On Toleration, Charity, and Epistemic Fallibilism

Studiu publicat în volumul In Honorem Flavius Antoniu Baias. Aparența în drept, tomul II, Ed. Hamangiu, București, 2021, p. 598-605.

Introductory remarks

It is very likely that the most difficult task of moral and political philosophy ever has been that of assessing comprehensive views which contradict each other not so much in what concerns the interests expressed by individuals but in what regards what is considered to be of genuine value^[1]. If individuals do not agree with each other about what constitutes a good and valuable life, then they would probably end up having dramatic conflicts, even if their actions are motivated by an honest altruistic attitude. Our deep beliefs about what is good and valuable for the life of all the individuals in our own community will prompt us to use the coercive mechanisms of the state in order to achieve the desiderata and the ideals that we share, not only for our own sake but also for those who happen not to share the same vision on the values and meaningfulness of a good life. Of course, those who disagree with us will try to make use of the institutions of the state in the very same way as we do in order to promote and support their own values and ideals. Unfortunately, as we know too well from history, the deep disagreements concerning values can turn into very traumatic conflicts to a much greater extent than the mere conflicts of interests.

Now, some of our value disagreements can be resolved through political mechanisms triggered by the public debates concerning the goals of our actions, debates which aim at giving strong support for the policies which promote those goals; however, some other disagreements which go more deeply cannot have usual political solutions. Here we can include deep religious differences and also certain philosophical beliefs concerning the value and the ultimate meaning of life.

But now, when the regular political mechanisms for acquiring social and political stability fail to produce the outcomes we wish, is there a more subtle mechanism which could keep the disagreements within reasonable and non-explosive bounds? Well, in such cases, people are supposed to learn to live in a rational way with differences, disagreements and profound alterity by refraining from using the coercive mechanisms of the state, with the aim in view not to place unreasonable limits upon the freedom and rights of those people who share values which happen not to be admissible by the dominant group in that society. In a few words, what people need in such circumstances is toleration.

Roughly, the whole spectrum of the concept of toleration unfolds against the background of a pair of presuppositions, namely the discriminating identification of the alterity (of the other) together with the decision to recognize and accept this difference through an active inter-cultural persuasive dialogue.

A very promising starting point for our discussion, albeit rather paradoxical, is the model of those social arrangements and constructions which are known as Utopia.^[2] Leaving aside the intricate and rather exotic details of the narratives concerning Utopia, the general model which emerges here is that of something inconsistent and unachievable in the strive to aggregate all the features that we wish a Utopia to instantiate. It is a sad fact of life which is worth exploring that it is impossible to achieve simultaneously and continuously all that is considered social and political good. A perfect deontic and ethical world which complies with all duties, obligations and necessary normative constraints may be a very attractive representation and ideal, but, in any rate, it is not a world accessible from our own contingent world whose denizens we happen to be. Anyhow, in the best of all possible worlds, toleration has no point. The rationale for tolerant attitudes and behaviour is given by precisely this deontic failure and imperfection and also by the principled impossibility to achieve all the ideals that are to be praised from a political stand point.

But why, after all, are we supposed to act in a tolerant manner in our world which is not perfect morally, deontologically, and politically? What is it that makes the imperfection of our own world impose the moral principle of identity discrimination and also of recognizing the alterity? What conceptual and logical connection operates between moral legitimacy and toleration, and between moral illegitimacy and lack of toleration, respectively?

If we go beyond the prima facie attractive moral position which urges us to be tolerant and embrace pluralism, then we have to acknowledge that both the conceptual analysis of the deep cultural differences and the cultural and political practice of toleration lead us straight into paradox. For as Thomas Nagel very aptly puts it “liberalism asks that citizens accept a certain restraint in calling on the power of the state to enforce some of their most deeply held convictions against others who do not accept them, and holds that the legitimate exercise of political power must be justified on more restricted grounds – grounds which belong in some sense to a common or public domain”^[3].

