Classical liberalism #2: How does toleration fit into a pluralistic society? | Chandran Kukathas

Classical liberalism #2: How does toleration fit into a pluralistic society?

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While pluralism is considered a condition, toleration is the response to it. To recognize and accept a diverse range of perspectives on ethical views is to exhibit tolerance.

Singapore Management University professor Chandran Kukathas points to toleration as a cornerstone of the classical liberal tradition. In fact, liberal thought arises from the reality that people disagree substantially on any number of things.

The principle of toleration offers guidance in understanding what makes a good society, as well as how that society upholds conditions of pluralism and diversity.

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CHANDRAN KUKATHAS:

Chandran Kukathas holds the Lee Kong Chian Chair of Political Science and is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. He was previously Chair of Political Theory and Head of the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (1989) and The Liberal Archipelago (2003). His next book, Immigration and Freedom, will be published by Princeton University Press.

Read Chandran Kukathas's latest book, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom

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TRANSCRIPT:

CHANDRAN KUKATHAS: I think of toleration as really a response to the fact of pluralism. So in that sense toleration is the normative principle whereas pluralism I think of as the condition of the world. I suppose 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, 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 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 we accept these differences. We think that we should try to work around them. At some point it's going to be difficult because we may have about some issues very, very strong views and may not be willing to tolerate or accept certain forms of diversity. But I think the aim of the person who is moved by the idea of toleration is to go as far as possible, to recognize that others may themselves think about our own views as somehow distasteful or repugnant or immoral.

Within the theory of liberalism what's dominated for sometime really, probably the last 50 or 60 years is the idea that justice is the most important value for trying to understand the good society and even for understanding the free society. But I think that 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 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 suggest that what you should do is try not to reconcile differences by coming to a mind about fundamental principles. By definition these were things that were 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 is what makes most sense. Now, one of the difficulties I think that came up straightaway though was that there's a question about what one should do when toleration threatens to break down. And one very prominent answer to this has been, and especially in modern liberal thinking has been what we do is we appeal to principles of justice to settle this question of 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...

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