Toleration and Deliberative Politics

Abstract

Liberal arguments for toleration often seem to rest on values as contestable as the practice of toleration itself. Some liberals insist that the only worthwhile way of life is ‘self-chosen’ and led in a challenging and experimental society. As Susan Mendus argues, this autonomy-based liberalism sees toleration as only a pragmatic device for encouraging such lives, and restricts its benefits to ‘those diverse forms of life which themselves value autonomy’.¹ Forms of life which value simplicity, hierarchy or fixed moral codes may be allowed to perish, or at least would not receive equal treatment under this dispensation. Other liberals hope to avoid the task of vindicating the ultimate value of an autonomous life, and instead evoke a neutral perspective, from which the state shows equal concern for the freedom of all its citizens, independently of their particular views about the meaning, value and purpose of human life. The suspicion lingers over this manoeuvre too that ‘the liberal has nothing to say to someone whose conception of the good is non-liberal except that he must set this conception aside for political purposes’.² These perspectives on toleration, according to their critics, merely assert controversial liberal values in a pluralistic social context.³