Toleration

A Critical Introduction

Catriona McKinnon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415322904
• eBook ISBN: 9781134351503
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Why should we be tolerant? What does it mean to 'live and let live'? What ought to be tolerated and what not?

Catriona McKinnon presents a comprehensive, yet accessible introduction to toleration in her new book. Divided into two parts, the first clearly introduces and assesses the major theoretical accounts of toleration, examining it in light of challenges from scepticism, value pluralism and reasonableness. The second part applies the theories of toleration to contemporary debates such as female circumcision, French Headscarves, artistic freedom, pornography and censorship, and holocaust denial.

Drawing on the work of philosophers, such as Locke, Mill and Rawls, whose theories are central to toleration, the book provides a solid theoretical base to those who value toleration, whilst considering the challenges toleration faces in practice. It is the ideal starting point for those coming to the topic for the first time, as well as anyone interested in the challenges facing toleration today.

Part I

Chapter 1

Toleration: a call to arms

Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.

(John Major, 1993, while Prime Minister of Britain)¹

Introduction

Toleration is a matter of putting up with that which you oppose: the motto of the tolerant person is ‘live and let live’, even when what she lets live shocks, enrages, frightens, or disgusts her. As such, toleration is a controversial value. The secular righteous on the left reject it as the pet indulgence of a pampered liberal elite whose self-interest it serves by providing them with convenient excuses for blocking any agitation aiming at real social change. The secular righteous on the right reject it as the corrupt policy of the morally spineless who lack the insight and strength of will to improve the moral character of society and their fellow citizens through zero tolerance. And the religious righteous treat arguments for toleration with suspicion in the face of the eternal damnation to be meted out to those who will inevitably stray from the path to salvation once other paths are made available to them through the practice of toleration.

The erstwhile defenders of toleration thus attacked by the righteous have fallen asleep at their posts. Like freedom and equality, toleration is a value that no democratic politician would dare to repudiate, and the political zeitgeist has it that we democrats are all agreed, more or less, on the questions of why it is a good thing to be tolerant, what ought not to be tolerated, and how the value of toleration is best realised in political principles and procedures, the law, and personal behaviour. And the fact of putative agreement on apparently justified answers to these questions has encouraged neglect of the arsenal of arguments available in the defence of toleration. This complacency in democratic communities with respect to the principles and practice of toleration renders the attacks of the righteous – albeit often under cover of defences of democracy, freedom, justice, and ‘our way of life’ – perhaps more of a threat than at any time since the middle of the last century. To get a sense of the dangers, consider the following cases.

On 2 November 2004 film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street by a suspect who, the Dutch justice minister claimed, ‘acted out of radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions’. Van Gogh had recently collaborated with the Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a self-described ‘ex-Muslim’, on a film exploring Islam and women, which was broadcast on Dutch television in August 2004. In the film a Muslim woman was shown being forced into an arranged marriage, beaten by her husband, raped by her uncle, and then punished for adultery; verses from the Qur’an relating to the status of women were then shown projected across the woman’s beaten shoulders. Hirsi Ali’s suggestions for combating the misogyny she perceives in Islam are for fundamentalist Islamic books to be banned, and for Muslim Mullahs to be expelled from the country. The murder of Van Gogh shows the worst kind of intolerance in action: the kind that ends with death. But can the solution to that terrible intolerance – in a country that is arguably the birthplace of toleration – really be more intolerance, in the form of book-banning and banishing?²

Race relations in Holland are deteriorating, with polls showing increased support for anti-immigration policies. The popularity of Rotterdam-based politician Pim Fortuyn (who stood on a strong anti-multiculturalist and anti-green platform, and was murdered by an animal rights activist in May 2002) is testament to this. And the Dutch ‘List Fortuyn’ is not an isolated example in Europe. ‘New populist’ political movements are gaining popularity (and, in some cases, political power) across the democracies of Europe: witness Le Pen’s Front National in France, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, the Alleanza Nazionale in Italy, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Danske Folkeparti in Denmark. These movements are united by their self-described commitments to speak for ‘the common man’, to oppose immigration and restrict multiculturalism as an aspect of this speech, and to unapologetically resist what they see as overstated and misguided ‘politically correct’ policies guided by a concern for human rights, climate change, and multiculturalism. Their emergence on the political scene serves as a call to arms for the defenders of toleration.

