Introduction
It is generally agreed that toleration is one of the foundational pillars of liberal society. And yet, toleration has come to be thought of as a difficult (Scanlon, 2003), paradoxical (Forst, 2013, pp. 17–26), elusive (Heyd, 1996) or conceptually impossible virtue (Williams, 1996).1 The present paper seeks to dispel three puzzles that allegedly beset the idea of toleration.2
One paradox concerns the value of toleration. Given that toleration requires that we do not interfere with ways of life that we deem ethically wrong, it is difficult to understand why toleration should be a virtue. If we are sufficiently confident that a given lifestyle is ethically objectionable and if we are in a position to suppress it, what could possibly be laudable about tolerating it?3
Another paradox concerns the limits of toleration. It is sometimes claimed that there is no such thing as true tolerance because tolerance must necessarily be limited. The idea of toleration is therefore intrinsically self-defeating.
A third problem relates to exactly how we go about justifying toleration and its proper boundaries. It has been assumed by many that for there to be true tolerance, the justification of tolerance must itself be ‘tolerant’. That is, it must not rest on any controversial premises that are peculiar to a reasonably contested philosophical or religious worldview. If no such neutral theory of tolerance is available, true tolerance again proves to be a chimera.
In what follows, I will address each of these three worries in turn and show them to be unfounded. I will argue that the moral value of toleration is readily intelligible and that the notion that there might be no such thing as true tolerance rests on false presuppositions. While I hope to demonstrate that toleration is less paradoxical or difficult than it has been made to appear, I am loath to deny that the topic still gives rise to intricate philosophical questions that the present paper does not answer. In particular, I will have rather little to say about exactly where the boundaries of toleration ought to be drawn, which is no doubt one of the core questions about toleration.4
The moral value of tolerance
According to a widely shared view, the concept of toleration involves an acceptance component and an objection component.5 Toleration implies acceptance in that it is essentially about putting up with the tolerated belief or practice.6 And it implies objection in that you cannot tolerate a belief or practice that you do not disapprove of. If you refrain from interfering with a practice that you are indifferent about or that you approve of, this noninterference would simply not qualify as toleration. As a matter of conceptual necessity, you cannot tolerate what you do not consider wrong.
This combination of acceptance and objection gives rise to the first of the three puzzles discussed in this paper: If the to-be-tolerated practice is deemed objectionable, how could toleration possibly be something virtuous or laudable? Why should it be virtuous to put up with what one deems wrong? Here are some typical statements of this worry:
The paradox is this: normally we count toleration as a virtue in individuals and a duty in societies. However, where toleration is based on moral disapproval, it implies that the thing tolerated is wrong and ought not to exist. The question which then arises is why, given the claim to objectivity incorporated in the strong sense of toleration, it should be thought good to tolerate. (Mendus, 1989, pp. 18–19)
Toleration is the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves. [. . .] But if your disapproval is reasonably grounded, why should you go against it at all? Why should you tolerate? Why, in other words, is toleration a virtue or a duty? (Raphael, 1988, p. 139)
If we are asking people to be tolerant, we are asking [. . .] [them] to lose something, their desire to suppress or drive out the rival belief; but they will also keep something, their commitment to their own beliefs, which is what gave them that desire in the first place. There is a tension here between one’s own commitments, and the acceptance that other people may have other, perhaps quite distasteful commitments: the tension that is typical of toleration, and which makes it so difficult. (Williams, 1996, pp. 19–20)
[I]f the reasons for objection as well as those for acceptance are identified as moral, the paradox is exacerbated into the question of how it can be morally right or even obligatory to tolerate what is morally wrong or bad. (Forst, 2013, p. 21, original emphasis)
As the last quote indicates, the challenge is not simply that of providing just any kind of reason for not interfering with practices or worldviews that one disapproves of. It goes without saying that people often have prudential reasons to put up with behavior that they find ethically objectionable or to agree on a tolerant modus vivendi.7 Rather, the challenge consists in providing a moral reason to put up with what one disapproves of. We are interested in toleration as a principled moral attitude. And the notion that it is morally right to tolerate what is objectionable is apt to strike one as puzzling.8
Although the virtue of toleration has thus come to be viewed as ‘paradoxical’ or ‘difficult’ by toleration theorists, this has not reduced their endorsement of toleration as a valuable liberal virtue. Providing a compelling vindication of toleration is considered challenging, but it is generally assumed that this challenge can be met. The literature contains a plethora of different, often whole-hearted, defenses of the idea of toleration. Therefore, arguing that toleration is valuable or morally obligatory is, of course, in accord with the philosophical mainstream. However, by advancing a rather simple and straightforward defense of toleration, I purport to challenge certain widely held philosophical misconceptions regarding the difficulty of toleration. The difficulty of making sense of the value of toleration has, to my mind, been overstated. There is nothing in the least paradoxical or puzzling about the idea that tolerating what one ethically disapproves of is laudable and morally required.
