Citizenship and equality: The Place for Toleration

Political Theory

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 1993, Pages 585-605

  Galeotti, Anna Elisabetta ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TURIN   (Italy)

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EID: 0042891184     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591793021004002     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. This is a popularized version of John Stuart Mill's position in On Liberty, in Collected Works, vol. 18, Essays on Politics and Society, edited by J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 213-310.
2. The theoretical model specifying circumstances, nature, justification, and limits of toleration can be found throughout the four volumes resulting from the Morrell Toleration Project of York University: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds. Aspects of Toleration (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds. On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Susan Mendus, ed. Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of liberalism (London: Macmillan, 1989).
3. The question of the circumstances of toleration was originally addressed by Preston King, Toleration (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), and then reexamined by Albert Weale, “Toleration, Individual Differences and Respect for People,” and by Peter P. Nicholson, ‘Toleration as a Moral Ideal,” in Horton and Mendus, eds. Aspects of Toleration, at 16-35 and 158-69, respectively.
4. The justification of the value of toleration as a matter of fact turns out to be rather problematic: Indeed, it is not evident why permitting something that is subject to moral disapproval, for which one believes to have good reasons, open to public discussion (and not mere idiosyncratic preferences) should count as a virtue, beyond mere prudential motives. For an analysis of the paradoxical nature of toleration, conceived in this way, see Brenda Cohen, “An Ethical Paradox,” Mind 76 (1967): 250-59; and more recently, D. D. Raphael, “The Intolerable,” in Mendus, ed. Justifying Toleration, 137-53.
5. The harm principle is indeed too vague and elusive to settle the question of what should not be tolerated. For example, what counts as harm to others: Only actions or also speech? What are the potential sources of harm: Only other-regarding or also self-regarding behavior? Is legitimate only the claim of being harmed in one's internal preferences, or also in one's external preferences? Finally, are these distinctions acceptable? For a discussion on this point, see the following in Horton and Mendus, eds. Aspects of Toleration’, Susan Mendus, “Harm, Offence, Censorship,” 99-112; John Horton, “Toleration, Morality and Harm,” 136-57; T. Baldwin, ‘Toleration and the Right to Freedom,” 36-52. See also Joseph Raz, “Autonomy, Toleration and the Harm Principle,” in Mendus, ed. Justifying Toleration, 155-75.
6. It is well known that paternalism is a vexata quaestio for the liberals; the possibility of justifying paternalistic state intervention has been recently defended by Danny Scoccia, “Paternalism and Respect for Autonomy,” Ethics 100 (1990): 3318-334.
7. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 219-51.
8. In the current liberal thought, the best examples of this position are John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987): 1-25, and “The Priority of the Right and the Idea of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (1988): 251-76; Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215-40, and Equality and Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Roland Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Stuart Hampshire, ed. Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and Philosophical Foundations for Liberal Tolerance (mimeo, Napoli 1988).
9. The argument for limiting the political domain can be found in John Rawls, ‘The Domain of the Political and the Overlapping Consensus,” in New York Law Review 64 (1989): 233-55.
10. This argument is classically worked out in John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by Mario Montuori (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963).
11. This point is clearly stated in all classical theory of toleration: John Milton, Aereopagitica, edited by J. W. Hales (Oxford, 1917); John Locke, A Letten and Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance: A l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calais, in Mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 563-650. In a somewhat different style, this point is underlined by Kristie M. McClure, “Difference, Diversity and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 361-91, in her analysis of Locke's political discourse, at 378.
12. On the neutrality controversy, see Gerald Dworkin, “Non Neutral Principles,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 491-506; Bruce Ackerman, “What Is Neutral about Neutrality?” Ethics 93 (1983): 372-90; Patrick Neal, “A Liberal Theory of the Good?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987): 567-81; Robert Goodin and Andrew Reeve, eds. Liberal Neutrality (London: Routledge, 1989); Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), and “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 3-46; Peter De Marneffe, “Liberalism, Liberty and Neutrality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1990): 107-77; Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics 99 (1989): 883-905; and R. B. Douglass, G. R. Mara, and H. S. Richardson, eds. Liberalism and the Good (London: Routledge, 1990).
