A LIBERAL JUSTIFICATION FOR TOLERATION:
PRAGMATISM
Another argument for toleration comes from the philosophical position of pragmatism, an important
movement in American political philosophy.
THE CENTRAL PRAGMATIST POSITION:
Pragmatism is the view that social values and political principles are judged to be the right principles
for any given society according to how well these values and principles enable the society to achieve
its collective goals and realise its shared ends.
THE CONTEXT OF THIS ARGUMENT FOR TOLERATION: PLURALISM
We live in a pluralist society today. And pragmatism first arose in response to an emerging recognition
of diversity in society and human experience at the end of the 19th century. William James, for
example, developed his pragmatism in support of the diversity of religious experience, as he felt it was
inevitable given the fact of the diversity of human experience in general.
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Pluralism is more of less the result of the fact of moral diversity, and aims to find a common good
that unifies this diversity.
Pluralists are committed to the idea that many (but not all) different versions of the good have some
claim on our moral imaginations.
There are many ways in which individuals, or communities, might pursue the good life.
But the pluralist holds that each of these many ways can still be called good, that each is itself a
possible manifestation of good.
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Political pluralism usually starts with this observation that there are different value systems in use in
the world, and there are various positions that arise out of that observation, meaning there are no
absolute truths or principles that all communities and individuals should believe in.
Political pluralism is concerned with the question of what sort of restrictions governments can put on
people's freedom to act according to their value systems.
o The strongest version of political pluralism claims that all these value systems are equally true - and
thus presumably all ought to be tolerated.
o A weaker view is that these value systems all ought to be tolerated, despite their truth.
o And probably the most common version of the view is that some of these systems (the reasonable
ones) ought to be tolerated.
IMPORTANT NOTE: PLURALISM IS NOT RELATIVISM
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A relativist, by contrast to a pluralist, holds that value is relative to a world-view or conceptual
scheme and that there is a problem of translation between conceptual schemes.
The difficulty here is that if there is no rational mediation between opposed world-views, no way
to adjudicate between them, then we are stuck with a struggle for power.
Relativism claims there can be no unifying idea of the good. What is good in that world-view is
correct, and other world-views are incorrect to suggest what they believe in is good.
So the focus of pluralism is on how we can hold various beliefs. And since this is the context of
pragmatism, the pragmatist argument for tolerance:
o Centres around this notion that beliefs are not absolute
o Considers that the notion of the good is dependent on the context of each community
o And argues that tolerance is not only required between communities, but that tolerance is
required within a community in order for it to come to hold its own belief of the good.
RICHARD RORTY’S PRAGMATIST ARGUMENT FOR TOLERATION:
The argument for toleration from the position of pragmatism can be non-liberal in
theory, but in practice it tends to be closely aligned with liberalism.
We will focus on Richard Rorty whose form of pragmatism is necessarily aligned with
liberalism as he provides a good link to the other arguments for toleration we have
previous seen (coercion as ineffective and fallibility) and to what we will be moving onto
in a few lessons (tolerance as a virtue).
Some key terms to note in this argument:
o Anti-foundationalism – we should not pursue ‘truths’ in external reality, instead we should come to
agreements about beliefs using the following tools…
o Vocabulary – what we use to agree upon our beliefs. Think of vocabulary as a particular community’s culture.
o Sentences – how we communicate our beliefs.
o Endorsement – how we come to agreement on our beliefs; we endorse the sentences of our community’s
vocabulary.
o Belief: is the endorsement of our sentences in our community’s vocabulary.
RORTY’S PRAGMATIST ARGUMENT FOR TOLERATION IN FOCUS:
Our beliefs are agreed by group consensus; they are not founded in any external reality / truth:
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We come to agreement on our beliefs using a vocabulary particular to a community.
When we use the word ‘true’: we use it to express our endorsement of beliefs and sentences, and
sometimes we might find it useful to express our fallibility by saying that some of our beliefs may not be true.
Rorty takes an anti-foundationalist view on truth: there is no systematic or metaphysical relation between
our beliefs and utterances, on the one hand, and reality on the other.
(In other words, we don’t interpret, organise or receive some external reality with our beliefs and the sentences
we use to communicate our beliefs.)
Rather, our sentences and beliefs serve a practical usage within a community. They are what we reach
by consensus and endorse as a group.
The aims of our communities are to find agreement on a belief
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Building on what we saw with the fallibility argument concerning epistemological scepticism (doubts about our
beliefs) a pragmatist he believes that ‘truth’ cannot be our aim when we inquire.