This is where paradox strikes and mystifies our common sense. For why should such a limitation placed upon justification be the standard form of grounding the political legitimacy? After all, for all those who do not accept that relativism is the most attractive ball game in town nowadays, the arguments against this limitation imposed upon the justificatory basis of the political decisions could appear very convincing and as honest as one can get. And they could very well ask themselves in a very proper way the following questions, as Nagel himself does, in order to give the best chance to the argument in favour of liberal toleration: “Why should I care what others with whom I disagree think about the grounds on which state power is exercised? Why shouldn’t I discount their rejection if it is based on religious or moral or cultural values that I believe to be mistaken? Isn’t that being too impartial, giving too much authority to those whose values conflict with mine – betraying my own values, in fact? If I believe something, I believe it to be true, yet here I am asked to refrain from acting on that belief in deference to beliefs I think are false. It is unclear what possible moral motivation I could have for doing that. Impartiality among persons is one thing, but impartiality among conceptions of the good is quite another. True justice ought to consist of giving everyone the best possible chance of salvation, for example, or of a good life. In other words, we have to start from the values that we ourselves accept in deciding how state power may legitimately be used”^[4].

§1. Two justificatory models of toleration

Why are we supposed, then, after all to be tolerant? Roughly speaking, we can give two answers which lead to two justificatory models for the virtue of toleration: one is deontological and the other is consequentialist. Let’s examine them in turn. 

§2. The deontological model

According to the deontological model, toleration is a morally necessary virtue whose value does not follow, first and foremost, from certain desirable social and political consequences, regardless how important those consequences could be for the social and political stability of our institutions. A full grasp of the power of this deontological concept is facilitated by thinking counterfactually. Thus, to think in a strong deontological sense that any value or any moral norm whatsoever should be followed in our actions, means that we are committing ourselves to those norms even in those contrary-to-fact situations in which if we acted according to them, we would be in a worse-off situation, compared with the actual state in which we are, than we would be shouldn’t we have acted in accordance with them.

From where does this strong moral necessity to be tolerant with those who are different from us in a very profound and (maybe) non-reconcilable way follow? First, it is worth emphasizing that the background against which we place this strong moral constraint of toleration consists in a deep asymmetrical relation between those who tolerate and those who are tolerated; but then, again, the same relation, if looked at from a different angle, has a tendency to get symmetrical, which is nowadays one of the main sources of the contemporary crisis of the concept of toleration^[5]. A short explanation will help us here.

Toleration is required by the logic of the communitarian life when there are at least two groups which are positioned asymmetrical with regard to the normative center of the political and epistemic power. In order to comply with the requirements of toleration the group which controls the power in this asymmetrical relation should accept to restrain its coercion means, which may very well be rooted in the exercise of its political power, and to build, in an alternative way, strong argumentative strategies which are persuasive and rational (maybe even compelling).

We get thus to the key term for the understanding of the deontological concept of toleration. This term is “reason”. In his paper on the issue of toleration Andrei Pleşu gives a very clear and unequivocal account for this position: “We can be tolerant in the name of reason, establishing that everybody is entitled to have his or her own opinion and that the principle of this right is rationality, but we can also be tolerant in the name of our various failures in acting rationally, recognizing that we don’t have access to the absolute universal truth, and therefore to the ultimate certainty, and thus our claim to be always right has no grounds”^[6].

What is implied here are two principles whose meaningfulness is crucial for a profound understanding of important philosophical principles which are recurrent in many quarters of contemporary systematic philosophy, such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology and ethics: what I mean here is the principle of charity and the principle of epistemic fallibilism.

§3. Toleration and charity

If we follow closely the principle of charity, we will see right away how the idea of toleration is essentially contained into our common mental and moral attitudes. To make this clear it is worth pointing out to the highly influential remarks that Donald Davidson made on this subject in the context of his seminal discussion in philosophy of mind.

The stance that Davidson defends with regard to the mind-body relation is called the thesis of anomalous monism^[7] – roughly the view that there cannot be any psyco-physical causal laws which connect mental phenomena with physical phenomena. One of the crucial premises of this conception is that the practice of attributing intentional stances to individuals, mental states such as beliefs or wishes – is governed by principles of rationality, while the physical realm is not subject to such constraints; hence, as Davidson very aptly puts it, the principle of rationality and coherence “has no echo whatsoever” in the physical theory, which makes impossible any causal connection of the mental phenomena with physical phenomena.

