Tolerance and Liberal Justice (original) (raw)
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The Scope of Tolerance and Its Moral Reasoning
2004
This essay aims to consider the scope of tolerance and its moral reasoning. I first discuss the reluctance of prominent philosophers to prescribe boundaries to liberty and tolerance. I then focus attention on Rawls’ discussion on tolerance, which I find quite disappointing, yet argue that his line of reasoning on the question of tolerating the intolerant contributed to the very fashionable consequentialist approach. After criticizing the consequentialist reasoning I introduce an alternative approach: the principled reasoning. I explain that much of the liberal reasoning is inspired by the 1 . Raphael Cohen-Almagor, D.Phil. (Oxon) heads the Center for Democratic Studies, University of Haifa, Israel. He is also Chairperson of Library and Information Studies, and Assoc. Prof. at the Dept. of Communication. In 1999-2000 he was awarded the FulbrightYitzhak Rabin Award and was a Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law and Department of Communication. In 2003-2004 he is a visiting fellow ...
Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition
Polity, 1997
Page 1. Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition* Andrew R. Murphy University of Wisconsin-Madison The tendency to use tolerance and toleration as roughly interchangable terms has encouraged misunderstanding ...
Journal of Value Inquiry, 1999
To be liberal in attitude and action is, among other things, to hold in high regard the personal virtue of tolerance. In the political sphere, liberals manifest this virtue in their concern that the state be as neutral as possible toward different ways of life and conceptions of the good. What reasons might a liberal have for being tolerant and advocating state neutrality? How good or strong are the reasons? There are seven reasons that might appeal to people as good practical reasons for being tolerant. Three of them turn out on inspection to be extremely weak, however, if even reasons at all. Three others are, in different ways, strong, though none of them is a practical reason that only liberals will find appealing. Only one of the seven is strong and essentially liberal in tenor. According to this reason, tolerance of others, including those who live ways of life we judge to be vile, is a necessary mark of respect for the autonomy of rational agents. There is no compelling argument why an agent must respect the autonomy of rational agents. Whether we are moved practically by respect for someone else's autonomy will depend on our system of values and other aspects of our personality. Respect for the autonomy of rational agents is certainly a deep part of liberalism, which itself is a comprehensive conception of the good; but, like all such conceptions, liberalism does not admit of non-circular justification. This means that, contrary to the universalistic aspirations of traditional liberalism, tolerance is not a virtue everyone need have a sound practical reason to cultivate in themselves, or at least the same practical reason; some people might even have excellent reason to be generally intolerant in attitude and action. Nonetheless, those of us who are liberals and respect the autonomy of rational agents are obliged to cultivate the virtue of tolerance. We will take up two tasks. The first is to evaluate each of the seven practical reasons for being tolerant, and, moreover, specifically to evaluate them from a liberal point of view. The second is to explain why it is important, at least for liberals, to cultivate tolerance for the right practical reason: in virtue of its connection to respect for autonomy. Failing to value tolerance for this particular practical reason can lead to one or both of two consequences. The exercise of tolerance can cause us to become indifferent to our own central values and goals,
Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance-Introduction
Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance , 2000
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE In Memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin TABLE OF CONTENTS Raphael Cohen-Almagor Introduction Mrs. Lea Rabin The Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin Frederick Schauer The Cost of Communicative Tolerance David Feldman Protest and Tolerance: Legal Values and the Control of Public-Order Policing Owen Fiss Freedom of Speech and Political Violence Raphael Cohen-Almagor Boundaries of Freedom of Expression Before and After Prime Minister Rabin’s Assassination Harvey Chisick The Dual Threat to Modern Citizenship: Liberal Indifference and Non-consensual Violence Sam Lehman-Wilzig The Paradox of Israeli Civil Disobedience and Political Revolt in Light of the Jewish Tradition L. W. Sumner Should Hate Speech be Free Speech? John Stuart Mill and the Limits of Tolerance Irwin Cotler Holocaust Denial, Equality and Harm: Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance in a Liberal Democracy Richard Moon The Regulation of Racist Expression Joseph Eliot Magnet Freedom of the Press and Terrorism David E. Boeyink Reporting on Political Extremists in the United States: The Unabomber, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Militias Edmund B. Lambeth Pragmatic Liberalism and the Press in Violent Times David Goldberg Protecting Wider Purposes: Hate Speech, Communication, and the International Community J. Michael Jaffe Riding the Electronic Tiger: Censorship in Global, Distributed Networks Notes on Contributors Index
Acts of Tolerance: a political and descriptive account (European Journal of Political Theory, 2014)
European Journal of Political Theory, 2014
Almost all philosophical understandings of tolerance as forbearance require that the reasons for objection and/or the reasons for withholding the power to negatively interfere must be of the morally right kind. In this paper, I instead put forward a descriptive account of an act of tolerance, and argue that in the political context, at least, it has several important advantages over the standard more moralised accounts. These advantages include that it better addresses instances of intolerance and that it is able to makes sense of state acts of tolerance.
Tolerance, the Constitution, and the Limits of an Open Society
When Bob Paquette asked me the other day for a title for my remarks this evening, I told him I'm using the title of the colloquium since it nicely captures not only our readings but what I'd like to say in a general way about the issues we'll be discussing over the next couple of days. At least since Locke, tolerance has been thought an important public or political virtue-indeed, a political necessity, given the brutal history of religious intolerance that Robert Weissberg sets forth early in our colloquium readings. And tolerance is also a useful private or personal virtue, although that's a more complex issue, as Weissberg suggests. But as a political virtue, tolerance is central to the American vision, rooted as we are in the Lockean tradition. It's incorporated in our basic law, the Constitution, or so I'll argue, even if its incorporation in our statutory and case law has been uneven, to say nothing of its incorporation in our practice. So there's t...
Toleration and the Challenges of Liberalism, 2020
Political liberty is at the centre of liberal conceptions of toleration. Liberal political philosophers disagree about the limits of toleration, whether equality is central to liberal toleration, and the toleration of illiberal religious and cultural practices, among other topics. Some non-liberal states adopt a model of toleration, despite significant limitations on liberty. Moreover, some recent work in comparative philosophy emphasizes pluralism across traditions of political morality. This chapter will consider a variety of positions on liberal toleration as well as the challenge to liberal toleration posed by ethical pluralism.