13. For the communitarian critique to liberalism, see Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Philosophical Papers 1) and Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Philosophical Papers 2) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Alisdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1988). Even some liberals agree with that point: For example, see Larry Alexander and Maimon Schwarzschild, “liberalism, Neutrality and Equality of Welfare vs. Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 85-110; and Patrick Neal, “A Liberal Theory of Public Good.”
14. This nonconspirative view of the liberal lack of sensitivity for differences is implicitly recognized even by Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) 156-57.
15. A point clearly stated by Henry S. Richardson, in “The Problem of Liberalism and the Good” in Liberalism and the Good, quoted, 1-28, at 8.
16. Going to the origin of the liberal theory of toleration, it is to be noted how Locke underlined the character of voluntary association of Churches: “I say it [the church] is a free and voluntary society. Nobody is born a member of any church” (A Letter, 23).
17. I have argued this point at some length in La questione della tolleranza, Politeia, Working Papers (Milano: Bibliotechne, 1990).
18. This problem is particularly present in Kent Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
19. Such a position is strongly endorsed by Mario G. Losano, “Contro la società multietnica,” Micromega, Die. 1991: 7-16, who contrasts the ideal of the secular state with the ideal of toleration, meaning that toleration is out of place in the public domain of the secular state. What is odd in his position, widely shared in Europe by leftist liberals, is that the state, especially in Italy, has never been completely secularized from the Catholic religion.
20. The doctrine on “indifferentia” was part of the original building of the toleration ideal. It has to do with the tracing of the divide between the state and the church; although it was affirmed that political power was independent from spiritual invasion in worldly matters, toleration was originally limited to the protection of creeds and faith and not extended to religious ceremonies and rituals. Those were proclaimed to be a matter of “indifference” to faith and salvation and therefore subjected to the political authority. This position was endorsed by Locke in his first writings on toleration, and later rejected in the Letter. See John Locke, Works, vol. 6 (London, 1823; reprinted by Scientia Verlag, 1963). It is interesting to note that a similar argument is made by the Muslims who want to accommodate Western tradition; they make a distinction in the Quran between principles concerning faith and matters of discipline indifferent to the faith; the latter can be given up with no consequence for the believer. See The New York Times, January 1992.
21. At this point, another question arises: Is it actually true that in the French public schools all religious symbols are banned? Is it not the case that certain religious symbols enjoy privileged status? Apparently, wearing a necklace with the cross has never created a similar problem: It is not a matter of formal acceptance or prohibition, but it is a matter of course. This fact might suggest that, as the critics of liberalism have remarked, neutrality is not so neutral after all, and the secular state is not so thoroughly secularized. In that sense, although French officials formally applied the liberal model of toleration, a flavor of discrimination could nevertheless be detected in their behavior. Of course, that might have been the case; whether or not, I do not think that the subjective attitude of the officials involved is relevant here in order to understand the general debate that the “chador case” has provoked.
22. This argument was suggested to me by Michael Walzer.
23. Having clarified that headscarves and not chador were the case, I nevertheless use the term chador not only because that is the way in which the case has been discussed publicly everywhere, in France as everywhere else, but also because “chador” is a salient symbol of the kind of attitude of the Muslim girls in the public school.
24. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert P. Wolf, R. Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon 1965).
25. Mario G. Losano, quoted, at 10.1 have no actual information on whether the girls were granted the exemption from physical education and biology; the letter of the sentence seems to exclude this. It seems to grant tolerance even to a proper chador but to reinforce the general rules about teaching.
26. J.G. A. Pocock maintains that the history of religious freedom between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century is a two-step process: The first step consists in the division of State from Church and assertion of the political independence from spiritual invasion, and the second step consists in the redefinition of religious experience as holding opinions. In this redescription, the revolutionary spiritualism of the sect is transformed in the radical liberty of the private conscience. See “Religious Freedom and the Desacralization of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, edited by M. D. Peterson and R. C. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43-73, at 60-61.
27. Along these lines, Jay A. Singler reinterprets the emergence of toleration out of the religious wars. See Singler, Minority Rights: A Comparative Analysis (London: Grenwood, 1983). See also J. P. Day, Liberty and Justice (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Larry Gostin, ed. Civil Liberties in Conflict (London: Routledge, 1988).
28. The reason is well explained in Pocock's article, quoted above.
29. Among the many possible examples, see Iris Young, quoted.
30. The “difference versus equality” debate has been developed especially by feminist thought. See, for instance, M. Thorton, “Sex Equality Is Not Enough for Feminism,” in C. Pateman and E. Gross, eds. Feminist Challanges (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Joan