Those principles of rationality warrant that the total set of intentional states that we attribute to a subject, and through which one can interpret and predict her actions under normal circumstances, will be as coherent and as rational as possible. Of course, this does not mean that we will make the unrealistic, and actually false, presupposition that those individuals whose utterances and actions are the object for our interpretations could not have false beliefs. Quite contrary, we know that what gives to our beliefs the philosophical bite that makes them theoretically interesting is the fact that they could be – and some of them actually are – false. The principles of rationality, which govern the attribution of intentional states, encapsulate the idea that “we can, however, take it as given that most beliefs are correct. The reason for this is that a belief is identified by its location in a pattern of beliefs; it is this pattern that determines the subject matter of the belief, what the belief is about”^[8].

What follows from this epistemic duty that we have toward the others as interpreters of their utterances and actions is that we should be charitable in the interpretation of their intentional states and that we should refrain ourselves from attributing to them obvious contradictory beliefs, even when the sentences that they utter are incompatible with the beliefs that we share or even worse, when their sentences have the surface form of a logical contradiction.

Consequently, what is required from an interpreter, in order for us to accept her interpretation, is to come up with an account for the meaning of the sentences and actions of the interpreted individual as coherent and as rational as possible. And when the interpreter fails to produce such a consistent interpretation it is very natural to blame the interpreter herself for the interpretative failure and not the interpreted person for holding inacceptable and inconsistent beliefs.

To sum up, the principle of charity will be encapsulated within the following thesis: the requirement of rationality and coherence pertains to the very essence of the mind – that is, it is constitutive to the mental in the sense that rationality and coherence make the mind be exactly what it is. And if, per absurdum, there were “beliefs” which would escape from the constraint of this principle, then those sui-generis “beliefs” could not be considered any longer mental states.

Where does all this lead us in relation to our topic? If we appreciate properly the force of all those Davidsonian remarks we shall understand why the principle of charity occupies a central place in any serious attempt to explain theoretically how it is possible to understand the others’ utterances and actions in a rational way. Davidson is crystal clear about this: “Since charity is not an option, but a condition of having a workable theory, it is meaningless to suggest that we might fall into massive error by endorsing it. (…) Charity is forced on us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters. If we can produce a theory that reconciles charity and the formal conditions for a theory, we have done all that could be done to ensure communication. Nothing more is possible, and nothing more is needed”^[9].

Summing up the deontological concept of toleration, the Davidsonian principle of charity requires us to prefer theories of interpretations which minimize the disagreements. This is why making appeal to charity – and ipso facto to toleration – is somehow inevitable.

The current crisis of the concept of toleration erodes this principle of charity which is so generous and it is also fed in its turn by a very feable and incomplete application of it. For, as Davidson rightly emphasizes, “minimizing disagreements, or maximizing agreement, is a confused ideal. The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding”.^[10]

Along the same general lines, Andrei Pleşu, in his essay, is worried by the radical distortion of the meaning of the concept of toleration and he deplores the degradation of the honest dialogue with the other who is substantially “different”, a dialogue which gives genuine substance to the tolerant attitude; and it is this fact – says Pleşu – which “amputates the appetite for knowledge, for the real understanding of the alterity, and which undermines the necessity for having debates.”^[11]

We get thus to the point where we are trapped in a vicious circle which is very hard to get through. For, on the one hand, the genuine debate is cancelled, because we are told in a way which is irresponsible from an epistemic and ethic point of view, that there is no truth to find out and no reasoning to make, and on the other hand, conversely, important truths have no echo in us and they are ignored by us, and the discursive reasoning becomes weak and is degrading fallaciously because the authentic debate is cancelled.

§4. Toleration and fallibilism

We also have to be tolerant due to our epistemic fallibilism: we have no access whatsoever to absolute truth and certainty in what concerns those things which are of utmost importance for the moral, religious and political life of our own community. Since our own moral and political beliefs that we praise mostly and consider honestly and with some grounds right may be nevertheless wrong, it is reasonable to acknowledge that those who do not share our fundamental commitments are as entitled epistemically as we are, according to their own justifications, to contrary opinions.

§5. The consequentialist model

Now, according to the consequentialist model, toleration appears as a political tool for alleviating dangerous disagreements or tensions which are a threat for the social order. If what we are looking for is a social and political stability compact then it is reasonable to not discriminate and accept things, which otherwise we had strong reasons to disagree and reject. In short, making a consequentialist calculus we see that there are by far more numerous reasons for being tolerant than for being fanatic and intolerant.

