Abstract
A tacit Whiggism reigns in political philosophy which holds that history is a long birth-pang of liberal values, that among these values are democracy and toleration, and that they now march in happy consort together. My less sanguine argument is that democracy and toleration are in endemic conflict with each other. This casts doubt on whether toleration can be a coherent political value.
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To this extent the situation may be more dire than that envisioned by those who think that toleration cannot be instituted politically as a moral value (e.g. because of moral disagreement) but that it can be given a purely political grounding, in roughly the sense of `political’ adopted by Rawls in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1993 ). For more on this conception of toleration, see Elisabetta Galeotti’s contribution in this volume.
For further discussion of this structure, see my Virtue, Reason, and Toleration: the place of toleration in ethical and political philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999), ch. 1.
See Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1930). See also J.Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), ch. 1.
For further discussion of the structure of toleration as a virtue, see Barry Barnes’ contribution to this volume.
It is over-simplistic to think that this is not really an incapacity, in contrast with the obstacles which are imposed by external objects or physical impossibility — though there are significant differences between them as forms of incapacity. See B. Williams, “Moral Incapacity”, repr. in Williams, Making Sense of Humanity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995 ), 46–55.
As I argue in my “Against Thin-Property Reductivism: Toleration As Supererogatory”, Journal of Value Inquiry 31 (1997), 231–249.
For the original formulation of this problem, see J.Horton, “Three (Apparent) Paradoxes of Toleration”, Synthesis Philosophica 9 (1994), 7–20, at p. 16f For further discussion, see also Horton, “Toleration As A Virtue”, in D.Heyd (ed.) Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1996), p. 34f, and my Virtue, Reason and Toleration,pp. 107–111.
This is, incidentally, a reason for doubting the reducibility of public to private deliberation, or vice versa,as argued recently in S.Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000), P 11ff.
See J.Rawls, A Theory of Justice,rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), §35: “Toleration of the Intolerant”, pp. 190–194. It is a marginal case for Rawls both because the intolerant are thought to lack dispositions characteristic of most citizens in the well-ordered society, and because they are thought to justify derogations from the equal liberty principle (p. 193).
In this regard the talk of `zero tolerance’ provides a case in point of the rhetorical transformations described by Quentin Skinner in his writings. See e.g. “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole”, in N.McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives (London 1974), 93–128.
Rawls, Reasonable Pluralism and Public Justification“, forthcoming. The main line of argument is that, to the extent that pluralism of outlooks is reasonable, it undermines itself, since then ex hypothesi the reasonableness of outlooks conflicting with one’s own follows. For an initial statement of this position, see my ”Floating on the LILO: John Rawls and the content of justice“, a review of J.Rawls, Collected Papers, Times Literary Supplement, 10 September 1999.
As has already been often observed in commentary on Rawls’s Political Liberalism. See e.g. U.Wolf, “Übergreifender Konsens und öffentliche Vernunft”, in W.Hinsch (ed.), Zur Idee des politischen Liberalismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1997), esp. pp. 63–66.
I owe the following objection to John Horton, who cited the book-reading example given (written communication).
Kant, “An Answer to the Question: `What is Enlightenment?”, in H.Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings rev. edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), p. 58. opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it.
Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.“ As with Kant’s remarks, this presupposes the discretionary and personal exercise of political power.
I omit, among others, public-goods and other telic justifications of democracy.
For more on the tension between neutrality and toleration, see the article by Saladin Meckled-Garcia in this volume. See also my “Metaphysics Postponed: liberalism, pluralism and neutrality”, Political Studies 45 (1997), 296–311.
See Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), e.g. p. 51.
Joseph Raz’s term. See his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986). 2’ Larmore’s term in Patterns of Moral Complexity.
For some suggestive remarks on the relation between agency and virtue, see see R.Audi, “Acting From Virtue”, Mind 104 (1995), 439–472, and Williams, “Moral Incapacity”. For further discussion see also my
Virtue, Reason and Toleration,ch. 3. cooperation over generations, they are prepared to offer one another fair terms of cooperation according to what they consider the most reasonable conception of political justice; and when they agree to act on those terms, even at the cost of their own interests in particular situations, provided that other citizens also accept those terms.
J.Rawls, Political Liberalism ( New York: Columbia University Press 1993 ), p. 9.
See e.g. G.Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), p. 4f and section II passim.
Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997), 765–807; repr. in Rawls, Collected Papers ed. S.Freeman (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press 1999 ), p. 578.
Similar remarks apply, e.g., to Brian Barry’s neo-Scanlonian contractualism, which attempts to produce agreement on terms `which nobody can reasonably reject“. See Barry, Justice As Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995). Barry explicitly acknowledges that this relies on a normative conception of what is reasonable (p. 8).
As I argue in Virtue, Reason and Toleration,esp. ch. 5, philosophical argument about toleration’s structure cannot provide a defmitive account of what should be tolerated. For related reasons, it is also very difficult to furnish an unambiguous content for toleration from within liberalism.
Note that this need not doom attempt to provide an agreement-based justification for morality itself. There are, in any case, different conceptions of what such a justification should aim to do. One is simply that it should replicate the content of morality. Another is that tell us what the bindingness of morality consists in, i.e. to provide an answer to the question, “Why be moral?”. Yet another is to provide a perspicuous procedural model for alleged formal properties of morality (e.g. its applying categorically) which would otherwise be obscure.
For further argument on this point, see my “Discourse Rights and the Drumcree Marches: a Reply to O’Neill”, forthcoming in the British Journal of Political and International Relations.
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Newey, G. (2003). Is Democratic Toleration a Rubber Duck?. In: Castiglione, D., McKinnon, C. (eds) Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_10
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