Education, epistemic virtues, and the power of toleration

ABSTRACT

Toleration is usually regarded as a pivotal democratic virtue that should be cultivated in the educational systems of liberal democracies. The concept of toleration, however, is marked by deep ambivalence. 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. This contribution develops a defence of toleration as a coherent and sound aim of public education and as a democratic virtue against the power-theoretical critique.

KEYWORDS:

• Toleration
• democratic virtue
• power
• education
• epistemic virtues

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Kühler, Peter Königs and an anonymous referee for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In what follows, I will use the terms toleration and tolerance interchangeably.

2. Both aspects of toleration are dynamically interrelated. In certain cases, the law precedes and nudges a transformation of attitudes and habits in the population (Balint, 2016), while shifts `in basic habits of interaction can [sometimes] rise to the level of constitutional change, preceding and necessitating changes in the law´ (Allen, 2004, p. 7).

3. For a different conception of intolerance, see König’s in this special issue.

4. Political toleration thus overlaps, in important respects, with other domains and forms of toleration (such as ethical or moral toleration: Forst, 2013 pp. 503–504).

5. The relation between rights and political toleration (Heyd, 2008), as well as the concept of basic political equality, is hotly disputed in the literature. I will return to the issue of respect in the next section.

6. See for the following also: Drerup (2019).

7. See for the following also: Drerup (2017).

8. The material is available to download from here: http://www.bpb.de/shop/lernen/themenblaetter/191501/minderheiten-und-toleranz. [Accessed 11 October 2018].

9. The poster can be found here: https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/weltgeschehen/article134270480/ARD-Toleranzkampagne-geht-maechtig-nach-hinten-los.html. [Accessed 11 October 2018].

10. In line with Brown’s critique, Dobbernack and Modood observe the spread of a `new logic of intolerance´ (Dobbernack & Modood, 2013, p. 2) in liberal democracies. According to this perspective, toleration tends to be instrumentalized in political debates as a political weapon, which is used to dismiss political opponents and discriminate against political, ethnic or religious groups as inherently intolerant and illiberal others (ibid.).

11. The theoretical framework that guides her analysis is prone to overgeneralization and exaggeration (cf. for a more nuanced power-theoretical approach, see Forst, 2015). As a totalizing methodology, it is based on normative, conceptual and empirical background assumptions, which can be taken into account and which also point to the limitations of her analysis. Even though Brown’s genealogy of toleration emphasizes that toleration does not exist as such (Brown, 2015), her own usage of the term toleration seems to be based on a form of conceptual essentialism, which identifies toleration with a particular conception of toleration (arguably some version of the permission conception, which assumes asymmetrical relations of toleration and which is certainly not the only conception of relevance in contemporary liberal democracies: Forst, 2013). See also the empirical social research of Klein and Zick (2013) in the case of Germany, which indicates the widespread acceptance of a version of Forst’s (2013) `respect conception in the population.

12. For an analysis of some of the problems related to the toleration of identities or particular aspects of identities, see Jones (2006). Beliefs and practices can be bound up with aspects of the self-understanding of a person in many ways. Thus, it is arguably impossible for a conception of political toleration, which claims to be politically relevant, to get rid of all identity constructions as an acceptable part of the objection component.

13. For the difficulties in empirically reconstructing the actual effects of political debates on the way that agents conceptualize their self-world and other relations, such as the effects of metaphorical framing, see Boeynaems, Burgers, Konijin, and Steen (2017).

14. It remains somewhat vague as to what is implied practically by the political recommendation to `nourish counterdiscourses that would feature power and justice´ or to `configure conflicts through grammars of power rather than ontologised ethnic or religious feuds´ (Brown, 2006, p. 205). As Ben-Porath puts it with reference to similar approaches in the context of peace education: `this trend’s educational force is limited to a meta-theoretical discussion of power and has little effect on students’ conception of the political world and their own roles in it´ (Ben-Porath, 2008, p. 66).

15. For a detailed conception of epistemic vices and their political implications, see: Cassam (2019). In what follows I am not going to provide a detailed reconstruction of the discussion between the two major camps in contemporary virtue epistemology, reliabilists and responsibilists (see, for instance: Carr, 2014). For the purposes of this paper, it is enough to point out that I agree with Siegel (2017) that a responsibilist view is in line with the most `appropriate and defensible epistemology of education´ (p. 99). Siegel states that in education, `results alone are not enough. Teachers want their students not just to believe truths, but to believe for the right reasons and appreciate the justification those reasons confer; not just to get the right answer, but to get it in the right way (e.g., by using appropriate methods/procedures) and to appreciate the rightness of that way´ (ibid.).

16. Students who do not even care about the truth, or do not believe that political knowledge is at all relevant, are much more likely not to care about the success of authoritarian politicians, who justify their political positions on the basis of objectively false claims about social reality. Teachers who do not value an orientation towards the truth, or do not even assume that it is possible to differentiate fact from fiction, probably should have never become teachers in the first place.

17. I think that there is a considerable overlap between political liberal and liberal perfectionist approaches with regard to the educational and political role and justification of epistemic virtues. In light of recent critiques of the political epistemology of Rawlsian political liberalism (Nussbaum, 2011), the approach defended here would definitely qualify as epistemically perfectionist. That said, a discussion of this (important) issue is beyond the scope of this paper (for a discussion of this and related issues see: Drerup, 2019).

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Johannes Drerup

Johannes Drerup holds a temporary professorship at the University of Koblenz-Landau. His major research interests include philosophy of education, political philosophy and applied ethics. Recent publications are: Justice, Education and the Politics of Childhood, edited together with Gunter Graf, Christoph Schickhardt and Gottfried Schweiger, Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. Education for Democratic Tolerance, Respect and the Limits of Political Liberalism. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52(3), 2019, 515–532.