The American Society for Legal and Social Philosophy has never in its first half-century devoted a volume in its NOMOS series to the theme of toleration. One might have expected such a book in the early years when the NOMOS volumes addressed some of the classic issues: authority, community, responsibility, liberty, justice, equality, representation, political obligation, and the public interest. Toleration, after all, is one of the defining topics of political philosophy—historically pivotal in the development of modern liberalism, prominent in the writings of such canonical figures as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and central to our understanding of the idea of a society in which individuals have the right to live their own lives by their own values, unmolested by the state so long as they respect the similar interests of others. The relevance of the topic straddles our three constitutive disciplines. Toleration has been central in the history of early modern and modern political theory; it is a testing ground of great analytic interest for various philosophical characterizations of state’s function in relation to morality; and in constitutional law, it presents itself as a way of thinking abut First Amendment rights such as the free exercise of religion and the wall of separation between church and state. One would have expected a volume on this before now. We will not speculate as to why toleration has been so conspicuously absent from the NOMOS series. But we are very glad that at this late stage we have been able to make up the deficit with a fine collection of papers addressing the topic in an intriguing variety of ways.
The theme of toleration would have been a good choice for a past volume of NOMOS, but it undoubtedly remains a fitting topic for our times. If the “circumstances of toleration” should be understood as the existence of a plurality of religious faiths with varying degrees of power to oppress one another, then arguably those circumstances obtain as pertinently today as during the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century wars of religion that gave way to the European tradition of religious toleration. The rise of fundamentalist and jihadist Islamic movements is one of the most striking phenomena of modern world politics. It has transformed the politics of the Middle East and thus also the politics of the global oil economy, and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it has convulsed the security politics and legal and political systems of countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Even before 9/11, some political scientists talked openly of a “clash of civilizations”: Islam versus the broadly liberal West.1 Even if one embraces the “clash of civilizations” thesis against its many critics, the parallels to the early modern period might encourage the conclusion that now, once again and more than ever, we need to revisit the doctrines of toleration that were so instrumental to a European peace.
Others talk, perhaps more plausibly, of a clash within Western liberal democracies between mainstream political culture and minority religious and cultural communities, with particular focus on Muslim minorities. This sort of talk has become quite common in political theory and political commentary in Europe, where it is galvanized not only by worries about war and terrorism, but also by ongoing controversies about the social integration of immigrants from former colonies, many of whom are Muslim. While most non-Muslims in Western democracies continue to express attitudes of toleration or acceptance of Muslim minorities post-9/11, one might think it overgenerous to characterize contemporary dynamics as expressing a strong climate of toleration. L’affaire du foulard in France—which in the name of universalist republicanism and laïcité resulted in a government decision to ban students from wearing the hijab in public schools—lay in the background of the street riots in Paris in 2005.2 The murder in 2004 of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan descent heightened an open and ongoing confrontation between liberal secularists (and feminists) and Muslim communities in the Netherlands.3 In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting Mohammed, violating the Islamic proscription of graphic depictions of the prophet, and it did so with a conscious intention of provoking controversy. The cartoons proved more provocative than the editors foresaw, generating angry demonstrations throughout the Muslim world, violent attacks on Danish and Norwegian embassies, and the loss of human life—in addition to heated debates over the limits of toleration and the proper exercise of rights of freedom of expression.4 The birthplace of liberal toleration does not, in such times, inspire triumphalist praise for its achievements in securing the conditions of stable pluralistic democracy.
Thus we may have some reason to question the progressivist story of liberal modernity which begins with the discovery of toleration and ties it to the emergence of constitutionally limited government, the recognition of individual rights, and the spread of democracy. In one strand of that story, modernization—both political and economic—was meant to go hand in hand with secularization, the shift to a rational basis of politics and economy and away from religion as an important foundation of political life. Processes of secularization and individualization are supposed to be good news for toleration because they can lessen the religious passions that produce the desire to repress other faiths. Indeed, on some definitions of toleration (as putting up with what one disapproves) they render toleration itself obsolescent. Yet the global reach of modernization through capitalism has not produced a withering away of religion. True, there has been a decline of religious belief in Europe, though over the last two decades this decline is actually quite modest, and in some countries—notably Italy and Denmark—people have actually become more religious.5 American exceptionalism holds true: Americans are significantly more religious than Europeans. Almost 60 percent of the U.S. population reports that religion plays a “very important” role in their lives, compared with 33 percent in the United Kingdom, 27 percent in Italy, and 11 percent in France.6 And American religiosity shows no signs of decline. More broadly, though, recent empirical research suggests that modernization has two competing effects on religiosity: to the extent it increases affluence and well-being through economic development, it weakens religious belief, but to the extent it increases cultural-religious diversity (through migration), it is associated with heightened competition between religious groups and intensified religiosity in general populations.7 So we need not look to the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether Christian or Islamic, to be persuaded that toleration as a response to religious pluralism remains a highly relevant construct.
For good reason, then, there continues to be very lively interest in the issues relating to toleration in each of our three constituent disciplines. A number of important monographs and volumes of essays have been published in the last ten years or so that indicate the issue of toleration is very much alive.8 The core philosophical questions concerning the meaning of toleration continue to be debated, and new issues arise as new generations of scholars pursue the topic and connect it to other controversies in jurisprudence, political theory, and political philosophy.
