Abstract

Liberalism's fundamental principle, that citizens should be equally free, commits a liberal state to pursuing a policy of toleration. Chapter One argues that, while a stable liberal state is one which successfully implements such a policy, it cannot do so unless its citizenry possesses the virtue of tolerance. The "question of tolerance," then, is whether those putative citizens of a liberal state who live by non-liberal traditions can be tolerant without either being coerced into it or betraying their own traditions, and without liberalism collapsing into relativism. This project answers the question affirmatively. ;I begin with a critique of John Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus, which is the most prominent recent answer to the question of tolerance, and which Chapter Two exposits as a principled agreement, between enemies, on Rawls's "political conception of justice." Chapter Three shows the idea to be either incoherent according to Rawls's own theory of agreement, or indistinguishable from the sort of modus vivendi agreement that he seeks to avoid. Chapter Three argues that the political conception can neither create nor maintain tolerance in non-liberals, since it presupposes an answer to the question of tolerance, rather than giving one. Were these problems irremediable, the question of tolerance would be either a pseudo-problem or a genuine but unsolvable problem. My remedies start with Chapter Five's analysis of traditional belief, which Rawls makes the ultimate basis of agreement on the political conception. Taking all traditional belief to be propositional, he thus overlooks the non-propositional belief which motivates intolerance. In Chapter Six, I argue that, to prevent non-liberal non-propositional belief from motivating intolerance, citizens of a liberal state must accept the sceptical, but not relativistic "principle of epistemic modesty," which denies the possibility of making determinate knowledge-claims about the character of the good for humankind. This lessens citizens' certainty regarding traditional propositional beliefs about the good for humankind, and thus moderates the motivational power of the non-propositional belief linked to them. Thus, tolerance is created and maintained in non-liberal citizens, who nonetheless remain free to believe in their communal traditions.