Liberalism includes many views on many topics. I will confine my attention to the
liberal principle of tolerance: the coercive powers of the society are limited by a
commitment to the broadest toleration of rival religious and moral conceptions consistent
with the protection of crucial social interests such as preventing harm to others and
preserving institutions of law and government. The state is thus to be neutral in the
religious and moral wars that rage over the point of human life and the detailed ways of
life worthy of human beings; but, of course, the state must keep the peace between one
individual and another and between competing factions. This peace-keeping function
requires that the state intervene when one person (or group) interferes with another's
pursuit of happiness or salvation. In exercising this role, sometimes fine distinctions
will need to be made, and there is room for worry that in the guise of peace-keeping the
state will really work to promote a favored vision of the worthy way of life. Still, this
liberal principle tells us what to worry about in such controversies, though its
abstractness means that by itself it cannot deal with difficult issues. However, the
principle of tolerance does not even abstractly address questions about property rights
and the distribution of wealth, so here the liberal tradition includes opposing
approaches.
The principle of tolerance is, if not the only thing liberals share, at least a
touchstone of liberalism. Tolerance can be defended pragmatically, as a mode of living
together justified simply by its success.(1) Or it can be
given a basis in critical morality, in differing ways depending upon the particular
critical stance of the defender. Both autonomy-based approaches and welfare-based
approaches are found. I think that the approach of H.L.A. Hart is most helpful, for it
proceeds critically but without appealing to some one grand foundational theory. Hart
defends tolerance by placing the burden of moral argument on those who favor
coercion—since coercion, as both an infringement of autonomy and a source of misery,
is morally wrong unless there is a special justification. He then argues that in cases
such as private homosexual acts between consenting adults there is no plausible
justification in critical morality for coercion and its attendant misery, since there is
no one to be protected, and "the attribution of value to mere conforming behaviour,
in abstraction from both motive and consequences, belongs not to morality but to
taboo."(2)
This is itself an argument within critical morality about the kinds of consideration
morally justifying coercion. In addition to a utilitarian concern for minimizing misery, I
see Hart's argument as incorporating an extension into the private moral sphere of Locke's
arguments against religious coercion in A Letter Concerning Toleration: coercion cannot
create belief and unbelieving conformity is in itself of no value when only the worth of
one's own way of life is at issue. Liberal neutrality in controversies about the worthy
life is here justified by an argument that does not claim moral neutrality about the
justification of coercion.
So from this viewpoint, there is only misunderstanding in communitarian attacks on the
principle of tolerance as inconsistently based on moral commitments. The defense of
tolerance found in Locke, Mill, Hart, and the Rawls of A Theory of Justice is clearly
mounted within critical morality. Other communitarian criticisms of the liberal principle
of tolerance take many forms and depend upon a variety of appeals to differing conceptions
of community. I will deal only with what might be called the appeal to the sources of
reflection, as found in Michael J. Sandel(3) and (with
qualifications) in Charles Taylor.(4) This appeal asks us to
attend to the constitutive role of community in the very identity of the self, and to
accept that all moral reflection is grounded on a self partly constituted by commitments
to conceptions of the good communal in nature and origin. And so, the argument goes, there
is a deep confusion in the liberal account of tolerance, and the neutrality of the liberal
regime to competing conceptions of the worthy life must be specious.
I think this communitarian point about moral thought includes an important insight: our
practical reflection is indeed always situated, in Taylor's sense.(5)
I cannot get out of my skin, cannot think in complete abstraction from the social self
that I am. And I cannot think about actions and institutions conceived apart from the
language and world I share with others. As Michael J. Sandel urges, moral thought is
itself embedded in families, political communities, and groups: "these stories make a
moral difference, not only a psychological one. They situate us in the world, & give
our lives their moral particularity."(6)
Both my problems and my thought about them are equally situated. But I do not think
that this insight undermines the liberal principle that the state should be neutral toward
competing conceptions of the worthy life. The communitarian faces a dilemma: either
reflection is grounded in a strong community for which liberal neutrality is not a live
option, or reflection is grounded in community within the reach of liberal questions (even
if not yet a liberal community) and so not irrevocably committed to illiberal political
conceptions. The reflective self cannot at the same time be faced with the problems of
modernity and be so closed that liberality threatens disintegration. In our pluralist
community, the conceptions of the worthy life that are constitutive of the reflective self
are themselves thin enough (or the constituting is tentative enough) to allow for
acceptance of liberal neutrality in the polity without danger to the stability of the
reflective self.