What is toleration? The richness of the Western intellectual tradition of toleration flows in part from the fact that the answer to this question is deeply disputed. One source of disputation over the meaning of toleration is the question: Who or what is the agent of toleration, and what is its object? At the core of the traditional discussion, toleration is understood as a way of characterizing the appropriate relation between the state, on the one hand, and various religious beliefs, practices, and ways of life held and followed by members of society, on the other. The state tolerates a set of beliefs and practices if it does not attempt to change or suppress them or impose penalties for holding or following them, even though it does not endorse them (indeed, even though at some level it may oppose them). In this volume, David Heyd questions the premise: to see the state as the principal agent of toleration, he argues, is to lock us into an outmoded understanding of toleration as an act of royal grace, an image of toleration that may have been appropriate enough for the monarchy of the ancien régime but is ill-suited to a modern democratic state grounded in the rule of law according to principles of impartial justice. What the modern state owes its citizens is not toleration but justice, and toleration properly understood is a matter not of politics but of private morals.
Others insist on the essential political relevance of toleration, while rejecting the view that toleration is best understood as a vertical relationship between the state and its subjects or citizens. With different emphases and diverse accounts of the moral psychology of toleration, a number of our contributors—Rainer Forst, Kathryn Abrams, Glyn Morgan, Andrew Sabl, and Ingrid Creppell—agree that toleration is best understood as a horizontal relationship between citizens in their public identity to one another, and of citizens’ churches, mosques, synagogues, congregations, and other religious and ethical associations to one another. Citizens acting individually or in groups tolerate one another if they refrain from interfering with one another’s practices or beliefs, even when they are convinced that these are wrong. In a pluralistic democracy, these authors argue, an attitude of toleration is a necessary support to citizens’ capacity to understand themselves as engaged in a project of shared self-rule grounded in egalitarian respect.
On some conceptions, toleration represents a concession or indulgence by an established state church or a majority religious group: it does not take advantage of its dominant position to suppress the beliefs and practices of non-conforming groups. But many find this conception of toleration condescending and unsatisfactory. On a more ambitious approach, toleration requires the state to refrain altogether from establishing any official faith, tolerant or non-tolerant: it should simply stay out of the business of religion. Belief and worship are things that should be left to the citizens as private matters. And citizens, for their part, should regard the beliefs and practices of those of other faiths as none of their business, strictly the business of those who hold and follow them.
If there is a common theme here it is the image of a pluralist society in which men and women of differing beliefs go proudly about their own business, living their lives in accordance with their own values or the religious teachings that they find convincing and congenial, and gathering with like-minded people so that they can avow these beliefs and follow these practices openly in the company of others. This attractive image of religious pluralism is compatible with a very weak form of religious establishment (of the sort one sees in modern Britain, for example); it is certainly compatible with there being majorities and minorities on religious matters and with some majority being predominant in the society. But a case can be made that under circumstances of weak establishment and/or social predominance, toleration is precarious and the attractive pluralism that we have imagined will inevitably be haunted by the worry that at any time predominance could turn into domination and weak establishment pave the way for more aggressive claims by the state. Defenders of toleration therefore often make the stronger claim that the law should be entirely neutral on matters of religion, that there should be a wall of separation between church and state, and that freedom of worship and belief should be regarded as a human right and secured at the national level by a constitutional guarantee.
On most traditional approaches, toleration is compatible with the tolerating entity (the state, churches in their relation to one another, or citizens in their relation to one another) holding the view that the beliefs or practices being tolerated are in themselves wrong or undesirable. Some philosophers even maintain that toleration makes no sense apart from some such view: if we didn’t think the beliefs or practices in question were wrong, the issue of tolerating them would not arise. (In this volume, Lawrence A. Alexander calls this “the paradox of toleration.”) Whether or not this is part of the meaning of toleration, there is a further question about whether toleration places limits on the holding or expression of such critical views. It may do so in the case of the state: the strong position described a moment ago might have the consequence that the state and its officials should express no view whatsoever on religion or on any particular religion (let alone act on any such view). For churches and citizens, of course, such a requirement would defeat the very purpose of toleration, which is to secure room for the holding of particular religious views which necessarily as part of their truth claim involve the view that other religious beliefs are mistaken. It may, however, be part of an ethic of tolerance—the virtue associated with toleration—to moderate these views, at least in the public realm, and limit oneself to their being expressed sensitively and respectfully.
There may also be an argument, either on the basis of the toleration ideal or as an independent matter of civility in liberal politics, for refraining from citing one’s religious views in political argument. We know that even if religious views are not themselves embodied in laws, they may be relevant in principle to the debates that citizens have about what their laws should be. Citizens have to reach a view on what do about such issues as abortion, euthanasia, the regulation of sexuality, social justice, the regulation of war, and so on. On issues like these, religious arguments are among the most powerful considerations that can be cited for positions on one side or another of the debates that citizens face (positions which in themselves would involve no affront to toleration if they were enforced); and it may be tempting for people to form pressure groups or even political parties to ensure that these religious considerations are given proper attention in political debate. People must be able to pursue what they take to be the important implications of their beliefs; that itself seems to be part of the tolerationist ideal. On the other hand, if we take the strong view that religion should be utterly separate from the politics of a society, then there may be a case for requiring people not only to refrain from demanding that religious views be enforced, but also to refrain from demanding that anything be enforced if the only grounds for that demand are religious.
