Essays on Toleration

Peter Jones

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786605443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The diverse make-up of modern societies has long been a major preoccupation of political philosophy. It has also been a prominent focus for public policy. How should a society provide for the differences exhibited by its population? Should it view them with indifference, or seek to diminish them in the interest of social cohesion, or view them as positive goods that it should facilitate or promote? The answer cannot be simple, partly because the differences captured by the terms ‘difference’ or ‘diversity’ are themselves so diverse. The essays brought together in this volume focus on one sort of response to difference: toleration. They were written at different times and deal with different aspects of toleration, but they are characterised by a number of common themes.

Chapter 1

Making Sense of Political Toleration^*

Toleration is a political ideal with which we are very familiar. We commonly suppose that some societies and some political regimes are more tolerant than others. Liberal democratic societies, in particular, conceive themselves as tolerant and suppose that a commitment to toleration is present in the design and operation of their institutions. Yet a moment’s reflection on the nature of toleration shows that it is not an idea that can be readily transposed from the political circumstances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to those of contemporary liberal democracies.

Consider the paradigm case of religious toleration. In the centuries immediately following the Reformation, rulers, in their official capacity as rulers, typically endorsed either Catholicism or a form of Protestantism. They had then to decide what to do about those of their subjects who were committed to something other than the officially approved religious faith. Rulers were tolerant if they permitted dissenters to practise their dissenting faith and intolerant if they did not. Consider now the same issue in the context of liberal democracy. Typically, nowadays, it would be thought quite improper for a liberal democratic regime either to endorse or to deprecate any religious faith or any particular denomination within a religious faith. For those who wield political power in liberal democratic societies, religious faith, as such, is simply off limits. But if a liberal democratic regime adopts no official view on the rights or wrongs of different religious faiths, how can it engage in religious toleration? If religious matters fall outside its jurisdiction, it is in no position either to tolerate or not to tolerate its citizens’ diverse religious commitments. Thus, it might seem that religious toleration, either as a political principle or as a political practice, has become obsolete. It is a relic of a bygone age that has been superseded by, rather than instantiated in, liberal democratic institutions. That, in turn, implies that the many imposing arguments for toleration that have been developed during the last five centuries are misapplied if they are urged in defence of contemporary political regimes. They may retain their force as arguments for ‘nonpolitical’ toleration amongst individuals or groups but they are misdirected if they are mobilized in defence of liberal democratic arrangements.¹

Yet there is something strangely counterintuitive about that conclusion. Rather than seeing the ‘hands-off’ approach to religious diversity, associated with liberal democratic regimes, as delivering something other than toleration, we might be more inclined to regard it as a full and final endorsement of the ideal of religious toleration. In this chapter, I examine and try to make sense of toleration as a contemporary political idea and as a feature of liberal democratic arrangements ideally conceived. I shall argue that ‘tolerant’ and ‘intolerant’ are qualities that we can still ascribe to political regimes and that arguments concerning toleration have lost none of their salience for political life.

Two standard conceptual features of toleration are particularly relevant to this exercise. First, toleration in its orthodox sense entails disapproval or dislike.² We tolerate only that to which we object; if we find something unobjectionable, we have no occasion to tolerate it. Thus, when people conform to the model case of toleration, they are usually thought to possess two sorts of reason: (a) a reason for objecting to and so for preventing x and (b) a reason for not preventing x. Their reason not to prevent x overrides their reason to prevent it; hence they tolerate x.

Secondly, we can tolerate only what we are able to prevent. If we object to x, but are powerless to prevent it, we cannot tolerate x. Toleration exists only when intolerance is an option. We can adopt a tolerant stance or possess a tolerant disposition even though we are powerless; that is, we might resolve not to prevent x even if we could. But, strictly, we actually tolerate x only if we are actually able to prevent x but opt not to do so.

