The politics and ethics of toleration: introduction

Toleration is widely considered as one of the core values of liberalism. In modern liberal societies, characterized by deep disagreements concerning the nature of the good and the just, toleration is usually regarded as an indispensable democratic virtue and as a constitutive part of liberal political practice. Traditionally, toleration is characterized as the willingness to put up with, or to permit, actions or practices of others, which one disapproves of and which one otherwise would seek to prohibit or prevent from occurring. Contemporary debates on toleration thus cover an immense variety of theoretical and political issues ranging from controversies over its exact understanding and conceptual scope as well as its practical boundaries, e.g. regarding freedom of expression or the legitimate role of religious symbols in educational institutions to the French burqa ban.

The contributions to this special issue take up a number of carefully selected key questions and problems emerging from these ongoing theoretical and political controversies in order to explore and shed new light on pivotal conflicts and tensions that pervade different conceptions of toleration in liberal theory and practice. These political as well as ethical questions concern competing interpretations of structural elements of the concept and different conceptions of toleration, different accounts of the justification and value of principles and practices of toleration and the relationship between toleration as a liberal ideal and historically grown societal power structures. In so doing, the contributions focus both on more general questions concerning toleration as a central category for the definition of a moral and liberal political theory and on the theoretical analysis of the complexities of real-world cases of conflicts of toleration.

The first two contributions by Peter Königs and Michael Kühler both primarily focus on the theoretical clarification of conceptual issues. Königs’s paper discusses and aims to dispel three puzzles which are commonly associated with the notion of toleration. These puzzles concern, firstly, the assumption that it is, at least at first glance, difficult to see why tolerance should be a virtue given that it involves putting up with what one deems wrong; secondly, the worry that the ideal of toleration is not fully realizable as toleration must necessarily be limited; and, thirdly, the assumption that ‘true’ tolerance requires meta-tolerance, that is, the idea that the issue of toleration must itself be approached in a ‘tolerant’ way.

Michael Kühler addresses the question whether a value-neutral liberal state still needs toleration or is even compatible with it, for apparently neutrality leaves no room for the objection component of toleration to take hold. Kühler argues that there is, indeed, conceptual and practical room left for a value-neutral liberal state to be tolerant. Drawing on the interplay between four kinds of reasons (pragmatic, ethical, moral, and political), he shows that pragmatic and political reasons may still provide the needed evaluative and normative ground upon which the combination of objection and outweighing acceptance, characteristic of toleration, can be made sense of. This implies, however, that the possible scope of toleration for a value-neutral liberal state is considerably limited.

John Horton’s and Andrew Jason Cohen’s contributions each provide an analysis of the justification and value of principles and practices of toleration in different sociopolitical contexts. Through a critical engagement with the work of John Gray, Horton’s paper explores connections between the ideas of toleration and modus vivendi. In particular, he argues that, while Gray is right to see a connection between modus vivendi and a particular conception of toleration (labelled the ‘traditional conception’, which incorporates an objection component), it is both problematic and potentially confusing to tie either of these ideas, as he does, to a theory of value-pluralism. According to Horton, they should instead be viewed as distinct but partially overlapping and often mutually supportive ideas, their relevance being explained best in terms of the need or desire of people to live together under conditions of conflict about the validity of different ways of life, and motivated by a variety of pragmatic and principled concerns. His paper also offers a modest defence of the traditional conception of toleration against some of its critics, arguing that such a practice of toleration, if supported by a modus vivendi, can provide a peaceable means of accommodating differences in a way that is broadly accepted, although neither ideal nor necessarily uncontested, by both tolerators and the tolerated.

Andrew Jason Cohen’s contribution has a transnational focus. He is analysing the question what liberals should tolerate outside the borders of their own state, that is under what conditions an interference by a liberal state in affairs abroad is permissible. His analysis is primarily focused on interferences aimed at providing humanitarian aid. Drawing on his interpretation of the harm principle he both discusses the case of humanitarian interventions done with the permission of the other state, which are based on a form of non-toleration of suffering, and humanitarian interventions done without the permission of the other state, which can be considered as non-toleration of a state that harms its residents (so that we might help end suffering).

Anna Elisabetta Galeotti’s and Johannes Drerup´s contributions both focus on contemporary challenges to toleration as a liberal ideal. Toleration, according to Galeotti, has been recently attacked both on practical and on theoretical grounds. On practical grounds, when confronting religious terrorism, many commentators have asked whether toleration can remain the general policy toward cultural and religious diversity. Theoretically, toleration has been questioned as to its analytical capacity in the realm of partisan politics. In her paper, she aims at countering such criticisms by means of a conceptual clarification which is especially focused on the notions of intolerance, intolerable and response to intolerance. The controversial cases arising in contemporary democracy are usually focused on the limits of toleration, hence on the intolerable, by stretching the interpretations of self-defense and the harm principle. She argues that this stretching is often excessive and the resulting interpretations too contentious to provide solid grounds for delineating the intolerable. Alternatively, issues of toleration can be examined from the point of view of tolerance/intolerance. She argues that this viewpoint can clarify issues at the descriptive level, sorting out who was tolerant and who was intolerant and what was intolerable, while disagreement may persist at the normative level, depending on the favoured justification of toleration.

Drerup takes up one of the most important criticisms of the view that toleration should be regarded as a pivotal democratic virtue that should be cultivated in the educational systems of liberal democracies. Power-theoretical criticisms of toleration as a political and educational ideal have emphasized that discourses of toleration are entangled with societal power struggles, and tend to naturalize social hierarchies and reify individual and collective identities. Given this criticism, toleration refers not just to justificatory problems concerning the limits of political or pedagogical authority, or to the peaceful negotiation of conflicts that pervade pluralistic societies. On the contrary, toleration itself seems to create and perpetuate precisely those political conflicts that it is meant to contain. Drerup concedes that it is important to interpret conceptions and principles of toleration in the context of historically grown power structures. Nevertheless, he argues that toleration can be defended as a coherent and sound aim of public education and as a democratic virtue against the power-theoretical critique. For this purpose, he reconstructs the critique of toleration proposed by Wendy Brown, arguing that her critique can be subdivided into two core claims: the power-driven selectivity of discourses of toleration and their tendency to operate with essentialist identity constructions. By engaging with these claims, Drerup outlines general contours and requirements of an empirically informed conception of democratic toleration as a virtue and educational aim. Brown’s critique shows, according to Drerup, that political intolerance in many cases is accompanied by (and, arguably, at least partly caused by) epistemic vices and educational deficits, as indicated by the results of empirical tolerance research. Contrary to Brown, however, he argues that these vices can and should be counteracted by the educational cultivation of epistemic virtues, which indirectly foster the development of the virtue of democratic toleration.