Here as elsewhere, we find that toleration can sometimes seem to be at war with itself. In order to protect religious freedom, we have to place some limits on religious expression. That in itself is not a criticism, for on no conception is the duty of toleration unlimited. On no conception is the freedom which religious toleration protects absolute. Obviously, toleration restricts the practice of punishing heretics and apostates and it may even have to restrict expressions of the belief that heretics deserve to be burned and apostates deserve assassination, even when these are not necessarily followed by action. Beyond that, religiously inspired practices which are dangerous or beliefs which are seditious or disruptive of a tolerant social order are not to be tolerated. Usually, however, suppression or penalization of these views and practices proceeds on the basis of descriptions that have nothing to do with their religious character: they are penalized because they involve killing, not because they involve human sacrifice; because they involve extortion, not because they involve compulsory tithing; because they undermine democracy, not because they look forward to the rule of the saints; or because they involve attacks on other people’s property or liberty, not because they involve vigorous evangelization. Figuring out these limits is sometimes quite difficult, for banning an action under a non-religious description may make it impossible for some people to practice their faith—and there is a question whether this is something that should be taken into account when lawmakers are debating what are otherwise the entirely non-religious merits of a legislative proposal. As we lay down rules for the prevention of cruelty to animals, for example, should we consider the impact that these may have on practices of ritual slaughter associated with various religions? Or is a state fulfilling its duty of toleration if it just concentrates on the non-religious merits of the regulation, unconcerned with their religious impact? These are some of the issues and antinomies that arise in the core discussion of toleration as it has been traditionally conceived.
How one responds to these and other questions about the character, the extent, and the limits of toleration depends of course on the case one makes for it. Toleration is not a self-justifying idea. It is a demanding principle that requires us to check and inhibit what might otherwise seem natural ways of pursuing what we value or what we think important in life. We have to have good reason for doing this. Some, like Steven D. Smith in his essay in this volume, argue that there is no neutral justification for toleration that can stand apart from the values that we are committed to. An ultraliberal theory of toleration based on a commitment to neutrality goes nowhere, if only because toleration itself has to rest on ideals that the liberal cannot be neutral about. We hold a principle of toleration (if we do), not because values don’t matter, but because values like peace, diversity, autonomy, or the integrity of individual conscience matter more than (say) the religious values that we might be inclined to uphold through the agency of state and law.
Toleration as self-restraint, whether in the expression of religious beliefs or in the open criticism of them, stands in contrast to a view of a politics of public reason in which citizens openly share the reasons, including the religious or cultural reasons, for their positions on controversial matters of public policy. Kathryn Abrams paints this contrast by distinguishing “forbearant” toleration in which one keeps one’s disapproval of others to oneself, from “engaged” toleration, in which one actively strives to understand the other’s belief from the standpoint of the other, even if in the final analysis one is not persuaded to agree with the other about religious or moral judgments. Like Anna Elisabetta Galeotti in her argument for a strong connection between toleration and recognition,9 and Ingrid Creppell in her arguments for the centrality of identity to the robust practice of toleration,10 Abrams argues that non-interference with others is inadequate to the challenges of egalitarian democracy under circumstances of deep pluralism and social diversity. What we need, instead, is a politics of active listening oriented toward mutual understanding.
Questions of toleration are thus inextricable from current issues in both law and political philosophy. In law, the place of religion in a liberal society continues to be a matter of considerable discussion among constitutional scholars. In the United States, issues of religious toleration are framed by the twin guarantees of non-establishment and the free exercise of religion. A number of important constitutional questions explore the tension between these two: to opponents of religion (or of a particular religion), the leeway granted to religious institutions often approaches establishment, while to many of those who hold religious commitments, the aversion from anything that might conceivably be regarded as state affiliation can tend to suppress their freedom to practice their religion, especially their freedom to do so in public. Tangled issues like this crop up in the debate about school vouchers (allowing parents in effect to spend some of their tax dollars that would otherwise go to public schools on the fees charged by religious schools): is this a matter of equal freedom and ensuring that religious parents are not burdened with having to pay twice for the education of their children, because they choose not to send them to public schools?
There is a similar tangle of issues in regard to the possibility of religious exemptions from generally applicable laws that are not in the first instance motivated as attacks on religion. In a notable pair of decisions in the 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the position that the enforcement of narcotics laws against the sacramental use of peyote in Native American religious ceremonies and the enforcement of historic preservation ordinances against a Catholic diocese seeking to modernize a church building called for strict scrutiny as a burden on the free exercise of religion.11 The decisions were very controversial, partly because they were unprecedented, partly because the second of them struck down (at least as applied to the states) legislation passed by Congress—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—attempting to impose a more stringent reading for constitution’s free exercise guarantee. Justice Scalia defended the decisions on the ground that allowing any grater ambit for free exercise would unduly impair the operation of the modern welfare/regulative state:
The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind—ranging from compulsory military service, to the payment of taxes, to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws, to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, … environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this.12
Opinions may differ about the implications of what Justice O’Connor called the court’s “parade of horribles.”13 There is no doubt, however, that Justice Scalia is right: the greater the scope for religious liberty, the greater the constraint on the regulatory state. What we see here is the considerable difficulty in pursuing a strong tolerationist line against a background in which whole areas of ordinary life—“things indifferent,” in John Locke’s language—are now all subject to state regulation for the sake of health, safety, or educational or environmental values.
Recent political philosophy also links centrally to themes of toleration. One issue that has assumed a new prominence concerns the place of religious claims in political deliberation. In Political Liberalism, John Rawls argued that political positions (at least on basic justice and constitutional essentials) should not be argued for on the basis of comprehensive moral, philosophical, and religious conceptions. Instead citizens should do their best to argue publicly on the basis of a common stock of ideas accessible to all.14 This is an indirect application of one particular conception of toleration—a conception that looks for a politics in which all religious elements have been banished from the public realm. But naturally enough it has also led to a debate about whether this is reasonable and about whether there are moral positions that do not admit of a public secular formulation or defense.
