Deliberative toleration

Political Theory

Volumn 31, Issue 6, 2003, Pages 757-779

  Bohman, James ^a  

^a SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Deliberative democracy; Liberalism; Public reason; Toleration

Indexed keywords

EID: 0242719845     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703252379     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Amy Gutmann, "Introduction," in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 22ff. For a similar distinction, see Monique Deveaux, Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), chap. 3.
2. Amy Gutmann, "Introduction," in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 22ff. For a similar distinction, see Monique Deveaux, Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), chap. 3.
3. On the concept of a regime of toleration, see Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 12.
4. John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," in Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 601.
5. John Rawls, "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," in Collected Papers, 424.
6. John Rawls, "Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 574.
7. Rawls, Ibid., 576.
8. Rawls, Ibid., 144, also p. 152ff.
9. Jürgen Habermas, "Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason," Journal of Philosophy 3 (1995): 124. Habermas's criticisms of Rawls might be thought to push him toward an open view of deliberation similar to the one that I am defending here. Because he argues that a "liberal political culture" is an empirical precondition for democracy, however, his conception of toleration and the obligations of justification led him to a standard liberal conception of the limits of toleration.
10. On "the epistemic value of quantity," see David Estlund, "Political Quality," Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (2000): 144; his "epistemic difference principle" is formulated on p. 147. More input is valuable from the participants' perspective only if it increases the possibility of each perspective being heard. Increasing input could be democratically justified to the worst off only if it increases the number of perspectives in discussion. In order that the worst off (here the least effective in deliberation) may accept the epistemic difference principle, the relevant value is the diversity of perspectives rather than quantity.
11. See, for example, Jorge Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 31ff.
12. Onora O'Neill, "Practices of Toleration," in Democracy and the Mass Media, ed. J. Lichtenberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167.
13. On the variability of norms of publicity as related to their problem-solving capacity, see James Bohman, "Citizenship and Norms of Publicity: Wide Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies," Political Theory 27 (1999): 176-202.
14. Robert Audi has long identified public with secular reasons. See his initial article and subsequent ones thereafter, "The Separation of Church and State and the Obligations of Citizenship," Philosophy and Public Affairs (1989). For Rawls's criticisms of this view as well as his rejection of the use of the principle of reciprocity in Gutmann and Thompson, see "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 587ff.
15. Robert Audi has long identified public with secular reasons. See his initial article and subsequent ones thereafter, "The Separation of Church and State and the Obligations of Citizenship," Philosophy and Public Affairs (1989). For Rawls's criticisms of this view as well as his rejection of the use of the principle of reciprocity in Gutmann and Thompson, see "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 587ff.
16. Iris Young, Democracy and Inclusion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 3.
17. T. M. Scanlon, "The Difficulty of Toleration," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 231.
18. On a different way of making the distinction between reasons and perspectives, see Iris Young, "Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication," in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Young argues that the primary resource that such differences offer for democratic communication "is not a self-regarding identity or interest, but rather a perspective on the structures, relations, and events of a society" (pp. 393-94). This leads her to see perspectives as objectively determined by a group's place in the social structure.
19. John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 68. Dryzek argues that the simple claim that all forms of communication must be accommodated does not go far enough. Rather, all forms of communication must be tested for their coercive potential and their capacity to connect the particular to the general. I argue here that such testing makes sense as part of a democratic regime of deliberative toleration.
20. Barbara Herman, "Pluralism and Moral Judgment," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 61; on "positive tolerance" as distinguished from the repressive character of purely negative toleration, see Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1965); specifically, a positive or liberating conception has for Marcuse an epistemic conception, since "the telos of toleration is truth" (p. 90). Marcuse's criticism of liberal toleration stresses that toleration need not be skeptically motivated. For an epistemic criticism directed at Rawls's idea of "toleration extended to philosophy," see David Estlund, "The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth," Ethics 108 (1998): 252-75. Estlund's criticism also relies on a reflexive argument, to the effect that political liberalism must admit the truth of its own view. This argument is insufficiently reflexive, however, because it does not make clear that the necessity of admitting truth is apparent only from the participants' point of view.
