Sensitivity isn’t enough

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 19 · 5 October 2000

From Glen Newey

Peter Berkowitz's review of my book Virtue, Reason and Toleration (LRB, 7 September) charges that it is a 'dense, abstract and resolutely technical' volume which is likely to be caviar to the general. The general, alas, seems to include Berkowitz himself, whose frustration at my failure to preach the value of toleration leads him astray at numerous points. As he alleges, I do refrain from telling everyone what to tolerate. To cite his examples, I don't say whether toleration requires us to give free rein to 'hate speech', or to allow parents to force their religion on their offspring. Does Berkowitz know the answer to these questions? One of the major arguments of the book is that the answers can't be known or that if they can that won't make them politically useful. Does Berkowitz have a theory of political justification which will show why my answers or his would be privileged? The problems facing philosophical arguments for toleration lie in the justification of liberal democracy itself. Matters aren't improved by getting him (or me) to tell everyone the answers, foisting them on a perhaps sceptical, apathetic or reluctant public, and then congratulating ourselves on our tolerance. His protests are in fact doubly baffling, as he earlier endorses my objection to the 'conceit' that philosophical reflection 'can decide political issues'.

No doubt 'we' democratic citizens still enjoy the odd Voltairean moment. But more politically relevant is the fact that, faced with objectionable conduct by others, we either can't make them do what we want, or can't be bothered to. 'Controversial empirical claims and debatable speculation about right and wrong', in Berkowitz's apt phrase, are what give rise to political conflicts over toleration, but he doesn't see that its beleaguered state, which he bemoans, has the selfsame source as what makes it politically urgent. Platitudes about how 'we' are all committed to toleration by the happy fact of living in a regime of 'freedom and equality' (are we supposed to have signed up to this?) yield no specific conclusions about toleration, as becomes clear when the values themselves generate political conflict. If we do live in such a regime, Berkowitz might pause to wonder why toleration is, as he believes, in such a bad way.

According to Berkowitz I don't provide 'even a smidgen of empirical evidence' for my passing comment, drawn from Aristotle's Topics, that ta endoxa, the opinions of 'the many or the wise', suggest that toleration is a moral value. Few readers of Aristotle apart from Berkowitz take him to have thought that moral philosophy should be done by Mori-style polling, rather than that the basis for ascribing certain views to the many or the wise varies with the solidity of the institutions themselves. Berkowitz doesn't give any empirical evidence against the view that toleration is such a value – indeed he implicitly endorses it elsewhere in the review. And in fact a good many smidgens of evidence appear in the book, which cites a range of writers who express the endoxon, and others who regard toleration as a moral value because its justification is a moral one (value-pluralists, rights-theorists, autonomists etc).

Glen Newey
University Center for Human Values<br />Princeton

Vol. 22 No. 20 · 19 October 2000

From Glen Newey

The last paragraph of my letter (5 October) in response to Peter Berkowitz's review of my book Virtue, Reason and Toleration says that 'the basis for ascribing certain views to the many or the wise varies with the solidity of the institutions themselves.' Berkowitz might well think that this is a view no less bizarre than the one I attribute to him: 'institutions' should (and in the submitted version did) read 'intuitions'.

Glen Newey
University Center for Human Values, Princeton