Connected with this, we find that there are continuing debates in political philosophy about the application of tolerationist ideas to more general questions of ethics and culture. In the 1970s, philosophers debated the idea of the state being neutral not just between religions but more generally between conceptions of the good or individual conceptions of what made life worth living.15 Ethical toleration was thought to be as important as religious toleration. The idea was that conceptions of the good were just as important to individuals as their religious views, that a society in which a plurality of conceptions of the good was followed would be no less stable, no less viable than a religiously pluralist society, that the demands of justice could be established without relying on any conception of the good; the law and state should therefore confine themselves to justice and morality and not seek to make individual citizens ethically more virtuous people or to give them meaningful lives, any more than it sought on the traditional conception to promote piety or modes of public worship. This anti-perfectionist extension of the toleration idea opened up debates about the functions of the state, the relation between state and community, and the separability of various strands of normative thinking (the right and the good, for example).
Some of these debates about ethical perfectionism and liberal neutrality, which flourished mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, have continued into the present. In 1986, Joseph Raz published The Morality of Freedom, which gave a new depth to discussions of perfectionism and neutrality in liberal theory. Raz’s view was a challenging one: he argued that nobody can sensibly value autonomy except to the extent that it is exercised in pursuit of activities that are themselves of value.16 If this is true then autonomy cannot be cited directly as a value supporting toleration, because toleration is characteristically presented as an argument for not interfering with choices that we have reason to regard as bad or wrongheaded. If someone thought that a particular religious belief was repugnant, or if someone thought that religious belief in general was demeaning and misconceived, then it would be difficult for them to make an argument that respect for individual autonomy required us to tolerate it. Certainly the doctrine of liberal neutrality is hard to defend on Raz’s account.17 Still, Raz’s position is consistent with the idea of a plurality of values, and if one also accepts his view that the choice of (say) one way of life sometimes involves regarding other ways of life as unworthy (even though they are not appropriately regarded as unworthy by anyone who chooses to follow them), then there may be room for a traditional notion of toleration, based on respect for individual autonomy, within the context of Raz’s overall perfectionism. The relationship between respect for moral autonomy and the practice of toleration is thematized in the present volume by several of our contributors, including David Heyd, Glen Newey, Rainer Forst, and Glyn Morgan.
Another concern of these essays is how we should understand the appropriate object of toleration, a question that may be distinguished from debates over the agent or the moral psychology of toleration. We mentioned the extension of the toleration argument from religious views to conceptions of the good generally. A similar extension, though in a slightly different direction, involves culture and issues of cultural rights. In the classic Lockean picture, the state in a religious plural society distances itself from the beliefs and practices of any particular religion. But pluralism has many forms: one of its most striking forms in the modern era is the multicultural character of modern Western societies—partly as a matter of endogenous diversity (including religious diversity) and partly as a result of immigration. In a multicultural society, different groups follow (or seek to follow) different rules and customs in a whole range of areas of life besides religion including language, health care, neighborhood relations, family structure, and the education of children. As such, culture confronts head-on the activities of an activist welfarist regulatory state: it is competing directly in the same business of regulating the texture and detail of everyday life. On the other hand, the bearers of cultural practices are often unwilling to give them up, not (as in the case of religion) because they see them as crucial to the salvation of their souls, but because they regard the practices as an indispensable part of their identity. Law and legal theory have had to come to terms with this clash, as we have seen. But political philosophers (and political theorists) have also sought to make sense of the identity claims involved here, and to find ways of reckoning the importance of cultural claims with an overall matrix of justice and rights.18
We may value toleration of a diversity of cultural practices, but not every culture we tolerate values toleration, either in its relation to other cultures or (more alarmingly) in relation to the beliefs and practices of its own members. A culture (or a religion, for that matter) is seldom the same to all those whom it claims as its members. Individual men and women may be related problematically to a culture or a religion by their own ambivalence, or by their membership in an internal minority, by the fact that they may also have a foot in another religious or cultural camp—something which is almost inevitable in the circumstances of a modern multicultural society, where allegiances and memberships overlap and cut across one another. People may be related problematically to “their own” culture or religion by the oppressive place to which it assigns them: as a number of feminist writers have noticed, this is particularly true of women.19 Toleration of a culture can easily shade over into indulging that culture’s own intolerant oppression of those within its power.20 But there is a paradox in any solution, because culture (the very thing that is being tolerated) is likely to come equipped with its own definition of what is and what is not oppressive, a definition which challenges the conceptions of oppression that are used by those liberals who want to place limits on toleration in this regard.
Debates over the philosophical logic of toleration, its moral psychology, and its appropriate agents and objects have shaped the Western tradition of liberal thought since the early modern period. Before turning to a discussion of that tradition, though, it is important to notice that toleration is not a uniquely Western doctrine. Islam has its own deep traditions of doctrinal and philosophical reflection on the justification and limits of toleration.21 Buddhism, one of the world’s oldest ethical traditions, offers not only rich philosophical resources for justifying toleration but the oldest exemplar of a political regime of toleration, in the rule of the Emperor Ashoka over India in the third century B.C.E.22 And notwithstanding recent debates over “Asian values” and their support for benign authoritarianism, as in Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore, Confucianism contains abundant philosophical resources for a defense of individual moral autonomy of the sort that supports toleration.23 We deeply regret that the constraints of an alreadyfull volume preclude us from including a conversation with non-Western traditions of toleration. Such a conversation would be a worthy—and timely—contribution to our understanding of toleration.