The British experience with respect to its most prominent new populist party, the British National Party (BNP), is more muted; their successes are limited to a few seats in local elections. However, the relative failure of the BNP in formal political arenas does not show that Britain is free from racial intolerance. A recent Council of Europe survey on racism and xenophobia ranked the UK the European state most hostile to political refugees.³ And statistics show that, relative to resident population in a police force area in 1997–8, black people were five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people;⁴ that black Caribbean pupils were five times more likely (in 1995–6) to face permanent exclusion from schools than white pupils;⁵ that (according to studies conducted by the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex) ‘covert racism exists almost everywhere’ in the state school system;⁶ and that (in 1995–6) the unemployment rate for ethnic minorities (18 per cent) was more than double that for whites (8 per cent), with four in ten young black women unemployed in that period compared to one in ten young white women.⁷

Of course, statistics can tell a thousand stories, and interpretations of those offered here can be given so as to avoid the conclusion that racism is endemic in the British police force, education system, and employment market. Perhaps more telling, then, are statistics relating to the perception of racial intolerance held by members of racial minorities. In 1995, an estimated 15 per cent of all offences against Asians and blacks were seen as racially motivated, compared to 1 per cent against white people.⁸ 1996 statistics further confirm this perception of racial violence in the UK: one in fifteen white people was very worried about ‘being subject to a physical attack because of their skin colour, ethnic origin, or religion’, whereas one in three people from an ethnic minority expressed such a worry.⁹ And in this period people from ethnic minorities were twice as likely (26 per cent) as white people (13 per cent) to say they avoided events or activities – such as football matches, nightclubs and pubs – because of fear of violence or crime. Finally, among 16–24-year-olds, 85 per cent of black Caribbeans and 50 per cent of Asians did not feel they could rely on the police for protection from racial harassment.¹⁰ Either Britain faces genuine problems of racial intolerance, or the worries and distrust consistently expressed by large numbers of its ethnic minorities do nothing but articulate a mass delusion with respect to the incidence of racial discrimination and violence in Britain.

Finally, and moving west, the state of the culture of toleration in the US can be seen by considering the gay marriage debate there. The current furore about gay marriage in the US can be traced back to the Supreme Court’s 1986 interpretation of Bowers v. Hardwick as a case about whether there exists a constitutional right to sodomy.¹¹ The court decided that no such constitutional right existed, and thereby made it possible for states to criminalise homosexual sex, and discriminate against homosexuals on the basis of their criminality (for example, Alabama denies custody of children to gay people on the grounds that gay relationships are criminal). However, the decision in Bowers was recently struck down by a Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas (26 June 2003).¹² Here, the court ruled that Texas’ anti-sodomy laws violated the constitutional right of all persons to privacy, thereby directly contradicting the decision in Bowers (the court stated that ‘Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct now’), and opening the door to legal challenges to all subsequent legislation drawing upon Bowers. In response to Lawrence (just three days after the decision), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (with bipartisan support) endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

This amendment denies to gay couples the right to marry as recently established by the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Goodridge v. MA Dept of Public Health (a case in which seven gay and lesbian couples challenged the decision of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to deny them licences to marry).¹³ President Bush voiced his support for this amendment, stating that, ‘Marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another’.¹⁴

A key ground on which the Marriage Amendment is claimed to be intolerant is that the denial to gay people of the right to marry violates their constitutional right to privacy. However, those opposed to gay marriage, such as the Alliance for Marriage, claim that permitting it in law would devalue heterosexual marriage and undermine the role of women.¹⁵ On this view, it is often claimed that gay marriage is to be placed outside the limits of toleration because the practice of marriage historically belongs to the heterosexual community, and is a signal of commitment peculiar to heterosexuals and valued by them as such. An analogy here is with all-male clubs. Men join these clubs because they are all male; if such clubs are forced by law to open their doors to women then they lose their value for existing members. To avoid this harm, provision should be made for women to open their own clubs. Applied to the question of gay marriage, the analogous argument is that homosexual couples should be permitted to join together in legally recognised civil unions – as they currently are in many US states, and may soon be in the UK – but not in marriage. The principle at work here is: ‘separate but equal’. This principle was, famously, struck down in 1954 by the US Supreme Court with respect to racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education, and this decision is held up by all as a landmark on the road to racial equality and toleration in the US.¹⁶ Fifty years on from Brown, can toleration permit that ‘separate but equal’ be written into the US Constitution with respect to the rights of homosexual people to enter into the marriage contract, with all its attendant benefits?

We do not live in a tolerant world, and claims that we democrats are all tolerant now should be treated with suspicion: either we are not as democratic as we like to think, or our democratic commitments at best underdetermine the choice of different practices of toleration, or at worst generate practices that directly conflict. Furthermore, the way the world is means that any sane politician has no choice but to pursue policies of toleration. If anything is a fact about human nature and its operation on a bounded planet with limited resources, then this is: conflict between persons is a permanent feature of their interaction in social contexts. Many such conflicts are open to solution without remainder through negotiation using procedures agreed to by parties to the conflict; for example, conflicts about territory, contracts, or reparation can have this character. However, many other conflicts cannot be resolved without remainder via procedural means: when persons come into conflict on questions about the best way to live, the right things to think, the ideal political society, and the true road to salvation, no amount of negotiation and bargaining will bring them to agreement without at least one party relinquishing the commitments that created the conflict in the first place.

