Some Remarks on the Concept of Toleration

Abstract

The paper contains a conceptual analysis of “act of toleration” and the property of “being tolerant”. Being tolerant is understood as a dispositional property of persons manifested in what the author calls the “circumstances of toleration”. The main circumstances distinguished are: a tendency to prohibit a certain behaviour and the competence to determine the deontic status of the behaviour in question. An act of toleration, then, consists in not prohibiting (or cancelling the prohibition of) that behaviour. It is argued that this requires the existence of two different normative systems, the “basic system”, and the “justifying system”. Acts of toleration must be based on reasons coming from the latter. This insight enables one to establish a difference between reasonable and unreasonable toleration, as well as between toleration and related concepts like indifference, acquiescence, etc. The analysis also introduces the distinction between “vertical” and “horizontal” toleration. Acceptance of this last category implies that toleration does not necessarily require hierarchical relationships between those who tolerate and those whose actions are tolerated.