The Western tradition of political and philosophical writings on toleration, however, is amply rich and multi-faceted to reward focused study. There is plenty for modern commentators to argue about, just in order to find out what lines of argument were actually being pursued by key figures, let alone how these arguments play out in the arrays of issues that actually concern us today. It is not possible to identify any one single line of canonical justification. Many aspects of the Western canon’s diverse arguments for and against toleration are explored in the essays by Rainer Forst, Michael A. Rosenfeld, Alex Tuckness, and Glyn Morgan in this volume, on the classic writings of Bayle, Spinoza, Locke, and Mill.
This has proved particularly true of John Locke, whose Letter Concerning Toleration is probably the best-known of the classic defenses of toleration. Locke scholarship—particularly in regard to his political and religious arguments—has deepened immeasurably over the last forty years,24 and modern discussions of the Letter Concerning Toleration reflect this. Locke pursues a number of separable and overlapping lines of argument, some of them specifically Christian, some of them based on a liberal conception of the proper function of the state, some of them pragmatic based on a specific doctrine about the nature of genuine faith and the inability of coercion to produce genuine belief, some of them based on reciprocity and a consideration of what turning the tables on a dominant Christian majority might involve.
Alex Tuckness points out that the way in which Locke defended his position on toleration against actual opponents in the Second, Third and incomplete Fourth Letters Concerning Toleration differs somewhat from the way he proceeded when he was responding only to imagined objections to the line he was taking in the first Letter. Tuckness argues that the later letters reveal the pressure Locke felt from the criticisms of Jonas Proast and others, so far as the argument about the inability of coercion to produce true belief was concerned. He thinks that under this pressure, Locke revealed that the argument he really thought important was a universalization argument: we cannot understand how a Christian magistrate has the authority to enforce the true (Christian) religion, without deriving it from a more general principle that any magistrate has the authority to enforce true religion as he understands it. Authorizations of this kind can only be conferred in general terms and the way they are applied in particular societies necessarily turns on the reasoning of those entrusted with political power. So, Locke argues (according to Tuckness), if we balk at the prospect of legitimate enforcement of (say) Islam at the hands of a Muslim prince against his Christian subjects, we must also resist the prospect of the enforcement of Christian religion (or any particular Christian doctrine) against those who do not accept it. We must resist the claimed authority wholesale; there is no room in the circumstances of politics for resisting it in some cases (those where we think the prince is right) and not others.
Locke’s arguments for toleration are perhaps the best-known in the liberal canon, though Tuckness has done us a service by revealing their complexity and by exploring a line of Lockean argument that has been unjustifiably neglected. Michael A. Rosenthal and Rainer Forst do similar service in focusing our attention on the arguments, respectively, of Locke’s near-contemporaries Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle—arguments that are not as well known now, though they were equally important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both Rosenthal and Forst relate the tolerationist thinking of the philosophers they study to the arguments of Locke’s famous Letter.
Michael Rosenthal argues that Spinoza pursued a more sophisticated version of the view about the relation between coercion and true belief which, as we have seen, Locke held but which (on Tuckness’s account) he felt pressure to give up. Locke held that belief was not subject to the will; but Spinoza held that the will and the intellect were inseparable and the will could not operate upon belief in any way that was independent of the intellectual processes by which belief was determined. Like Locke, Spinoza had to confront the objection that even if force cannot work directly to produce true belief, it may have indirect efficacy in that regard. His answer, according to Rosenthal, rests on a subtle but compelling theory of the internal economy of the intellect. Belief represents not just an output of the mind, but a certain sort of equilibrium among the complex elements of which the intellect is composed. The fact that some aspect of one’s believing a certain proposition is affected by fear or compulsion—for example, the fact that one had the experience of being compelled to read the books that taught that that proposition was true, rather than coming upon them in the normal course of epistemic life—that fact affects the nature and quality of the “belief” that results and may undermine its stability as well as its proper relation to other beliefs that one holds. In this sense, force may be incapable of producing genuine belief, even when it is used only indirectly.
Rainer Forst’s discussion of Bayle also takes the Proast-Locke controversy as its point of departure. Locke’s vulnerability to Proast’s argument for indirect coercion revealed the danger, for the tolerationist position, of the absence of an independent moral argument for the wrongness of state interference with religious belief. Locke was prepared to appeal to specifically Christian arguments at this point.25 But as Forst argues, Locke’s argument remains a “permission” conception of toleration, in which the governing authority chooses not to exercise its superior political might to suppress the religious views of a minority it judges to be wrong in its religious beliefs. At most, on Tuckness’s reading of Locke as offering an argument from the perspective of the universal legislator, Locke has a “coexistence” view of toleration, in which magistrates understand that the power of ruling may not be in their hands forever, and that there is therefore a prudential reason for tolerating incorrect religious faiths for the sake of avoiding conflict. Neither version of toleration, however, expresses respect for the dissenting religious believer. According to Forst, Bayle is the first theorist of toleration to ground it in a principle of mutual respect among equals. Contrary to many interpreters of Bayle, Forst argues that his defense of toleration is not based on a skeptical stance toward religious truth claims. Rather, Bayle navigates the tensions between faith and reason by maintaining that faith is not against reason, but goes beyond it. Faith offers answers to questions on which reason must remain silent, and reason can neither confirm nor refute the claims of faith. “Reasonable faith knows that it is faith; hence it does not compete with reason on reason’s terrain—and vice versa” (102). Within Bayle’s view, then, it is possible to affirm that another’s religious faith is reasonable, while also maintaining that it is fundamentally wrong. Bayle’s morality of mutual respect and epistemic restraint undergirds a conception of toleration that is more far-reaching than that of any of his contemporaries, extending equally to atheists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and all the others who lay beyond the limits of toleration drawn by Locke. The limits of toleration, according to Forst’s Bayle, are drawn not by the content of belief but by the believer’s propensity to uphold the public peace and to forswear the temptation to try to force conscience.
