A Letter Concerning Toleration

"Toleration is an ideal of conduct, which involves putting up with something you find objectionable – you disapprove of it, or you dislike it. You can do that as an individual, or a society can do it, and the ideal is one that’s become pretty well entrenched within liberalism. The reason I started with Locke is because his arguments about toleration are the touchstone of modern discussions of toleration within the liberal tradition. He’s not the first person ever to say anything about toleration – if you look at the history of human beings living together anywhere at any time, you’ll always find examples of people recommending something that looks like toleration, because it’s very hard to see how a human society could go on at all if people refused to put up with the things they disliked or disapproved of. Locke’s argument is capable of being construed in lots of different ways. Some people construe it as a pretty instrumental argument without much positive content, but I would tend to understand it differently from the way in which a lot of contemporary analytical philosophers have taken it. Well, most philosophers see it as something pretty simple: in their view, Locke’s argument is that it’s futile to try to coerce people into believing something other than they do, because that’s not how belief works. Belief isn’t susceptible to coercion. So it doesn’t make any sense, is irrational, to try to coerce people into believing something other than they currently do."