In Our Own Defense

Introduction

In the vol. 3, no. 4 issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs we defended a moral and religious grounding of tolerance. To our surprise, three out of four respondents disagreed with us, sometimes enthusiastically! Since we take Jean Bethke Elshtain's criticisms as friendly amendments, we will focus instead on the essays by Edwin Black, Jay Mechling, and James Arnt Aune, who found our arguments and even us to be ludicrous and dangerous.

Our argument is summarized as follows. First, tolerance, which comes from the Latin tolerare, carries the connotation of putting up with or enduring a weight or burden. Tolerance, we suggested, is the disposition to endure or bear peoples' beliefs and practices that we find either false or immoral. But disagreement is not sufficient for the exercise of tolerance. In addition, there must also be an element of deep commitment to the belief or practice in question. Therefore, we argued, tolerance makes sense only against a backdrop of religious or moral conviction, since judgments of tolerance and intolerance require either a conception of the true or good and a corresponding depth of commitment to certain beliefs and practices. Without such we cannot coherently be tolerant. Put another way, without disagreement (which the detached neutrality of the secular relativist makes impossible) there simply is no burden to bear, nothing to tolerate. Furthermore, we argued, tolerance requires a thick conception of the self, a conception of considerable religious or metaphysical substance. The reason, we argued, is that only such a conception of the self can coherently ground the intrinsic worth and dignity of people who disagree with us and in virtue of which we can tolerate their beliefs.

Nearly every critic claims that we argued that only a Judeo-Christian-Muslim conception of the nature of persons is adequate to ground the respect of persons necessary for tolerance. Mechling, for example, saddles us with the claim that "the only conception of the person that counts as 'thick' is one that sees the Divine in the person " (647). In order to rebut this misconception, let us quote ourselves: "But it is only a thick conception of persons that can coherently ground that worth. It is a conception of persons as icons of God, divine image bearers, objects of divine love or some other suitably thick conception of persons, that can account for the intrinsic and inestimable worth of human beings" (Clark and Corcoran, 631; emphasis added). Our critique was not of secularism per se, and we carefully and repeatedly specified exactly the views we were opposing: a kind of secularism that is both relativistic and has a thin conception of persons. There might be other adequate, even secular, groundings of tolerance. Some groundings of human worth that are worthy of consideration and not ruled out by anything we said include conceptions of persons that are, for example, religious but nontheistic, theistic but non-Western, Aristotelian and Kantian (of the theistic and nontheistic variety). Whether or not these are equally adequate groundings of human worth is a matter for debate.

Ad Black

Edwin Black dismisses us in just two brief paragraphs. He caricatures our position when he asserts that it would be "so sanctimonious a condescension" for him to have tolerated an odiferous colleague on the grounds that "this rancid creature bears the image of the divine." Our claim, however, is that he should tolerate his colleague because his colleague is worthy of respect. What grounds his colleague's worth, we would argue, is the fact that he is created in the image of God; but, again, there might be other grounds. This substantive grounding of respect for persons gives Judeo-Christian-Muslims, who are often tempted to intolerance, good reason to cultivate the virtue of tolerance. Black grounds his view of tolerance in the social contract with its concomitant commitment to psychological egoism. He will tolerate his stinky colleague not because of any moral value his colleague may have but...