The phrase ‘political toleration’ might be used to describe toleration exercised within a political process. We might observe, for example, that, since disagreement, debate, and contestation for power are essential features of democracy, so too is political toleration, even though, curiously, the give-and-take that is essential to a democratic process is rarely considered under the heading of toleration. Here, however, I mean ‘political toleration’ to have a broader meaning. It describes toleration secured through the apparatus of the state. Thus, for example, both religious toleration and cultural toleration fall within the compass of political toleration in so far as they are forms of toleration secured by the state. We might describe political toleration in this sense as ‘public’ toleration since it is toleration secured by and through a society’s public authority and public arrangements. Thus ‘private’ toleration is toleration afforded by one individual or group to another without its being routed through the state. If, for example, a household plays loud music which neighbouring households find objectionable but which they nevertheless resolve to endure, their toleration is ‘private’. Their toleration is ‘public’ in the sense that both the objectionable noise and the toleration goes beyond a private household, but it is not ‘public’ in the sense intended here in that it is not secured by way of public authority.

Can There Be Liberal Democratic Toleration?

With these simple features of the concept of political toleration in place, we can consider how different sorts of political regime might exhibit toleration. Consider again a simplified version of the absolute monarchy that characterized many European societies during the early modern era. Suppose that a monarch possessed more or less absolute power, and embraced a particular religious faith as the officially approved faith of her realm. Suppose, for example, that the monarch was a Catholic and made Catholicism the approved religion of her kingdom but that amongst her subjects she had some who were avowed Protestants. In these circumstances, the possibility of political toleration or political intolerance is readily evident. The ruler had the power either to permit or to disallow the practice of the Protestantism of which she disapproved. The monarch displayed toleration if she permitted Protestant subjects to practise their faith and intolerance if she did not.

If we carry that idea of political toleration forward to contemporary democratic societies, who or what is the equivalent of the tolerant monarch? The most obvious equivalents are the elected governments that wield power in modern indirect democracies. So should we now conceive political toleration as a toleration that elected governments might extend to the populations they govern, just as unelected monarchs once decided whether to tolerate their dissenting subjects? That cannot be right. For one thing, as we have already noted, there are many matters relating to toleration that fell within the authority of early modern monarchs, such as ruling on the ‘right’ religious faith, that liberal democratic thinking places outside the proper competence of elected governments. But, more generally, the notion that an elected government might tolerate its electors inverts the proper democratic relationship. An elected government stands to its electorate as agent to principal and it cannot be for an agent to decide whether it shall indulge its principal. On the contrary, in democratic theory, it is the people as principal who should wield ultimate power over its government as agent.

Of course, in modern democratic reality, popular controls over elected governments are so limited and so crude that governments have ample opportunity to act as agents free from the thrall of their electors. Nor do governing parties merely transmit popular preferences. They develop strongly approving or disapproving views of their own which may or may not align with popular attitudes. Witness, for example, the conduct of British Labour MPs in securing a ban on hunting with dogs or the stance of the Bush presidency on embryo research and gay marriage. If ‘political toleration’ means toleration by government, real-life democratic political systems still offer some scope for toleration that takes a ruler–subject form.

Yet, if political toleration is to occupy a significant place in liberal democratic thinking and institutions, it cannot be confined to the occasions when governments break free of democratic control and gain an opportunity to behave like indulgent autocrats. So where else might we locate democratic toleration? An obvious answer is in the conduct of democratic majorities. In simple democratic contexts, a majority can wield power over minorities and is therefore able to tolerate minorities by allowing them to behave in ways that the majority dislikes or deprecates. Powerless minorities, just because they are powerless, cannot reciprocate that toleration. But that asymmetric conception of toleration is also deeply unsatisfactory as a democratic ideal and is particularly unsuited to liberal democratic thinking. The citizens of a democratic society should stand on an equal footing and that equality is at odds with the unequal power relations that the traditional conception of toleration seems to presuppose.

