Toleration, Choice and Liberty

Abstract

DR KING AND PROFESSOR CRICK ARE BOTH MAINLY CONCERNED TO discuss the concept of tolerance as the deliberate acceptance of what is disapproved. They wish to reserve the use of the word ‘toleration’ for a variation upon this general idea, but their proposals are not quite the same. Dr King wants to use ‘toleration’ as ‘a label for those ideas, doctrines, ideologies or movements’ which have opposed specific types of intolerance. The dictionary label for this is ‘tolerationism’. Toleration is what the ideas, doctrines, etc. advocate; it is not a label for the ideas and doctrines themselves. Professor Crick, at the beginning of his paper, says that he too will use the word ‘toleration’ for ‘theories or doctrines’ which advocate a form of tolerance. But his actual usage later on suggests that he did not intend the word to mean the theories or doctrines; rather that he proposed to say a doctrine was a doctrine of toleration if it advocated a certain kind of tolerance. His distinction between ‘tolerance’ and ‘toleration’ is intended to restrict ‘toleration’ to tolerance in general, tolerance of wide classes of action, and not to use it for tolerance of one specific type, e.g. tolerance of religious worship (which is how it is in fact used in the Act of Toleration and in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration).