I think of toleration as really a response to the the fact of pluralism so
in that sense toleration is the the normative principle whereas pluralism I
think of as the as the condition of the world I suppose just to be you know just
to complicate things a little bit one could think about pluralism as itself a
kind of principle so if one says one is a pluralist what one means is I think
one recognizes the diversity of ethical views out there and one's attitude
therefore is tolerance or toleration so in that sense pluralism sounds like
it's also an ethical position but the way I'm using it here I'm going to take
it that pluralism is the condition so toleration is the is the response to it
we accept that there is a plurality of perspectives on the world of ethical
views and so on and the attitude we take is that well we we accept these these
differences and we think that we should try to to work around them at some point
is going to be difficult because we may have about some issues very very strong
views and may not be willing to to tolerate or accept certain forms of
diversity but I think the aim of the the person who is moved by the the idea of
toleration is to is to go as far as possible to recognize that that others
may themselves think about our own views as somehow this stateful distasteful or
repugnant or immoral within the theory of liberalism what's dominated for some
time really probably the last 50 or 60 years is the idea that justice is the is
the most important value for trying to understand the good society and even for
understanding the free society but I think
the classical liberal tradition really is one that sees toleration as much more
important now it hasn't always been explicitly so but I think if one looks
at the at the origins of liberal thinking at least in the modern world
then toleration becomes much more important and the reason for this is
that I think liberal thinking really arises out of a reflection on the fact
that people disagree substantially about things they have different ways of life
especially I think in Europe they had different religious convictions although
different religious convictions within Christian traditions and one of the
theories that came out of this was a theory of how to deal with these
differences and the solution was to develop norms of toleration norms that
suggested that what you should do is try not to reconcile differences by coming
to a mind about fundamental principle since by definition these were things
that people disagreed about the solution was to try to find a way of not so much
reconciling as accommodating differences so in principle the idea of toleration
really is what makes most sense now one of the difficulties I think that came up
straight away though was that there's a question but what one should do when
toleration threatens to break down and one very prominent answer to this has
been and especially in in modern liberal thinking has been well what we do is we
appeal to principles of justice to settle this question and what are the
limits of toleration but the problem here is that if justice is itself
something that we can disagree about then to appeal to justice would really
just beg the question because we'd be appealing to something that we say is
the correct view when we've started off with the problem that we don't agree but
what the what the correct view is so I think the retreat to justice as the
solution to establishing the limits of toleration is extremely problematic and
that's why I think for classical liberals the principle of
toleration is really much more important and should have the status of a
free-standing principle not one that has somehow subordinate two considerations
of justice I think the purpose of the principle of toleration is to offer us a
little bit of guidance in thinking about how one understands a good society under
conditions of pluralism or diversity it doesn't go too much further in the sense
that it doesn't help us for example settle on how to establish determinately
you know what the law should be or how we should settle particular questions I
think what it really does is suggest that the way to go is to think about how
one can reach some kind of understanding by you know accommodating differences
and diversity one can think about toleration in that sense in in a number
of different ways one can think of it in a very minimal way we can think about
being tolerant in the sense of just being willing to put up with something
or one can think about toleration as something a bit more expansive something
that is a virtue in the sense that you know one not only accepts reluctantly
but actually accepts with a kind of open spirit to think okay you know I will not
only not you know exercise violence to force my views upon you but I might
actually also go a little bit further to try to understand your point of view I
think that's the more capacious kind of of toleration so this is quite a there's
quite a wide range of attitudes that you could take if you you know if you
accepted the principle of toleration but just saying I accept the principle of
toleration wouldn't be enough to actually say exactly where you stood on
a whole range of things