The other thinker whose work is canonical in the area of toleration is John Stuart Mill, though in Mill’s case we are dealing with a more general argument that has implications for the toleration debate, rather than an argument (like those of Spinoza, Bayle, or Locke) that address religious toleration directly.
Glyn Morgan is interested in the view of social relationship that underpins Mill’s defense of the toleration of diverse individual life-styles in On Liberty. The potential for individual liberty to serve its progressive purpose depends not only on what we tolerate but also on how we tolerate. Indifference, detachment, or polite self-restraint should not be mistaken for progressive tolerance, which requires a sort of censorious acceptance: a willingness to let others know precisely and pointedly why one thinks they are deeply mistaken, at the same time that one refuses to interfere with their actions. Of course the harm principle defines the limit of toleration so understood. We must not tolerate actions that harm others in their most fundamental interests. But there are many objectionable actions that fall short of such harm, including harms to oneself and to one’s moral character, and it is a moral failure—what Mill calls “selfish indifference”—to refrain from expressing our disapproval in such cases. Toleration must be reconciled with our duty to shape one another’s character for the better, and to foster the progress of moral understanding by exchanging critical arguments with those with whom we disagree, on matters of individual conduct as well as public policy. The prospects of democracy itself depend upon the improvement of the moral character of individuals through exchanges of this sort. Only our interests in security from serious harm can justify the coercion of the state, but a society committed to the equal security of all—a truly progressive society—should not cultivate a culture of excessive permissiveness toward groups that undervalue the equality and freedom of all their members.
Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, and Mill—these are not the only philosophers of toleration in our tradition. Toleration has also had its defenders in twentieth century political philosophy. So, for example, religious freedom is one of the basic liberties secured under John Rawls’s two principles of justice as fairness: Rawls argues that persons behind the “Veil of Ignorance,” which he uses as a heuristic to figure out the impartial demands of justice, would not take chances with their liberty by acknowledging any principle that allowed for the enforcement or suppression of religious views: “Even granting … that it is more probable than not that one will turn out to belong to the majority (if a majority exists), to gamble in this way would show that one did not take one’s religious or moral convictions seriously.”26 The moral and political philosophy of Immanuel Kant is also a major source of insight into the values that underpin toleration, particularly the value of autonomy. And Kant’s work in this regard continues to be a major point of orientation in contemporary debates. (It has to be said, however, that there is an important difference between the idea of moral autonomy that is so crucial for Kant’s moral philosophy and the ideal of personal autonomy that he seems to be invoking when he writes that “[n]o one can coerce me to be happy in his way (as he thinks of the welfare of other human beings); instead each may seek his happiness in the way that seems good to him.”)27
There is also in this volume an essay on Thomas Hobbes, but that is not a discussion of an argument for toleration; it is the presentation of an argument on the other side. Hobbes made an argument for erastianism, an argument that the state continues to have an important role to play in orchestrating public worship. It is usually thought that Hobbes opposed liberal toleration for secular reasons: the need for peace and conflict resolution in religious matters and the need to defuse religiously based objections to the exercise of civil authority. Jeremy Waldron shows, however, that Hobbes also pursued a religious argument for the state’s role in these matters. The whole society, as much as any other entity, is required to worship, placate, and propitiate God, and there is something offensive to God in that regard, Hobbes reckons, in the uncoordinated mish-mash of religious observances that one finds in the practices of a tolerant pluralistic society. This provides a salutary reminder that the image of pluralism, mentioned at the beginning of section 2 of this Introduction, is necessarily appealing to everyone.
Besides the refreshment of arguments in the canon of political thought that we have already discussed (in the papers by Forst, Tuckness, Rosenthal, and Morgan), one of the things that is most striking about our essays is the presentation of a number of different images of toleration. At the beginning, we alluded to an image of a pluralist society—a society in which men and women of differing beliefs go proudly about their own business, living their lives in accordance with the religious teachings that they find congenial, but each taking little interest (positive or negative) in anyone else’s religious or spiritual affairs. They care about their own beliefs; they simply don’t care about those of anyone else; they have different and more important things to preoccupy themselves with in their relations with others. It is the image of toleration that one gleans from Voltaire’s famous observation on the London Stock Exchange: “Go into the Exchange in London, … and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.”28 Amongst the many purposes toleration can serve, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is good for the business of capitalism.
That’s one image of toleration—toleration as detachment—and it is attractive to many. We would like to end this introductory essay by sketching out three other pictures of toleration that emerge from the contributions to this volume.
