Abstract
In recent years, a number of prominent thinkers (Rawls, Nagel, Waldron) have argued that democratic arrangements tend to favour the flourishing of toleration among groups with radically different comprehensive worldviews. My paper examines one of the most insightful attempts to demonstrate such a positive connection between democracy and toleration. In two recent essays, ‘Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy’ (1996) and ‘Toleration without Liberal Foundations’ (1997), Sheldon Leader has presented a powerful case for grounding the practice of toleration on the values of democracy. I argue that Leader’s attempt to ground the practice of toleration on a common understanding of democracy faces a number of fundamental obstacles. Such obstacles could only be overcome if both liberals and their opponents were to reach an agreement on the value of democracy and thereby converge in their support for toleration. I argue that, far from providing a common ground that liberals and their opponents can share, the so-called ‘shareable understanding’ of democracy appeals primarily to liberals. The difficulty resides in the fact that not every group in a liberal constitutional regime can be convinced of the priority of democratic principles over their other fundamental value-commitments.
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References
As Leader puts it in “Toleration without Liberal Foundations”, Ratio Juris,vol. 10, no. 2 (1997), p. 142: “A wide range of groups, some strongly illiberal, demand their rightful place by virtue of a society’s claim to being a democracy. Cultural groups, churches, families, through to trade unions, corporations, and single or loosely associated individuals - all argue that democracy confers on them a right to build up and live through these institutions. In doing so, they all share a general support for toleration, since that is what allows them each to survive in the face of outsiders’ objections to what they do. But they differ strongly over the fine grained interpretations to give to that right as they impinge on one another… It is at this point that it becomes interesting to see what their common support for democracy commits them to… Either they hold onto their initial, preferred notion of toleration and franldy admit that after due reflection they don’t care that much about democracy after all; or they hold to the latter, and then accept the need to alter their initial understanding of what toleration commits them to.”
Sheldon Leader, “Toleration without Liberal Foundations”, paper presented at the UNESCO Conference on Tolerance and Law, April 1995, Pontignano, Italy; “Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 1 (1996), pp. 45–67; “Toleration without Liberal Foundations”, Ratio Juris, vol. 10, no. 2 (1997), pp. 139–64.
Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 1; `Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy’, p. 45.
Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 2; `Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy’, p. 46.
Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 5; `Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy’, pp. 48–9.
Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 8; `Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy’, p. 51.
In the 1997 essay, “Toleration without Liberal Foundations”, (footnote 16, pp. 152–53 ), Leader attempts to provide an answer to this criticism of mine. His answer picks out an example which is the exact opposite of the one I provided, namely, one where an individual discriminates against another by refusing to employ him on grounds of his religiuos beliefs. In such a case there is clearly no basis for granting the individual who discriminates a basic right to toleration, since his actions damage the civil interests of the person being discriminated against, while there is every reason to favour central control so as to prevent such an act of discrimination. Leader’s answer attempts to show that in such a case we are not dealing with the basic right to toleration, but either with an equal or with a special right to toleration. But he does not answer the objection that in cases, say, of racial, sexual or religious discrimination, there are non-detachable reasons for allocating an issue to central control. Rather, his example seems to confirm it.
Cf Brian Barry, “How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions”, in R. B. Douglass, G. M Mara and H. S. Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 44–58, at p. 44: “I want to ask what arguments are available to persuade people who are not liberals… that they ought nevertheless to subscribe to liberal institutions. I will examine four such arguments… and conclude that they are either limited in scope or dependent on dubious factual premises. The implication to be drawn is the rather depressing one that the only people who can be relied on to defend liberal institutions are liberals.”
The rights to religious freedom of, say, Jews and Catholics must include a right that their theology be fixed in a way they see fit, and this is not, of course, done democratically“, Leader, ”Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 17; ”Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy“, p. 64.
This implies that laws against blasphemy, as currently extant in the UK, carry no democratic legitimacy, since they grant to Christian religious groups the right to appeal to the state to legally enforce their views of the sacred upon the rest of society as well as upon their own dissenting minorities.
Toleration without Liberal Foundations“, p. 156.
The commitment to preserve non-liberal forms of life may take precedence over the commitment to uphold democratic principles. We may remain stuck at the point of departure, unable to reconcile the differences between liberals and their opponents by appealing to principles that all can share.13
My conclusion thus radically differs from the one put forward by Leader in the fmal section of his 1997 essay, “Toleration without Liberal Foundations”, Ratio furls,op. cit., p. 163. There he claims that: “In working through the nature of these three rights of toleration, we have avoided relying on any of the standard foundations that inform either a liberal position or those of any of the liberal’s opponents. Instead we have sought guidance from the cross-cutting principles of democracy… The solutions that do emerge will often coincide with those that some of these contestants would start out by proposing, but ours is a point of arrival: The point of departure lies in working through the differences between democracy and oligarchy - an effort to which liberals and non-liberals should be committed if, as so often happens, they want to claim their place in society by using the common currency of an appeal to democratic principles.” I elaborate on my arguments about the difficulty of reconciling non-liberal groups to democratic principles, and on Leader’s reliance on liberal principles to specify the scope and limits of toleration, in the next section of my paper.
Three Faces of Toleration in a Democracy“, p. 55.
Ibid., pp. 55–6.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 56–7. 19Ibid, p. 57.
See A. Buchanan, “Revisability and Rational Choice”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 5 (1975), pp. 395–408; W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 ), p. 213.
W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,p. 152. As Kymlicka puts it: “Liberals are committed to supporting the right of individuals to decide for themselves which aspects of their cultural heritage are worth passing on Liberalism is committed to (perhaps even defined by) the view that individuals should have the freedom and capacity to question and possibly revise the traditional practices of their community, should they come to see them as no longer worthy of their allegiance.”
Ibid
Ibid., p. 153.
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d’Entrèves, M.P. (2003). The Fraught Relation Between Toleration and Democracy. In: Castiglione, D., McKinnon, C. (eds) Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_12
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