Toleration and Neutrality: Incompatible Ideals?

Abstract

Toleration and neutrality have often featured as interchangeable terms in commentaries on liberal political morality.1 In this vein influential thinkers, such as John Rawls, speak of liberal neutrality as if it were an extension of the principle of toleration.2 In what follows I aim to show not only that these concepts are fundamentally different, but also that tolerant and neutralist principles are not even mutually supporting. The concepts clearly have many things in common, especially when we are talking about their relationship to political justification and action, and both appear to capture the aims of liberal political morality. In fact they seem to represent two aspects of one project, taking on different burdens in a moral division of labour: one a virtue of institutions and the other a virtue of citizens. However, the overlap is deceptive and misleading in terms of what liberals should consider themselves committed to. Separating them will clarify their values for liberal political morality. So, my second aim, after distinguishing the concepts, is to consider whether toleration is necessary in a neutralist society. I argue against this view. I then consider whether toleration might not be independently valuable, perhaps as a competitor, to neutrality, an approach which, I also argue, has decisive reasons against it.