There are commitments so deeply entrenched for us that philosophical reflection simply
will not abandon them, and some of these we consider enforceable—the commitment is
not merely to something as part of a worthy life, but also to providing all with a shared
world including these elements. These commitments are precisely the sort that establish
the limits of liberal tolerance: we cannot tolerate such things as violence, fraud, or
reckless endangerment. The requirements for social peace that the liberal state is charged
with enforcing are differently incorporated into the liberal self than other
commitments—we find in our reflection that there is both added stringency and a
greater claim of universality. There are other commitments that a majority within the
pluralist community share, and that are unlikely to be shaken during reflection, but that
we need not see as enforceable despite our continued allegiance: here one possible result
of reflection is tolerance where it may not have existed before. For instance, once
reflection led even people like Locke to deny toleration to atheists, yet now in the
cultures descending from Locke's community, reflection brings toleration, often without
abandoning theism.
If on reflection someone does not favor legal and social tolerance concerning some
commitment of this second sort, the reason will not be the constitutive role of the
commitment within the self—for the self is not giving up the commitment by endorsing
tolerance. Rather, the reflective self is likely to favor enforcement in the pursuit of
some goal such as protecting a favored moral environment—exactly the sort of ground
that leads to delicate line-drawing within a liberal regime, attempting to allow both
parties to the dispute some space within which to pursue happiness or salvation on its own
conception. This kind of refusal of toleration can be seen now in the case of pornography,
for instance. But for those in the larger pluralist culture, such issues can have nothing
to do with maintaining the self that forms the base for reflection.
This would, perhaps, not be true in our reflective context if we inhabited a strong
community, united by many strands of commitment to a finely detailed and thick conception
of the worthy life as a necessarily shared set of practices. Someone in the larger
pluralist society can consider pornography morally degrading and even include this as part
of his self-conception, but he need not have a commitment to living in a society in which
there is no pornography; if he does have this communitarian ideal, it would be bizarre for
it to be deeply embedded in his self-conception, since he has not been reared into such
expectations of living in a strong community sharing detailed practices.
It is, for instance, plausible that for the Amish and for Hasidic Jews the reflective
self is grounded on commitments to such a thick and detailed conception of a communally
shared life that liberal tolerance within the community is unthinkable. Here the
commitment would be, for instance, to a shared life in which there is no such thing as a
sexually suggestive image—and it is perhaps imaginable that such a value be literally
constitutive of the reflective self. This would fit with the Amish tendency to split into
ever smaller groups divided by what seem to outsiders insignificant details of social
practice. There are limits to possible reflection in every community, and some communities
might be incapable of liberalism, even in the modern age, because they are not of the
modern age. Their self-conceptions may be not only imbued with conceptions of the good
(like everybody's), but also imbued with conceptions of a rich communally shared way of
life, thick with detailed practices.
Despite their evident vitality and even prevalence, liberal forms of sociality are
rejected by communitarians, who seem to demand that we establish cohesive communities with
shared, detailed conceptions of the worthy life. Michael J. Sandel has argued that in
deciding whether there is a privacy right to consensual adult homosexual conduct, we must
address the substantive moral question of the value of homosexual intimacy.(7)
This seems to me like insisting that an adequate account of issues of religious freedom
must address the substantive question of the value of various quite different religious
(and non-religious) ways of life. (The similarity is meant only to hold within general
political theory—not within United States constitutional interpretation, where
religious freedom has a specific textual basis unlike any of the new "privacy"
freedoms.) Sandel proposes that the nation as a whole form a view of the moral value of
homosexual intimacy, rather than allowing various groups and individuals to form separate
views. This misconstrues the kind of unity possible in a pluralistic society—as
communitarians, with so vivid a sense of liberal society's normative minimalism, should be
the first to see.
The attempt to forge such a community-wide moral view would itself violate our
self-understanding. But although there is in a pluralist, liberal society no national
community in the strong sense, there are communities of various degrees of strength within
the nation. What role can these communities and their beliefs play in philosophical
reflection in the larger society?
Many of the strongest communities seek no role in the reflective life of the larger
society. The Amish, for instance, enter into discourse with the larger society only to
protect their autonomy, not to transform "the world." But various communities of
faith do assert a transformative rather than a merely self-protective role. Their ability
to address the larger society effectively is, however, limited by the points of contact
their shared thick conceptions have with the thinner conceptions shared more broadly. And
generally the larger the community the nearer it is to the thinness surrounding it.