One alternative image emerges mainly as a foil, for the various presentations; it is not the sort of toleration favored by any of our authors. It is toleration as restraint exercised de haut en bas: someone in a privileged position (a state official, for example, or a comfortable member of a religious majority) tolerates beliefs and practices that are in some sense beneath him. In this picture, the demands of toleration are unilateral and asymmetrical: toleration is a one-way relationship from high to low. Argument for toleration is a matter of persuading the powerful or privileged figure that it would be undignified, or irrational, or counterproductive, or just unkind not to let others hold and practice their own religions. We appeal to his interests—the interests of the dominant figure—and persuade him that his own statecraft discloses no reason to persecute or suppress. (As many of our authors note, John Locke’s theory is often interpreted as arguing in this spirit.) Or, if we appeal to the interests of those who are tolerated, we do so only to the extent that they are taken on board in the sentimental economy of the privileged figure. He feels for their predicament and their vulnerability, and he ought to show mercy on them by not pursuing, in religious matters, the advantage given to him by his superior power or authority.
As we said earlier in this Introduction, toleration conceived in this way can easily seem insulting to those on the receiving end. Wendy Brown’s essay emphasizes this perception of asymmetry: “The pronouncement, ‘I am a tolerant man,’ conjures seemliness, propriety, forbearance, magnanimity, cosmopolitanism, universality, the large view, while those for whom tolerance is required take their shape as improper, indecorous, urgent, narrow, particular, and often ungenerous or at least lacking in perspective” (408). Brown is particularly interested in how this asymmetry plays out also on the matrix of civilized/uncivilized. Societies which describe themselves as tolerant regard this as an attribute of civilization: those whom they tolerate are lower in the scale of civilization and those they have to deal with who will not tolerate other religions are barbarians, beyond the pale (and so paradoxically may have no claim to the benefit of the toleration that defined who was civilized in the first place). Brown’s thesis reminds us that tolerance has not always been regarded as a virtue—not just from the perspective of those who would like to see religion enforced but also form the perspective of those who have no interest in that, but are interested in the way we present ourselves in our relations with others whose views and practices are unfamiliar to use. People have talked of “repressive tolerance,”29 and we must not assume, just because toleration is the liberal virtue par excellence, that it is immune from criticism in itself or as part of the general critique of liberalism.
The advantage of this image of toleration de haut en bas is its realism: it acknowledges the realities of power and orients its normative arguments to what is likely to convince the holders of power, rather than simply giving vent to the resentment of the powerless. A second alternative, which may also pride itself on its realism, is Glen Newey’s picture of toleration as murality—as a matter of building walls around and within a political community to contain and limit antagonism. Newey is skeptical about conceptions of toleration that require the deep sharing of values like autonomy and integrity. He believes that we find a better (certainly a more viable and realistic) grounding for toleration in the Hobbesian ideas of peace and security. A community whose members recoil from the prospect of civil war will look for any structures and arrangements that avoid endemic religious conflict. It is conceivable that they will aim to set up an erastian sovereign of the sort that Hobbes envisaged (though in the short term the effort to do so is likely to make matters worse not better). Most likely they will look for ways of defusing religious conflict, separating the potential combatants, and establishing some sort of modus vivendi between them. As the saying goes, good fences make good neighbors: if one can set things up so that differing religious sects are, so to speak, walled off from one another and walled off too from the prospect of gaining control of the state, then it may be possible to contain and limit their antagonism. The walls of Newey’s murality are partly a matter of separation, partly a matter of guarantee, and they define a sort of toleration that is pursued not for the sake of any moral ideal but for the sake of what he calls an “unquiet but not murderous” form of coexistence.
Toleration as murality takes seriously the lethal ground on which increasingly, in many parts of the world, religious conflicts are played out. It looks for any means of reducing that lethal potential, whether those means answer to the traditional depiction of toleration and whether or not they can be supported by the values that traditionally have been though to underpin toleration. One of the most controversial features of Newey’s conception is that it offers no guarantee up front about the shape of tolerant social and legal arrangements: they may involve a recognizable scheme of constitutional guarantees, they may involve an Ottoman-style millet system, they may involve suppression of evangelism or even apostasy, or they may even involve carefully limited forms of religious competition. We do not decide these matters a priori, he argues, but in light of what is necessary in a particular historical and social environment to keep the peace.
Some will say that this image therefore betrays the promise of liberal toleration, because that tradition looks forward to a particular kind of approach to religious pluralism, not just any old structures for containing religious antagonism. They may say that Newey is entitled to doubt whether the liberal toleration is necessarily effective in securing peace, but that should not be the same as defining “toleration” so that it covers any arrangement which proves effective in that regard.30
Newey’s murality was put forward in this volume as a direct challenge to Ingrid Creppell’s image of toleration as mutuality, and it is with this more optimistic and more idealistic picture of toleration that we will end. Creppell’s vision of toleration as mutuality also presented itself as a revisionary conception: it is an alternative, for example, to the de haut en bas picture that, as we noted earlier, emerges from the Lockean argument. Toleration, Creppell argues, is about relationship, but it is better conceived as a symmetrical two-way relationship, rather than a one-way dispensation administered from a position of power. I tolerate you as you tolerate me: the toleration relationship is to be understood in the first instance as a relation of respect among equals.