Such conflicts provide the circumstances of toleration. The record of history aside, there are many reasons to think that such conflicts are endemic in human society: for example, that they are the normal result of the exercise of reason in conditions of freedom; that they are a consequence of the incommensurability of the values involved in such conflicts; or that they reflect the fact that the truth of the beliefs, and the significance of the values, manifest in such conflicts are relative to the point of view of the believer and the moral system of the valuer. These explanations of the permanence of pluralism will be explored in due course (in chapters 5, 4 and 3 respectively).¹⁷ For the moment, note that the fact that such conflicts stand as circumstances of toleration does not entail that toleration is the only solution to such conflicts. Other routes to the resolution of such conflicts more common in history are war and oppression. For those who cannot countenance toleration of their ideological opponents, napalming their villages, pointing nuclear warheads at them from a nearby island, or flying aeroplanes into their landmarks, are real, practical alternatives. And for those who win such wars, or who already have power over those they oppose, an Inquisition, a committee for un-American activities, or two years’ hard labour in Reading jail serve the end of conflict resolution just as well as toleration.¹⁸ The circumstances of toleration are here to stay, but the practice of toleration is not a given. If a peace fit for justice is our goal – that is, social organisation according to non-oppressive principles which mediate hot and cold conflicts so as to prevent their deterioration into war – then toleration is our only option. With toleration secured, further measures to achieve justice – however conceived – are possible: insofar as everyone ought to care about justice, everyone has a reason to value toleration.

Two philosophers who saw clearly the imperative to be tolerant as issuing from the nature of human beings inhabiting a world in which avoidance of one another is not an option were John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Before entering the current debates we would do well to recall their lessons.

Avoiding jihad and the tyranny of the majority: Locke and Mill on toleration

John Locke (1632–1704) published his famous A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689.¹⁹ Locke was a very political political philosopher, and was involved in struggles to establish limited government throughout his life. The arguments of the Letter set limits on the authority of governments and priests with respect to religious belief, and are addressed to these agents of intolerance.

Restoration England was not a safe place in which to be non-Anglican. The post-Civil War Restoration settlement of 1660–2 saw Anglicans gain control of (the ‘Cavalier’) Parliament, and thenceforth use their power to enact legislation (for example, the ‘Clarendon Code’, the Toleration Act, and the Act of Uniformity) to enforce religious uniformity, quash the dissent of Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Quakers and – as a matter of course – Catholics, and fine, imprison, and deport members of these denominations. The settlement also saw the Anglican Church itself become more non-latitudinarian and insistent on uniformity of belief and religious practice.

Religious tensions simmered in Restoration England and the threat of revolution, or a return to civil war, was constant. During this period (in 1667) Locke became personal physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, and soon thereafter also became his friend, confidante, and political ally. In 1679 Shaftesbury attempted to pass through Parliament the Exclusion Bill, which would have denied the throne to Charles II’s Catholic brother, James II. Because Charles had no legitimate heirs, the success of the Exclusion Bill would have, in effect, overturned the principle of hereditary succession upon which the whole monarchy rested. Charles reacted by dissolving Parliament. Shaftesbury was then associated with the seditious activities of the Duke of Monmouth (one of Charles’ illegitimate sons), and implicated in the 1683 Rye House plot to assassinate Charles and his brother, James. Upon discovery of the plot, Shaftesbury fled to Holland. Although the extent of Locke’s direct involvement with Shaftesbury’s political activities is not clear, Locke also sought exile in Holland, where he remained until the year after the 1688 Glorious Revolution in which James II was replaced on the throne by Protestant William of Orange and Mary (James II’s daughter).²⁰

Locke wrote the Letter during his exile, but never acknowledged authorship of it. Living in these times, Locke must have been keenly aware of the circumstances of toleration, and the ever-present bellicose and/or oppressive solutions to the conflicts constitutive of it. The Letter insists on the distinction between church and state: the former is a voluntary association concerned with the spiritual welfare of its members,²¹ and the latter a non-voluntary association concerned with temporal, civil matters and the common good.²² As such, it is impermissible for either institution to use force to impose conformity in religious belief and practice: these matters lie outside the scope of the state’s legitimate concerns, and even though the church ought to facilitate worship and offer guidance, ultimate responsibility for the spiritual welfare of each person lies with the person herself. This distinction, however – and the religious toleration it implies – is the conclusion of the Letter. The arguments that deliver it are as follows:²³

1. The argument from the irrationality of imposition: by its very nature, faith cannot be imposed, therefore the intolerant religious oppressor acts irrationally.
2. The argument from scepticism: rulers cannot know which form of worship is the path to salvation, which counsels them to pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography