Essays on Toleration by Peter Jones

Author:Peter Jones [Jones, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy
ISBN: 9781785522635
Google: 2ClGtAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 44060384
Publisher: ECPR Press
Published: 2018-01-15T08:36:52+00:00

Chapter 7

Toleration, Recognition, and Identity*

Toleration has a long history both as personal virtue and as a political ideal. But is it an ideal that has now run its course? Toleration is associated with disapproval: we tolerate only that to which we object. That negativity seems at odds with the mood of our times. The prevailing spirit, at least amongst the intelligentsia of the Western world, is one that views human diversity positively as something we should embrace and celebrate. Rather than regarding the differences that human beings exhibit as tiresome inconveniences that we should grudgingly accommodate, we should recognize the positive value of human diversity and the many ways in which it enriches our lives.

It is not only the negativity of toleration that suggests that its time may have passed. The way in which the make-up of human diversity is now conceived calls into question the appropriateness of toleration. The traditional subject matter of toleration is beliefs and values and the practices to which they give rise. But nowadays, the differences that human beings present are more commonly construed as differences in identity and culture. Indeed, the very word ‘difference’ has come to be associated with one particular form of difference: differences of identity. Whether toleration retains its relevance and value once we conceive the world as characterized by different identities rather than different beliefs and values is moot.

The demand that is most commonly associated with differences in identity is a demand for recognition rather than for toleration. ‘Being recognized’ seems to imply a form of positive endorsement that goes beyond being merely tolerated and that is altogether more consonant with cherishing and celebrating diversity. Yet, in contemporary circumstances, demands for recognition are also not without difficulty. In so far as the members of a society possess different and conflicting beliefs and values, and in so far as those conflicting beliefs and values are caught up with differences in identity, the endorsement of identities implied by ‘recognition’ may not be easily secured. If people possess different and conflicting conceptions of what is right or good or commendable or acceptable that relate to the different identities they confront, those different and conflicting conceptions would seem, prima facie, to present obstacles to the mutual recognition for which theorists of identity so frequently call. They also signal that toleration is a far from redundant ideal. It may be therefore that, rather than treating toleration and recognition as alternatives, we need to find some way of bringing them together so that people can simultaneously tolerate and recognize. In this chapter I investigate whether it is possible to combine toleration with recognition and, if it is, what sort of recognition is possible in circumstances of toleration. I also examine whether the idea of toleration retains its appropriateness and appeal if it is translated from its traditional concern with beliefs, values, and practices to a world in which social diversity is configured as a diversity of identities.

I investigate these issues by examining an argument recently developed by Anna Elisabetta Galeotti.

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