The virtues of toleration

These departures from the old-fashioned ideal of toleration are all too likely to breed more old-fashioned intolerance. The case for toleration appeals in part to the fact that our society contains a diversity of strong and incompatible moral views. Consider the case of homosexuality. There are those, such as some traditional Christian, Jewish, and Moslem believers, who hold that homosexuality is immoral per se; others who regard it merely as a preference, that by itself raises no moral issue of any kind; and yet others who regard it as a form of cultural identity, with its own lifestyle and literature. These are deep differences among us, since they reflect not only divergent judgments on moral questions but also different views as to what is the subject matter and character of morality itself. An attempt to give legal force to any one of these views, in circumstances of deep pluralism of the sort we have now, is likely to fragment us further, and to evoke more intolerance among us. A policy of toleration, in which homosexuals have the same personal and civil liberties as heterosexuals and in which neither category bears burdens the other does not, seems the policy most likely to issue in a peaceful modus vivendi.

What a policy of toleration would not mandate is the wholesale reconstruction of institutional arrangements such that homosexuals acquired collective rights or were in every context treated precisely as heterosexuals. As matters stand, there is a single form of marriage entrenched in law in the U.S. and Britain. Complete neutrality between heterosexuality and homosexuality would entail the legal recognition of homosexual marriage, just as complete neutrality between Christian and Moslem marriage would entail legal recognition of polygamous marriage. If we go this route, we are not far from the radical libertarian reductio ad absurdum--the abolition of marriage itself and its replacement by whatever contracts people choose to enter into.

Apartheid in Reverse

IT IS in the area of multiculturalism that a policy of toleration is most needed, and ideas of radical equality and positive discrimination most unfortunate. We have already noted one disadvantage of policies of affirmative action--that they are applied on the basis of group membership and so entail the collectivization of (at least some) rights. Policies which result in the creation of group rights are inevitably infected with arbitrariness and consequent inequity, since the groups selected for privileging are arbitrary, as is the determination of who belongs to which group. The nemesis of such policies--not far off in the United States--is a sort of reverse apartheid, in which people's opportunities are decided by the morally arbitrary fact of ethnic origin rather than by their deserts or needs.

There is a deeper objection to policies of multiculturalism that issue in the creation of group rights. This is that a stable liberal civil society cannot be radically multicultural but depends for its successful renewal across the generations on an undergirding common culture. This culture need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behavior, and, in our times, it typically expresses a shared sense of nationality. Where multiculturalism and toleration diverge is in the recognition within the ideal of toleration that stable liberty requires more than subscription to legal or constitutional rules--it requires commonality in moral outlook, across a decent range of issues, as well. We can live together in deep disagreement about abortion, for example, but not if we also disagree about the propriety of using force on our opponents.