Abstract
This Essay explores the possibility that morally ambivalent practices (practices that are neither morally abhorrent nor morally indifferent) can be protected as rights to do wrong. The first section of the paper establishes the conceptual coherence of the notion of legal rights to do legal wrong. Legal Toleration, it is argued, has a bifurcated structure. Different sanctions fall on different agents, such that some agents are exempted from general legal prohibitions, yet subjected to expressive official sanctions. The second section of the Essay explores the normative justifiability of deploying Legal Toleration to exempt morally ambivalent practices from general legal prohibitions. It considers three possible justifications for Legal Toleration: Integrity, Uncertainty and Disagreement. Each relies on a distinctive account of what it means for a practice to be morally ambivalent. After showing the limits of the Integrity and the Uncertainty accounts, the Essay discusses in greater depth the potential and pitfalls of a defence of Legal Toleration grounded in Disagreement. On that view, morally ambivalent actions are liable to be exempted from general laws because they express liberal disagreement about justice. The logic of political liberalism is that, because democratic proceduralism dissolves moral ambivalence about the contested practices, there is no scenario in which citizens retain a right to do wrong. The defensibility of Legal Toleration ultimately hinges on the plausibility of compromises about justice within political liberal theories of public justification.
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