It is crucial to Creppell’s conception that toleration is not expected to exist in a relational vacuum. In a modern multi-faith and multi-cultural society, the members of various groups are bound together by all sorts of common concerns. There is, to be sure, the common concern for security that Newey emphasizes. But there is also the common search for justice and fair terms of cooperation generally, even in matters that don’t involve religion. There are elements of mutual aid and common loyalty that drives us to look out for each other and work together to create and maintain structures of care for matters of common concern. Creppell’s view is that this panoply of relatedness is not just the upshot of self-interested individual behavior. As she puts it, there is a will to relationship: “the institutions and ethos of politics itself must be valued for more than strategic purposes” (316). But if this will to relationship is present anyway in the fabric of social life, then toleration can be understood as an integrated aspect of it, not as something that has to be argued for as an entirely fresh relationship, as it were among strangers. True, we are separated to some extent by our differing religious beliefs. But in the last analysis, she says, “we come down to the question of why would those who believe fundamentally different things desire to live in a society together?” (349). Since they evidently do desire to live together in something more than muted antagonism, we can take the shared and reciprocal concern and respect that characterizes that will to relationship as a basis for thinking through this potentially divisive issue of the attitude we take to each others’ religions. If we address the matter on this basis of mutuality, Creppell reckons, we will see how to argue for toleration and the arguments we use will have the advantage of being not ad hoc but fully integrated into the ideals that underpin every aspect of our relationship in liberal society.
Where does this leave us? Should we understand toleration as a pragmatic solution to the evils of religious conflict, or as an expression of a moral-practical ideal grounded in universalistic principles of egalitarian respect and impartiality? Perhaps, as Noah Feldman argues in his essay in this volume, we should not allow ourselves to be pressed into a dichotomous choice. Yes, human beings are motivated by narrow and partisan self-interest. Instrumental justifications of toleration, as securing the peace that is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of our other ends, can be highly effective in motivating us to resist the impulse to pursue our interests violently. But we are also moral beings, and as such disinclined to sustain, indefinitely, political orders that we cannot affirm as basically just. Toleration is useful, but we care about it because we also believe that it is moral.
Toleration becomes an issue when societies that were once monolithic communities of faith and value split on these questions into different sects and parties or when individuals and families who previously lived in separate communities of faith and value come together in a single social and political environment. The canon of Western liberal thinking on toleration emerged in the early modern period when these processes were just beginning in Western Europe and North America. The problem has not gone away, nor despite the best efforts of those early modern theorists has it been solved. On the contrary it is as urgently in need of solution now as it has ever been, for as well as increasing diversity and the effects of travel and immigration, there is a sense now that we share a world where the question of toleration is posited not just as an issue for states, for their local laws and constitutions, but for humanity as a whole.
1. See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). There is some excellent discussion of the Huntington thesis in the essays by Wendy Brown and Steven D. Smith in this volume.
2. For a critical analysis connecting the Paris riots to French traditions of republicanism as a “mission civilatrice,” see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Michael J. Balz, “The October Riots in France: A Failed Immigration Policy or the Empire Strikes Back?” International Migration 44(2): 23–34 (2006).
3. Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London: Penguin Books, 2006).
4. For a fulsome discussion of the issues, see Tariq Modood, Randall Hansen, Erik Bleich, Brendan O’Leary, and Joseph H. Carens, “The Danish Cartoon Controversy: Free Speech, Racism, Islamism and Integration,” International Migration 44(5): 3–62 (December 2006).
5. Neil Nevitte and Christopher Cochrane, “Individualization in America and Europe: Connecting Religious and Moral Values,” Comparative Sociology 5(2–3): 203–31 (2006).
6. See “Among Wealthy Nations, U.S. Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion,” Pew Global Attitudes Project Report, December 19, 2002, available at http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=167.
7. Thorleif Pettersson, “Religion in Contemporary Society: Eroded by Human Well-being, Supported by Cultural Diversity,” Comparative Sociology 5 (2–3): 231–57 (2006).
8. See, e.g., Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), and Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For edited volumes, see Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione (eds.), The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Toleration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), Susan Mendus (ed.), The Politics of Toleration in Modern Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), and David Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
9. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition.
10. This volume, and in Creppell, Toleration and Identity.
11. See Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) and City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997).
12. Employment Division v. Smith, op. cit., 888–89 (Scalia J., for the court).
13. Ibid., 902 (O’Connor J., concurring).
14. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 10, 213–14.
15. See Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Stuart Hampshire (ed.) Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1978). See also the papers in Robert Goodin and Andrew Reeve (eds.), Liberal Neutrality (London: Routledge, 1990).
16. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 417: “[A]utonomous life is valuable only if it is spent in the pursuit of acceptable and valuable projects.”
17. Ibid., 110 ff.
18. See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Jacob T. Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also the essays in Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds.), Minorities within Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
19. See, e.g., Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
20. For a vivid account of how this plays out in a strongly tolerant society, see Unni Wikan, Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
21. See, e.g., the title essay by Khaled Abou El Fadl, and critical responses, in Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague (eds.), The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), Sohail H. Hashmi, “Islamic Ethics in International Society,” in Sohail H. Hashmi (ed.), Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. 167–69.
22. For an overview of Ashoka’s regime of toleration and its legacy, see Amartya Sen, Human Rights and Asian Values (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997), 19–23. Sen also discusses the tolerant Islamic regime of the Moghal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century. See also his discussions of Ashoka and Akbar in The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin, 2005), 12–19, 287–91.
23. See, e.g., Joseph Chan, “Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism,” Philosophy East and West 52(3): 281–310 (2002).
24. See Peter Laslett’s introduction to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
25. See the discussion in Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 210–11.
26. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 207.
27. “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory but It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 277, at 291. See also Jeremy Waldron, “Moral Autonomy and Personal Autonomy,” in John Christman and Joel Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 307.
28. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 26.
29. See Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
30. On the relative weight of peace and other moral considerations within liberal toleration, see Melissa S. Williams, “Tolerable Liberalism,” in Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds.), Minorities within Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).