21. Barbara Herman, "Pluralism and Moral Judgment," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 61; on "positive tolerance" as distinguished from the repressive character of purely negative toleration, see Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1965); specifically, a positive or liberating conception has for Marcuse an epistemic conception, since "the telos of toleration is truth" (p. 90). Marcuse's criticism of liberal toleration stresses that toleration need not be skeptically motivated. For an epistemic criticism directed at Rawls's idea of "toleration extended to philosophy," see David Estlund, "The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth," Ethics 108 (1998): 252-75. Estlund's criticism also relies on a reflexive argument, to the effect that political liberalism must admit the truth of its own view. This argument is insufficiently reflexive, however, because it does not make clear that the necessity of admitting truth is apparent only from the participants' point of view.
22. Barbara Herman, "Pluralism and Moral Judgment," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 61; on "positive tolerance" as distinguished from the repressive character of purely negative toleration, see Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1965); specifically, a positive or liberating conception has for Marcuse an epistemic conception, since "the telos of toleration is truth" (p. 90). Marcuse's criticism of liberal toleration stresses that toleration need not be skeptically motivated. For an epistemic criticism directed at Rawls's idea of "toleration extended to philosophy," see David Estlund, "The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth," Ethics 108 (1998): 252-75. Estlund's criticism also relies on a reflexive argument, to the effect that political liberalism must admit the truth of its own view. This argument is insufficiently reflexive, however, because it does not make clear that the necessity of admitting truth is apparent only from the participants' point of view.
23. Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," 95. The "liberating" feature of democracy is not mere or "pure" toleration, but "the chance it gave to social dissent" to change circumstances.
24. See Rawls's criticism of arguments for liberal neutrality based on autonomy as a moral doctrine; for Rawls, liberalism as a moral doctrine itself "fails to satisfy the criterion of reciprocity." See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xliv-xlv, also p. 77ff. Autonomy-based liberalisms include Kymlicka's arguments for the basis of toleration and Gutmann and Thompson's use of reciprocity discussed below.
25. Michael Walzer, On Toleration, 71.
26. Just as he criticizes Kymlicka's autonomy-based argument for toleration, Rawls criticizes Gutmann and Thompson's view of deliberative democracy for treating reciprocity as a substantive norm in the sense of a "comprehensive doctrine." See Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 578.
27. For a detailed account of the practices of accommodation and the specific background to Mozert, see Stephen Bates, Battleground (New York: Poseidon, 1993). By far the fullest treatment of this case and its implications for liberal democracy is to be found in Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially pt. 2.
28. For a detailed account of the practices of accommodation and the specific background to Mozert, see Stephen Bates, Battleground (New York: Poseidon, 1993). By far the fullest treatment of this case and its implications for liberal democracy is to be found in Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially pt. 2.
29. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 65.
30. While he ultimately wants to reject the parents' claims, Macedo shows that it is not because they are unreasonable or nonreciprocal in their goals. See Diversity and Distrust, 160.
31. Joshua Cohen, "Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy," in Democracy and Difference, ed. S. Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 101. Note that for Cohen this is a matter of freedom of expression, not a matter of entitlement to contribute to the common definition of a society. Freedom of expression permits religious reasons to be used in public discourse as first-person acts of testimony; this is a defense of toleration as based on rights to noninterference.
32. Erin Kelly and Lionel McPherson, "On Tolerating the Unreasonable," Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 38-55. However "strong" their conception of toleration, it leads Kelly and McPherson to the opposite conclusion from the one that I defend here: "Our position in favor of extending public justification to the unreasonable implies, however, that philosophical discussion in the public sphere should ideally be kept to a minimum" (p. 51). This is because they defend and extend a liberal notion of noninterference with clearly antideliberative consequences. Second, their argument in favor of extending justification to the unreasonable continues to hold that the norm of reasonableness is decisive in discussions of toleration. The proper conclusion is that since justification is owed to the reasonable and the unreasonable alike for exactly the same democratic reasons, judgments about reasonableness of the tolerated are simply irrelevant to the aims of toleration.
