Toleration and modus vivendi

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore some connections between the ideas of toleration and modus vivendi, principally through a critical engagement with the work of John Gray. In particular, it argues that while Gray is right to see a connection between modus vivendi and a particular conception of toleration (here referred to as the ‘traditional conception’) it is both problematic and potentially confusing to tie either of these ideas, as he does, to a theory of value-pluralism. Instead, they should be viewed as distinct but partially overlapping and often mutually supportive ideas, the relevance of which are best explained in terms of the need or desire of people to live together under conditions of conflict about the worth of different ways of life, and motivated by a variety of pragmatic and principled concerns. The 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Gray
• liberalism
• modus vivendi
• toleration

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Johannes Drerup, Michael Kühler Manon Westphal and Peter Jones for their helpful comments on various drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For an alternative, very different discussion of the relationship between toleration and modus vivendi, see Kühler (2019).

2. I have further discussed my approach to the theory of modus vivendi in Horton (2007; 2010a, 2010b, 2019).

3. See Horton (2011).

4. Arguably, both indifference and acquiescence can in some specific circumstance amount to weak forms of toleration, although I shall ignore these possibilities here. For some further conceptual reflections on toleration see Forst (2013); Newey (2013); Balint (2017); and Kühler (2020) and Königs (2020), both in this volume.

5. The traditional conception of toleration, as I understand it, encompasses both what Rainer Forst in his magisterial discussion of toleration calls the ‘permissive’ and the ‘modus vivendi’ conceptions. For Forst, the modus vivendi conception is really only a special case of the permissive conception, obtaining when groups happen to have roughly equal power, so I do not think that he would fundamentally object to this telescoping of the two conceptions (See, Forst (2013 esp. pp. 26–32)). Of course, Forst is critical of these conceptions of toleration, instead defending what he calls the ‘respect conception’. I have discussed Frost’s work on toleration in more detail in Horton (in press). It is also be noted that Peter Balint has claimed that this ‘traditional’ conception of toleration ‘may actually be a quite recent orthodoxy in political philosophy’ (Balint, 2017, p. 27).

6. To be clear, I am not here concerned with whether such positive steps may not sometimes be desirable – in fact, I think they will – but only with their conceptual relationship to toleration.

7. I leave aside the question of how far impartiality and equality of recognition are part of a single ideal or represent differing ideals as nugatory in relation to my concerns here, although it might not be for some other purposes.

8. For interesting accounts of how a liberal state can still properly be described as ‘tolerant’, see Jones (2007b) and Balint (2017). This issue is also discussed by Kühler (2020) and Galeotti (2020), both in this volume.

9. Inevitably, what are legitimate objects of toleration and how such matters are to be decided are important questions, and no doubt questions to which political philosophy has something useful to contribute to how they are answered, if not perhaps quite as much as some philosophers seem to think, but they are not the focus of attention here.

10. In what follows I mostly talk of conflicts between ‘ways of life’, as does Gray, but this is also meant to include more specific practices and types of action. Conflicts in ways of life are the most extensive and potentially dramatic but it is important to remember that many conflicts of value are of much more limited scope than such a term might suggest.

11. It should be noted that Joseph Raz – an important influence on Gray’s account of value pluralism – on the other hand has built a powerful form of what has become known as ‘perfectionist liberalism’ on the basis of a theory of value pluralism (Raz, 1986), although this is not something that can be explored here, and which is not discussed by Gray, either.

12. I say ‘primarily’ because there is also a question about how we should respond to ways of life that are substantially bad or contain significant evil, on which matter Gray, rather surprisingly, does not have much to say.

13. Gray accepts, as he has to, that many ways of life do not endorse value-pluralism, but fails to appreciate that this leaves him in a rather analogous position to those who insist on the truth of liberal principles of justice. In both cases highly controversial and contested philosophical theories are doing the normative heavy lifting.

14. It is perhaps worth remarking at this point that the mere fact that a modus vivendi still implies limits does not mean that it is in just the same position as Rawlsian liberalism. Any attempt to deal with deep disagreements that is going to be remotely plausible will have some parameters of inclusion; some limits to what is permissible. The issue is where and how such boundaries get drawn.

15. I have begun to explore the relationship between modus vivendi and political legitimacy further in Horton (2019).

16. Among other interesting reflections, Gray also partially backtracks on the neo-Hobbesian character of his account, now seeing it as owing more Spinoza.

17. On the other hand, David McCabe has recently sought to develop an unequivocally liberal theory of modus vivendi (McCabe, 2010). Unfortunately, I cannot address his argument here, but as he too ties modus vivendi to value-pluralism, I can make a similar response to his position to that which I have made to Crowder.

18. Without remotely claiming to have resolved these issues, I have discussed them further in Horton (2010b) and (Horton, 2019). A fuller discussion of key issues facing modus vivendi theory can be found in Willems, manuscript.

19. Although I have imagined a hypothetical ‘Islamic state’, one might also think of a Jewish state or a Christian one.

20. My reference to ‘an Islamic way of life’ is likely to provoke objections in some quarters on the grounds that it is misleadingly ‘essentialist’, as there is no such thing as a single Islamic way of life. That observation is of course true, but my point is only that there are significant differences in the social and political organisation of societies based on some interpretation of Islam than those that supposedly enshrine the values of liberal democracy. However this is precisely formulated, it seems to me that the basic point cannot seriously be denied.

21. For some interesting reflections on the kinds of political institutions that may or may not be particularly well-suited to modus vivendi arrangements, see Westphal (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Horton

John Horton is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Keele University, UK. He is the author of Political Obligation (2^nd edn 2010) and has edited several books and published many articles on toleration.