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that some commentators have concluded that toleration belongs to the politics of a bygone age. It may have been welcome in hierarchical societies in which the freedom of subjects depended upon the grace of their rulers, but it is has no place in a society of self-ruling citizens, each of whom enjoys equal status and equal rights. It may remain an important virtue in people’s personal lives, but as a political ideal toleration is now otiose. That dismissal of political toleration is, I shall argue, unwarranted and stems from a misconception of the role of political authority in relation to toleration.³

From Rulers to Rules

It is clear that, if toleration is to figure significantly in liberal democratic thinking and arrangements, it must take a more symmetrical form than those we have so far considered. It must be consistent with a democratic conception of citizens as people who enjoy equal status and equal rights as members of a common political community. That points to the error of trying to make sense of political toleration in contemporary circumstances by finding some individual, group, or entity that is the contemporary equivalent of an early modern monarch. Rather than locating political toleration in the dispositions and vagaries of governments or majorities, we should locate it in a society’s legal and political arrangements. We need to explore the idea of the tolerant society rather than the tolerant ruler.

In describing a society as ‘tolerant’, we might refer to either or both of two things. First, we might refer to the personal qualities of its population. We might mean that, in significant number and in significant measure, members of the society are committed to the rightness or goodness or desirability of toleration and that, accordingly, they display toleration in their relations with one another. Secondly, we might mean that the public arrangements of the society embody a commitment to toleration and secure toleration for the society’s members. It is this second conception of a tolerant society that I shall equate with ‘political toleration’ and which, I shall argue, is a feature of liberal democracy ideally conceived. Of course, these two respects in which a society might be described as tolerant are likely to be found together, especially in democratic circumstances. Tolerant political and legal arrangements are likely to be put in place only if they enjoy reasonable support amongst the relevant population, and they may be sustainable only if there is a limit to the weight of popular intolerance that they have to contain. But, if we are to make good the claim that some political regimes can properly be described as tolerant, that claim has to rely upon more than the supposition that they are staffed and supported by tolerant people.

If we shift our focus from rulers to rules and institutions, that still does not render the idea of political toleration immediately intelligible. For one thing, rules and arrangements regulate and restrain people’s conduct, and restraint implies intolerance rather than tolerance. For another, it is not clear that the disapproval, that is essential to the idea of toleration, can be a feature of rules and arrangements. Inanimate human creations, such as rules and institutional structures, cannot entertain feelings of dislike or form disapproving judgements. They may, of course, express the dislike or disapproval of their architects. Yet instruments of people’s dislike and disapproval are precisely what we think the rules and institutions of a tolerant society should not be.

Upholding an Ideal of Toleration

The solution I propose to this conundrum is that we should conceive political toleration not as toleration extended by a society’s rules and institutions to the population they regulate. Rather, rules and institutions can be adjudged tolerant because and in so far as they uphold an ideal of toleration. They secure an order of things in which people can live their lives as they see fit, unprevented by disapproving others who might otherwise impede them. Thus, for example, a tolerant political order will allow neither Christians to prevent Muslims living as Muslims, nor Muslims to prevent Christians living as Christians; nor will it allow either to suppress atheists, or atheists to suppress either. I do not mean, of course, that a tolerant political order will secure people’s freedom to do just anything; there must be limits. But, in general, a tolerant regime should be understood as tolerant in virtue of its preventing the censorious from using political power to suppress the objects of their censure.

A tolerant political arrangement is, then, one that upholds an ideal of toleration rather than one that itself engages in toleration. Now I must acknowledge what might seem a paradoxical, and perhaps incoherent, feature of this way of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Making Sense of Political Toleration
• 2 Toleration and Neutrality
• 3 Legalizing Toleration
• 4 Toleration, Religion, and Accommodation
• 5 Beliefs and Identities
• 6 Toleration, the Rushdie Affair, and the Perils of Identity
• 7 Toleration, Recognition, and Identity
• 8 Liberalism, Belief, and Doubt
• 9 Toleration, Value-Pluralism, and the Fact of Pluralism
• 10 Can Speech Be Intolerant?
• 11 International Toleration and the ‘War on Terror’
• Index
• About the Author