33. Views that endorse political egalitarianism as essential to deliberative democracy include Joshua Cohen, Thomas Christiano, Jack Knight and James Johnson, and others. See the essays in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); I have mentioned David Estlund's argument against political egalitarianism above. To the extent that his epistemic alternative is based on principles that can be reasonably rejected, it violates democratic principles and could be used to justify intolerance.
34. The parents initially accepted such an accommodation, but some school officials rejected it. See William Galston, "Diversity, Toleration and Deliberative Democracy: Religious Minorities and Public Schooling," in Deliberative Politics, ed. S. Macedo (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39-48. Galston defends "mere toleration," limited only by "the minimum necessary social unity." A deliberative theory does not defend such a minimum unity; social unity may, like civic virtue, exist to a greater or lesser degree without undermining the success of the deliberative regime of toleration.
35. On the related conception of "partial citizens," see Jeffery Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 87ff.
36. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 62.
37. Both these arguments in favor of liberal education and against the default mode of accommodation are found in Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, 165f. My argument for accommodation is based on democratic rather than cultural grounds. Accommodation is required if it can be shown that political egalitarianism or other democratic principles are violated without it. I am grateful to Alan Paten for pushing this objection to the presumption that accommodation is always correct in a pluralist democracy.
38. On the specific accommodations offered in general to fundamentalist parents in the district and in this particular case, see Bates, Battleground, 159. For a criticism of liberal and deliberative arguments against accommodation to religious groups, see Jeff Spinner-Halev, "Extending Diversity: Religion in Public and Private Education," in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. W. Kymlicka and W. Norman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68-95. Spinner-Halev makes central the practical and institutional argument that having fundamentalist parents withdraw their children from public schools serves the democratic goal of civic education less well than accommodation.
39. On the specific accommodations offered in general to fundamentalist parents in the district and in this particular case, see Bates, Battleground, 159. For a criticism of liberal and deliberative arguments against accommodation to religious groups, see Jeff Spinner-Halev, "Extending Diversity: Religion in Public and Private Education," in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. W. Kymlicka and W. Norman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68-95. Spinner-Halev makes central the practical and institutional argument that having fundamentalist parents withdraw their children from public schools serves the democratic goal of civic education less well than accommodation.
40. As Bates shows, competing diversity claims were central to the arguments of the lawyers for the parents; see Bates, Battleground, 267.
41. David A. J. Richards, "Toleration and the Struggle Against Prejudice," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 135.
42. On the impact of the fact of pluralism on the way "regulative principles constitute a community of moral judgment," see Barbara Herman, "Pluralism and Moral Judgment," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 69. Herman's Kantian account of moral community in terms of "engaged moral judgment" is quite similar to Habermas's conception of an inclusive communication community. Both are inadequate in the face of democratic dilemmas of deep conflict and must be supplemented by reflexive challenge to the deliberative framework.
43. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 339. For such a theory of toleration, see Rainer Forst, "Toleranz, Gerechtigkeit und Vernunft," in Toleranz, ed. R. Forst (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag, 2000), 118-43.
44. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 339. For such a theory of toleration, see Rainer Forst, "Toleranz, Gerechtigkeit und Vernunft," in Toleranz, ed. R. Forst (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag, 2000), 118-43.
45. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 140-41.
46. Frank Michelman, Brennan and the Supreme Court (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 59.
47. I am here arguing that Kymlicka's distinction between ethnic and immigrant minorities ought not apply to deliberative practices. See Will Kymlicka, "The Good, the Bad and the Intolerable: Minority Group Rights," Dissent 3 (1996); 29.
48. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
49. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 121.