Good Fences and Good Neighbors: John Locke's Positive Doctrine of Toleration

Abstract

Often critics who decry the poverty of neutrality as a regulative ideal in contemporary liberal regimes point to John Locke as an early apologist for a kind of toleration that discourages spiritedness in the public sphere. In this paper, I interpret Locke as a thinker who advanced both a right and a duty to toleration. This reconstruction of Locke's doctrine of toleration is salutary not only because he uses a state of nature argument to ground a moral right to toleration a right to care for one's own civil and religious ends, free from the magistrate's limited authority but also because he proffers a duty to tolerate others by cultivating a spirit of mutual assistance, liberality, charity, and conversation among citizens of the polity. Locke's educational writings show how this positive doctrine is inculcated through the cultivation of the social virtues, qualities of good character that are demonstrative of what Locke calls ‘a Good Life.’ This positive duty of toleration supplements certain defects of the contractarian argument (defects which liberal societies continue to try to ameliorate), since the fences that secure rights are shown to be necessary but not sufficient to foster the neighborliness that invigorates a good community.