Abstract
In the Introduction to Political Liberalism John Rawls explains how in that book he attempts to address a ‘serious problem’ in the account of just political principles in his A Theory of Justice. In the earlier work he advanced an idea of a well-ordered society which he subsequently came to think was unsatisfactory in that it seemed to require that all citizens should accept the two principles of justice on the basis of a comprehensive philosophical doctrine which could conflict with their own comprehensive moral, religious or philosophical beliefs. This gives rise to a serious problem because:
A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines, but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally. Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them, or some other reasonable doctrine, will ever be affirmed by all, or nearly all, citizens.1
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Notes
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. xvi.
It should be evident that the question as to what counts as a ‘reasonable’ conception of the good is crucial to Rawls’ later interpretation of his theory. Of course, some limit on the extent of pluralism is unavoidable since no theory could possibly accommodate any and every comprehensive doctrine within a single political order. However, exactly which doctrines are deemed reasonable, and on what basis is a contentious issue.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxi.
It is, therefore, not surprising that it was in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that toleration emerged too as a matter of fierce philosophical debate, to which the most distinguished contribution is John Locke’s Letter on Toleration, published in 1689. For the text of Locke’s Letter and a series of discussions of its historical context and continuing relevance, see John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.), John Locke: ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’ in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991).
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxv.
Ibid., p. 134.
Related discussions of this apparent paradox can be found in John Horton, ‘Three (Apparent) Paradoxes of Toleration’, Synthesis Philosophica 9 (1994), pp. 16–18 and ‘Toleration as a Virtue’, in David Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) pp. 34–8.
Another context in which this issue is especially pressing is education. For an interesting defence of a broadly similar position to that of Jones with respect to education, see P. Gardiner, ‘Propositional Attitudes in Multicultural Education, or Believing Others are Mistaken’, in John Horton and Peter Nicholson (eds.), Toleration: Philosophy and Practice (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992).
For a more optimistic view, see Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
For a different strategy for dealing with these issues, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Even some theorists sympathetic to Rawls’ contention that principles of justice should be determined without a reference to any particular conception of the good reject the claim that conceptions of the good can be removed altogether from politics. See for instance Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) pp. 144–5.
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Horton, J., Mendus, S. (1999). Toleration, Identity and Difference. In: Horton, J., Mendus, S. (eds) Toleration, Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983379_1
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