§6. A “paradox” of toleration?

I shall finish by making a short remark on one of the sources of current pathology of the concept and practice of toleration. This motivates what can be called a “paradox of toleration”: How should we react when confronted with intolerance? What are the limits of toleration in relation to fanaticism and to what is intolerable? Is it possible, and if so, is it desirable, to find a rational grounding for accepting what is otherwise unacceptable?

Thomas Nagel also sees the real problem and danger behind this form of unbounded and unreflected toleration when he speaks about the over-exaggeration of the positive discrimination, better known today as the affirmative action policy.^[12] What’s all this about? Toleration plays, as it were, the role of “the middle term” between freedom of speech and opinion (according to J. St. Mill toleration is a necessary product of liberty) and political equality (according to J. Rawls, toleration is logically correlated to equality). It is a real challenge then to keep a right dynamic equilibrium between individual and social justice, on the one hand, and the freedom of speech (and opinion), on the other hand. And basically, the same kind of problem will occur when we look for equilibrium between norms and whatever deviates from norms or between rules and exceptions. The current tendency is to focus upon, sometimes even to over-emphasize, the value of equality. However, what the political practice of positive discrimination shows, especially when one abuses of it, is the difficulty to keep a right balance between equality and liberty: the requirement of equality threatens the requirement of free competition and free choice. If we push to the extreme the norms of positive discrimination we end up on a slippery-slope and we will not be sure any more whether it is not fair that one should always prefer whomever is naturally worse-off than whomever is better-off, having in view a rather abstract and formal representation of the differences for which neither one has any obvious moral merit. The legitimate worry here is this: if we generalize this criterion for choice, shouldn’t we stick to the same logic and whenever we have to make a choice shouldn’t we always choose the worse-off, in order to correct her native lack of chance, for which, in any rate, she has no moral responsibility whatsoever?

Thomas Nagel’s remarks have the merit to awake us from our moral slumber, as it were, and make us become aware that if we go down this slippery-slope we end up to the border of a moral Utopia. If we wish to accept something, which otherwise is unacceptable, we will have to make it be the case that one should produce what is impossible. Well, if this is what we really wish or want, then we see that we are likely to end up where we began this journey, in Utopia. However, as we already know, in Utopia toleration has no real point or moral merit^[13].

Footnotes

^[1]  Cf. T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality, O.U.P., 1991, pp. 154-168.

^[2] See R. Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Blackwell, 1974, p. 297-334.

^[3] T. Nagel, idem, p. 158.

^[4] T. Nagel, idem., p. 158.

^[5] In a very suggestive and illuminating way Andrei Pleşu, in his Cuvântul conference, Toleranţa şi intolerabilul. Criza unui concept (Toleration and the intolerable. The Crisis of a Concept, published by the journal Cuvântul, XI (XVI), no. 2 (332), February 2005, p. 11-13, brings into discussion the dialectics of the rule-exception relation. What until recently has been tolerated becomes something legitimate today and is questioning the legitimacy of the tolerating instance: “The exception becomes tolerant with the rule, and the rule developes a guilt complex, and thus an inferiority complex in relation to the exception. The exception becomes militant, self-sufficient, and, eventually, discriminatory and intolerant!”.

^[6] A. Pleşu, ibid.

^[7] See D. Davidson, Mental Events (1970), Psychology as Philosophy (1974) and The Material Mind (1973), in D. Davidson Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p. 205-259.

^[8] D. Davidson, Thought and Talk, in Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 168.

^[9] D. Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, in Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 197.

^[10] D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. xvii.

^[11] A. Pleşu, ibid.

^[12] Cf. T. Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979.

^[13] I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Andrei Pleşu for asking me to comment publicly on his paper Toleranţa şi intolerabilul. Criza unui concept (Toleration and the intolerable. The Crisis of a Concept), which was published afterwards by Cuvântul. This kind invitation gave me the input to write a first draft of the paper that I am presenting here. I would also like to thank my colleague, Professor Adrian-Paul Iliescu, for his criticism which helped me to improve the paper. It goes without saying that I am the only one who is responsible for the contents and arguments that I am putting forward in this paper.