There is still one more kind of community—the larger community itself, the
pluralist society, denied the dignity of the title "community" on some
definitions of that word. Apart from such technical gerrymandering, nothing forbids our
speaking of the entire pluralist society as a community.
For instance, Ronald Dworkin has urged that the sharing of a legal system leads to the
personification of the community expressing its principles in its law.(8)
And whatever its virtues or flaws, there is no misuse of language in this use of
"community". But the Dworkinian conception of community is constructivist:
community is merely used as the interpretive mask or persona enabling the interpreter to
insist on a deep coherence of principle in law comparable to personal integrity in the
individual. Dworkin's use of personification is like that of Socrates in Plato's Crito:
when the laws speak it is the philosopher who gives them voice. The community's principles
are thus not found by asking the members of the community, but rather by
theory-construction on the part of the interpreter, using the legal practices and texts as
the signs of the underlying theory. There is still perhaps a real appeal to community,
since the practices and texts will have been created collectively (or at least created by
a large number of people). So though the interpretation and theory construction are
individualist, the grist for the interpretive mill comes from many not one.
Besides this constructivist conception of what it is for the whole society to be a
community, there is a causal conception that all of us constitute a community by living
together. This is the notion of community that makes the most sense in the larger
pluralist society. We are all members of the same community to the extent that we inhabit
the same world of causes, physical and social. The mutual responsibilities of membership
in this wider community vary with the kinds of impact we have upon each other, and also
depend upon premises contested within the liberal tradition, such as the opposing views of
laissez faire liberals and welfare liberals. But the liberal tradition is united on the
principle of tolerance and on a an account of community that allows for political
neutrality in controversies about the worthy life. Though other conceptions of community
may be layered on top of it, the causal conception seems to be basic to a society of
tolerance.
On this conception, the only difference between the community of a city and the
community of a nation-state is one of extent. In times of disaster, such as floods or
hurricanes, the language of community is used in exactly this simple way. And the oddness
of speaking of the community of the pluralist nation-state may have no deeper root than
the fact that disasters and other causal processes tend to be more limited or more
extensive geographically than such political entities. Surely nothing very deep connects
the people of a pluralist modern city—except law and geography, and these connect
larger polities too. But then perhaps shared liability to suffering is something deep, and
natural disasters reveal a deep communal connectedness after all.
Why not then speak of the global community? Indeed—and an awareness of possible
global disaster is exactly what has made this way of speaking common. It is easier to
imagine a disaster (or a benefit) affecting all human beings than one affecting precisely
all members of a particular nation-state. The exception used to be war, for it did, before
the nuclear age, unite nations as such in the prospect of disaster; this may still be so
for limited wars. And war is a great sustainer of community feeling. The emotional roots
of this tribal unity in battle may go very deep into human nature.
Community through sharing a common fate will differ in scope depending upon all sorts
of causal factors. W.H. Auden saw that, in a world of global mutual dependency, the old
boundaries of communal feeling no longer make sense, but rather than seeing everybody as a
brother (or sister) we are tempted "to regard everybody else on earth not even as an
enemy, but as a faceless algebraical cipher." A return to "tribal
loyalties" is simply impossible for us, he claims.(9) I
hope that this really is impossible, given the ethnic strife and hatred now destroying the
lives of so many.
Some philosophical communitarians do sound as if they propose a return to tribal
loyalties—or the creation of a new tribe in place of the deracinated pluralist
society. Perhaps they so dread the estrangement leading to seeing others as ciphers that
they flee in thought toward a communal solidarity impossible in modern pluralist cultures;
if so, their efforts can only be counter-productive, encouraging disengagement from those
not sharing one's conception of the worthy life. In the pluralist democracies, this means
disengagement from the larger society and energetic partisanship within ethnic and
religious communities. For the forging of a shared conception of how and why to live must
fail in such societies.
For most of us, the appeal to the sources of reflection will reinforce liberal
tolerance, not undermine it. We find that our reflective selves are modern, in just the
way Auden articulated (though perhaps with some longing for an imagined past). This
modernity is the reflective source built upon by liberals in their plea for tolerance. If
there are sometimes good reasons to doubt that tolerance should be victorious, they can
have no basis in an appeal to an illiberal self most of us simply do not recognize.
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