The key to understanding the value of toleration is, I think, to attend closely to the acceptance component. Of the two components of toleration, the objection component has received relatively more scholarly attention,9 while characterizations of the acceptance component tend to be rather casual. In particular, characterizations of exactly what kind of acceptance is needed for there to be tolerance are often – though not always10 – somewhat imprecise. Peter Nicholson, for instance, writes that the ‘tolerator has the power to try to suppress or prevent (or at least to oppose or hinder) what is tolerated’ but that he ‘does not exercise his power, thereby allowing the deviation to continue.’ And: ‘toleration is the virtue of refraining from exercising one’spower to interfere with others’ opinion or action’ (Nicholson, 1985, pp. 160, 162). According to Catherine McKinnon, the tolerator ‘refrains on principled grounds from acting on her disposition to oppress or interfere with another person or group’ (McKinnon, 2006, p. 28). For D.D. Raphael, ‘[t]o tolerate is to allow or endure something of which one disapproves.’ (Raphael, 1988, p. 141) John Gray notes that ‘[w]hen we tolerate a practice, a belief or a character trait, we let something be that we judge to be undesirable, false or at least inferior; our toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone.’ (Gray, 1995, p. 28, all emphases added) And Rainer Forst mostly operates with a circular definition of the acceptance component, according to which acceptance means that one tolerates the practice that one objects to.11
While Forst’sdefinition is uninformative, the former characterizations of ‘acceptance’ are somewhat imprecise and, most importantly, over-inclusive. They fail to acknowledge that not all ways of interfering or not putting up with are intolerant in the strict sense of the term. There are many ways in which one may aim at changing people’s views or behaviors without failing to tolerate them. Clearly, persuading others of one’s own view through rational criticism and argumentation is not intolerant.12 And there is nothing intolerant about, say, religious missionary work provided (and this is a key proviso) the missionaries respect certain standards of human decency.13
The crucial question therefore is exactly what kind of acceptance is the minimum requirement for tolerance. I submit that toleration means that one interferes with other people’s ways of life only through means of interference that exhibit a certain degree of civility, human decency and benevolence. Put the other way around, people’s beliefs and practices are not tolerated if they are interfered with through particularly vile or ruthless means of interference.14
Paradigm cases of intolerant ways of interfering with disapproved-of world-views include for instance physical coercion (which includes state coercion), hate campaigns and public demonization. Clearly, people whose worldviews are being combated by such means can rightly complain that they are not being tolerated or that there is at least a significant lack of toleration. By contrast, more lenient ways of interfering with disapproved-of practices do not necessarily qualify as intolerant in the strict sense of the term. I concede that the concept of toleration is to some extent fuzzy, making it impossible to classify each and every instance of interference as a clear-cut case of either tolerance or intolerance. I do not purport to be able to offer any such clear-cut delineation. But I do take it that it would be conceptually wrong to call behavior intolerant that significantly falls short of exhibiting the sort of viciousness of the above given paradigmatic examples of intolerant interference.15
To illustrate, it does not strike me as intolerant if (as happened recently16) the devoutly Christian owners of a pizzeria, when pressed by a journalist, state that they would refuse to cater a gay wedding, while professing that they would happily serve gay couples in their restaurant. Their behavior may be objectionable on other grounds. It may or may not be discriminatory, closeminded, bigoted, informed by false assumptions about what the teachings of Christ require, and many other things. But it would be quite a stretch to say that their refusal to cater gay marriages goes to show that they do not tolerate homosexual lifestyle or gay marriage in particular. They are merely refusing to get involved with the disapproved-of practice rather than actively disrupting it, and the service they are denying – party catering – is a non-vital one that can easily be obtained from a different provider. By contrast, it does strike me as intolerant to call upon people to burn down the pizza place or to incite a public smear campaign that forces the owners of the pizzeria to (temporarily) close their business. And it would certainly be intolerant to legally force them to cater gay weddings against the dictates of their conscience.
Two implications of the just sketched characterization of the acceptance component are worth emphasizing. First, it is important to notice that there is a difference between discrimination and intolerance and that not all forms of discrimination amount to intolerance. As just seen, refusal to cater gay weddings may well be discriminatory (if one caters heterosexual weddings), but it is not in itself intolerant. By the same token, if a state privileges one religion over others, this does not necessarily imply that these other religions are not being tolerated. This depends on the nature and severity of the discrimination. Second, the fact that a given negative attitude does not qualify as ‘intolerant’ does not mean that this attitude might not be objectionable on other grounds. By exempting certain forms of interference or disapprobation from the charge of intolerance, we do not thereby condone this behavior or forgo the right to criticize it. We may still criticize it, for instance, as ignorant, rude, stubborn, discriminato...
