Toleration and groups
| Author | Peter Balint |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116661112 |
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(3) 375–384
! The Author(s) 2016
Toleration and groups
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116661112
Peter Balint
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
University of New South Wales, Australia
Gideon Calder, Magali Bessone and Federico Zuolo (eds), How Groups
Matter: Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies. Routledge: New York: Oxford,
2014, 241 pp.
The fact of groups seems an essential part of politics. We find others with similar
interests or identities and work, with varying degrees of coordination, in concert
with each other; or alternatively, we see a characteristic in others – an interest,
need, set of beliefs or other identifying feature – which allows us to demarcate them
as a group and treat them accordingly. So as much as Rousseau may have abhorred
factions, they seem a virtually inescapable part of politics. The necessity of toler-
ation also seems an inescapable part of politics: we do not all agree with each other,
want different things, and have a multitude of varying power relations. So, while
groups seem empirically unavoidable, toleration seems normatively essential.
Politics without toleration involves various agents trying to enforce their views
and behaviours on those who are different to themselves. Of course, we can imagine
a world without politically meaningful groups or without toleration, but this would
be a dystopia of enforced sameness and conformity.
So from the point of view of political theory, and particularly the now dominant
liberal political theory, toleration and groups should just be part of the landscape.
Yet, as How Groups Matter: Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies dem-
onstrates, our understanding of them is far from complete. Questions about toler-
ation remain unanswered. For example, how can we make sense of political
toleration? How is political toleration related to the moral virtue of tolerance?
And this is before we even start asking about the limits of any such toleration.
So too with questions about groups. For example, do groups have moral agency?
Can groups have intentions? How can an individualist ideology like liberalism
make sense of groups? Finally, particularly when these questions are brought
together, the relationship between the toleration and groups is far from clear.
For example, can groups be either the subjects or objects of toleration? Can any
rights or agency groups have always be reduced to their individual members? And
if groups or their practices are to be tolerated, who counts as a member? While
giving different answers to these questions – and not all answering the same set of
Corresponding author:
Peter Balint, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Northcott Drive, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia.
Email: p.balint@unsw.edu.au
376
European Journal of Political Theory 17(3)
questions – the chapters of How Groups Matter provide a rich and useful discussion
of a complex and important set of issues for political theory.
Toleration
Toleration can be and has been understood in a variety of ways. In philosophical
circles, the currently dominant view involves some form of objection, the power to
negatively act on that objection and intentionally not doing so. While these three
conditions provide a broad description, they are filled out in many different ways.
One prominent schism is in the degree of moralisation required. Some treat toler-
ation as a virtue and require both the reasons for objecting and the reasons for
intentionally withholding power to be of the morally right kind. On these views, an
objection cannot simply be a prejudice or aesthetic distaste, and the reasons for
non-hindrance must not be simply pragmatic or to gain some advantage (for
example Nicholson 1985 and Habermas 2004).1 Some only moralise this second
set of reasons for non-hindrance, allowing any reasons for the initial objection
(most prominently Cohen 2004).2 And finally, some treat toleration as simply
descriptive of relationships between agents, and do not morally prescribe the rea-
sons agents may have for either objection or for non-hindrance (see Laegaard 2013
and Balint 2014, 2017).3
Part of this disagreement comes from focussing on different contexts and partly
from focusing on toleration as a practice, attitude or virtue. Difficulties arise when
one context or understanding is applied to another. Most prominently, and most
relevantly for this discussion, is the application of moralised and virtue-driven
understandings to the political realm. Using a moralised virtue understanding in
the political realm does produce a number of paradoxes of philosophical interest
(see Horton 1994 and Forst 2013).4 But does it have any practical applicability to
the sharp, and often painful, problems of toleration that occur in contemporary
political contexts? As I argue elsewhere, political toleration is quite different from
the moral virtue of tolerance, and it should not be surprising that the two do not fit
neatly together (Balint 2017). First, the descriptive understanding maps much
better onto our ordinary usage of the term, and is more useful in countering the
harm of unjustified intolerance. That is, we commonly talk about toleration in
ways that are neither fully nor partially moralised; for example, racial toleration
between citizens, or a state’s toleration of human rights abuses for prudential rea-
sons such as trade. And moreover, if in the political realm our interest is in stop-
ping unjustified acts of intolerance and the real impediment they are to people’s
freedom, then at least in the horizontal inter-citizen realm, it seems a minimal
account of toleration will work best. That is, what ultimately matters is that
people are not unjustifiably intolerant by, for example, not renting their house to
those of another race or religion, rather than if they follow the morally correct –
and it must be said, often extremely challenging – reasoning.
Second, in cases of political toleration, the objection condition may not always
be present. When we talk about a tolerant state or society, for example, we are
talking about one where the power to negatively interfere is withheld, but there is
Balint
377
usually no assumption of objection. That is, political toleration in this general sense
only requires power and non-hindrance. It is this sense that is implied when we
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