first a few (hopefully) clarificatory words about liberal toleration,
mostly in response to John Browning's questions.
John Browning asks whether a liberal is someone who 'campaigns door to
door to try to get other people to campaign door to door for people's right
to disagree with them [the liberal]'.
The liberal does think that people have the right to disagree about various
basic questions about the nature of the good life, and he/she will
certainly campaign door to door to get others to acknowledge that right.
Typically, liberals also believe in tolerating the intolerant to the extent
of allowing intolerant groups and individuals the right to express their
views (as distinct from acting on the views they may express). In this
sense, the liberal will even stand up for the right of individuals to
disagree with him/her on the very desirability of toleration itself.
It is true, nevertheless, that liberal toleration is inherently self-limiting.
Concretely, toleration consists in granting and respecting equal liberty
for individuals of varying philosophical and religious persuasions. As a
liberal citizen, I am obliged to treat this principle of equal liberty as a
'side-constraint' on the pursuit of my own religious or related beliefs. I
can claim my own liberty but, reciprocally, I am obliged to respect that of
others. If an individual or group violates this side-constraint, e.g., by
aggressing against members of a different religion, then they will have
violated a fundamental civic obligation and the liberal state should not be
tolerant of that. It should try to prevent and/or punish it.
In doing so, the liberal state does not contradict itself. There is no
contradition here because liberalism is not committed to some notion of
'tolerance per se' or 'absolute toleration' (an idea that has a more
Foucauldian, post-modernist or nihilist quality about it). Liberal
toleration consists, centrally, in the reciprocal acknowledgement of equal
freedom between citizens. Thus, when a liberal state sanctions someone who
violates this principle, it upholds and enforces liberal toleration and
does not contradict it.
This not to deny that there is a range of really 'hard cases' (which
professional political philosophers spend much of their classes and careers
discussing). These tend to boil down to the question, 'To what extent
should a liberal state tolerate 'oppressive' practices performed within
traditional religious (and similar) groups?' I won't try to answer this
question here as my main aim is just to show that liberal toleration (a) is
self-limiting and (b) is not self-contradictory (because self-limiting).
I hope this helps.....
On Steve Teles' points:
(1) Civic Liberalism, as I defined it in my last note, is indeed the
position William Galston argues for in LIBERAL PURPOSES, though one can
accept the basic idea of Civic Liberalism without accepting Galston's
policy prescriptions as regards the desirability of discouraging single
parent families, etc., or his claim that Rawlsian liberalism is essentially
'unCivic' in kind (an error that I think is repeated in Michael Sandel's
recent work but which is clearly refuted by Rawls himself in POLITICAL
LIBERALISM, pp.190-195).
(2) I heartily agree that liberalism needs a theory of character and that
liberal states should seek to promote a certain kind of liberal character
centered on the liberal virtues. However, I would want to integrate the
theory of liberal character into a theory of justice. Philosophically,
there has to be such integration because it is the underlying theory of
justice that enables us to specify what the liberal virtues are. And
politically, I am very wary of movements which stress character issues in
abstraction from issues of justice (as I think US 'communitarians' tend to
do). 'Politics of character - politics of justice = punishing the poor.'
Best wishes,
Stuart White
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