The pragmatist holds that we can only adopt something as an aim when we are able to recognize that it
has been achieved.
And since we are fallible, we are never in a position to recognize that one of our beliefs is actually true—all we
can recognize is that it meets standards of acceptance that are endorsed, for the time being, in our
community.
Communities evolve through changing ‘vocabularies’ that best achieve our aims for agreement:
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Pragmatists say that we can criticize and revise our view of the world.
We should be free to propose new ‘vocabularies’—systems of classification and description (i.e. new
agreements on our beliefs).
We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether they enable us to discover truths or by showing that they
can be read off the nature of reality.
Instead, we evaluate our vocabularies with a practical judgement: by seeing how they enable us to
achieve our goals and formulate better and more satisfying goals.
Following this, tolerance is necessary as beliefs are subjective there are no absolute truths:
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Rorty’s pragmatism is necessarily aligned with the notion of a liberal society of plural communities.
And considering his view that vocabularies need to change in order to best achieve the aims of a
community, debate and discussion is required in order to allow for such progression.
The Pragmatist wants to bypass the mode of thinking that requires us to believe that affirming values requires
a principled affirmation of values. Principles are in fact problematic and counterproductive.
People who believe in a liberal society should be suspicious of permanent truths and principles.
As Hannah Arendt argues, debate is at the heart of political life, and Truth (as in principled, absolute
truths) kills debate.
FURTHER DETAILS ON RORTY’S PRAGMATIST ARGUMENT FOR TOLERATION:
By looking closer at this argument we can find flaws (weaknesses) in his argumentation.
1. Justifying the liberal value of tolerance
NOTE: Beliefs are convictions. Values concern how we things ought to be.
Rorty refers to ‘strong poets’ and ‘culture critics’ as those who achieve solidarity in a community, not
through argumentative appeal to defunct philosophical foundations but through culture (art and literature)
which persuades us to see one another as co-members of a political community.
Culture here is symbiotic in the sense that the culture makers feed off public feelings and galvanise
these opinions into the culture that the public then embrace and live in.
To justify liberal values you have to embed them in the public’s minds, creating solidarity around them –
this is how such values survive, through the endorsement of the majority of the community.
The morality of a value is judged by its basis in ‘we-intentions’. These are the overlapping beliefs,
desires and emotions, that create the consensus within a community.
But Rorty does not suggest tolerance should be adopted only if a community favours it with its ‘weintentions.’
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Rorty goes further by claiming tolerance is a requirement for any liberal community:
‘To refuse to argue about what human beings should be like seems to show a contempt for
the spirit of accommodation and tolerance, which is essential to democracy. But it is not
clear how to argue for the claim that human beings ought to be liberals rather than fanatics
without being driven back on a theory of human nature, on philosophy.
I think that we must grasp the first horn. We have to insist that not every argument needs to
be met in the terms in which it is presented. Accommodation and tolerance must stop short of
a willingness to work within any vocabulary that one’s interlocutor wishes to use, to take
seriously any topic that he puts forward for discussion.’ [Emphasis added]
Q1. What does the quote suggest about how we should treat those who use a vocabulary of intolerance?
Q2. What’s good and bad about taking such an attitude towards intolerance?
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It’s a good attitude to take because…
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It’s a bad attitude to take because…
2. The contingency of liberal values
It is important to note the contingent nature of liberal values (that their acceptance or emergence are not
certain – they might have never come about at all), as this brings out the point that our values have no
foundations, i.e. beliefs have no basis in a reality external to our minds, in a divine order, or in a metaphysical
account of human nature.
Q. How does this view support or clash with the previous liberal arguments for toleration (Locke and Mill)?
3. The irony of liberal values
Because of the contingent nature of liberal values, the strong poet and culture critics have doubts about
the expression of their liberal hopes as they express them – they know that the values they are putting
forward, as originated from the public itself, might not be seen as correct in the future. This makes them
ironists.
However, and crucially, this is not true of the poet’s and critic’s audience: Rorty claims that these people
ideally do not hold doubt about the vocabulary of their convictions:
‘In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the
nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be commonsensically nominalist [they
recognise that beliefs are not based in foundations] and historicist [understand that
beliefs are contingent]. So they would see themselves as contingent through and through,
without feeling any particular doubts about the contingencies they happen to be.
Q1. In a community, who are the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘nonintellectuals’?
Q2. Despite taking doubt into consideration, in what important way does this argument for toleration differ from
the fallibility argument?
Q3. Should the difference between the way intellectuals and nonintellectuals take to beliefs and values be of
concern?
YES:
NO: