|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Paradoxes of Tolerance
| Article
# : |
11065 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
4,522 Words |
| Author
: |
Daniel N. Robinson
Daniel N. Robinson is chairman of the Department of
Psychology at Georgetown University. His latest book is
Aristotle's Psychology (Columbia University Press, 1989). |
Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.
--Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
Tolerance is generally taken to be the mark of an instructed mind, aware of its own limitations and of the fallibility of human judgment. The greatest writers in the humanistic tradition, seeking to liberate reason and thought from the chains of unreflecting obedience, have repeatedly summoned political authorities to the value and the virtue of tolerance. And, as they have often arrived at their positions by widely different paths, their consensus on the matter is all the more striking, all the more convincing. Try to identify any other significant claim that would enjoy unanimity among Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill! Nor is the reason for such agreement hard to find. Merely to entertain a serious philosophical position entails a commitment to tolerance, for philosophy begins with doubts about and challenges to the prevailing wisdom.
Writing at the close of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant grounded the principle of tolerance in morality itself. He argued that the very possibility of morality arises from and depends upon the autonomy of a rational being--a being capable of willing good or evil and thus of being held accountable in the moral sense. Were human beings lacking in such autonomy, there could be no moral life for them at all, only a life in which their conduct would be determined by the application of external rewards and punishments. But if it is through autonomy of the will that persons come to occupy the moral realm, then any dictatorial imposition on that freedom must be at the expense of the moral life itself.
According to Kant, a rational being recognizing the formal connection between freedom and his own moral nature must honor the same connection as it obtains for other rational beings. Thus, one is called upon to regard fellow human beings--whose natures are the same in this regard--as having an essential dignity that must not be degraded. On the Kantian theory, each member of a moral community knows himself to be the source of moral maxims that, in their objective manifestation, take the form of binding laws. But each member of the moral community must then recognize others, too, as sources for themselves. Thus does the moral law reside within the individual person, whose moral freedom is seen as the necessary
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
