Abstract
Liberal theory since Rawls has been much exercised by the issue of whether it can be rendered coherent without either a philosophical theory of the good or self, or else offending the claims of difference. On the one hand, a theory of the good or of the self which transcends the given desires of particular and empirically or culturally given selves is thought no longer to be had. On the other hand, liberals have felt themselves vulnerable to the charge that the apparently impersonal character of political principle under classical liberalism not so much failed to recognise the claims of difference as gagged them, and so discriminated against a range of groups characterised in terms of some property — gendered, ethnic, cultural, religious — conventionally thought to belong in the private sphere.
This essay has, I hope, benefited hugely from discussion with participants at the Morrell Conference, but also from my colleagues in the Political Theory Seminar at Exeter, in particular from Catriona Mackinnon, and from correspondence with Paul Monaghan (Exeter), Gordon Finlayson (York), Christine Laursen (UC Riverside) and Rainer Forst (Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt a. M). Most of all I have to thank Susan Mendus for probing and sympathetic analysis and advice, some which I was able to respond to, and some of which formulated what I was trying to say better than I had been able to myself. Needless to say, I have been unable to meet all their objections.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I say this to exclude those theories, such as Rorty’s, which seem to leave questions about what or whom to exclude to a later stage, to be decided, not at the level of the theory, but by the ‘democratic’ community established under the theory.
Since this paper was delivered, Onora O’Neill’s Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) has appeared in which these themes are pursued at a range and level which I cannot hope to match here, or indeed at all.
See Albert Weale, ‘Toleration, Individual Differences and Respect for Persons’ and Peter Nicholson, ‘Toleration as a Moral Ideal’, both in John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.) Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen,1985).
Weale, and Nicholson, ibid.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1964) pp. 57–8.
Ibid., p. 70.
See the discussion in J.B. Schneewind, ‘Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue’, in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and the works cited there, particularly Judith Baker, ‘Do One’s Motives Have to be Pure?’, in R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds.), The Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 457–74, and Tom Sorrell, ‘Kant’s Good Will’, in Kant-Studien, 78 (1987) pp. 87–101.
Kant, Groundwork, p. 107.
Ibid., p. 74.
Ibid., p. 76: ‘we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeking to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an example — that is as a model.’
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 107.
Which, together with various evasive strategies, was forcefully put to me by Susan Mendus and Catriona Mackinnon.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 147ff.
The phrase is Gordon Finlayson’s, who also suggested to me that ‘love, gratitude, forgiveness, and honour’ are, like toleration, virtues which might be thought to ‘go down to the ground floor ’. As indicated earlier, I am not sure that this is true of honesty, in the sense of truth-telling. Someone might be honest, in the sense of being reliably and dispositionally truthful, and yet be so for reasons of fear of the consequences. The same could be argued for forgiveness. Love and gratitude look more promising.
John Rawls,A Theoty of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 206; Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. xxivff, and see below.
Kant, Groundwork, p. 101.
Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) pp. 2–3, 86–101.
For a discussion of how closely the categorical imperative presses on practical moral reasoning, see R.F. Atkinson, ‘Kant’s Moral and Political Rigorism’, in Howard Williams (ed.), Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1992) pp. 228–48.
John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, in Philosophy and PublicAffairs, 14 (1985), pp. 223–51; pp. 230, 239. cf. Political Liberalism, pp. 13–15, 62, 99ff.
John Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980), pp. 512–72, p. 524, and see, somewhat less stridently, Political Liberalism, pp. xvii—xviii, 10, 95.
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 197.
Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 48.
John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ p. 246.
The claims on this point are extraordinarily insistent. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 19, 206, 247, 553–4; Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, pp. 225, 228, 230, 231, 239, 245, 249; Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xxivff, 8, 10, 58–62, 194–6; Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, pp. 175, 179 (citing Rawls ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, p. 225), pp. 18, 189–90, 195.
Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, p. 230; Political Liberalism, pp. 1 1ff.
Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, p. 231.
Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Tmth, p. 193.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 72, followingA Theory of Justice, pp. 85ff.
Vide the apocryphal response of Michael Oakeshott to an audience that produced the question how you recognise an intuition, that they must not expect him to tell them everything.
Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Tmth, p. 191; emphasis added.
Ibid., p. 245 and earlier.
Ibid., p. 188.
Weale, ‘Toleration, Individual Differences and Respect for Persons’, p. 28.
Ibid., p. 34.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hampsher-Monk, I. (1999). Toleration, the Moral Will and the Justification of Liberalism. In: Horton, J., Mendus, S. (eds) Toleration, Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983379_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983379_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40799-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-333-98337-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)