IB Philosophy 8.2.2 Tolerance Notes

The Concept of Tolerance

1. The Unit 8 question, "How should we live together in a society?," finds one of its most contested answers in the concept of tolerance. Tolerance has long been seen as one of the core values of liberal democracies (societies that protect individual freedoms and use democratic elections). It is the quality that allows people with very different beliefs to live peacefully under shared laws.

1. Historically, tolerance emerged as a response to the European wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Locke argued in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) that civil authorities should not impose religious conformity because genuine belief cannot be coerced.
   1. Tolerance was thus conceived as a pragmatic solution to the problem of religious diversity. After decades in which Protestants and Catholics had imprisoned, tortured, and executed each other in the name of religious truth, Locke concluded that civil magistrates could no more compel genuine belief than they could make a person fall in love by decree.
2. Locke's argument established a narrow conception of tolerance focused on non-interference. The state refrains from persecuting individuals for their beliefs, and citizens accept the presence of those with whom they disagree.
   1. This minimal tolerance asks only that people do not actively harm one another on the basis of difference.
3. Voltaire extended this idea by framing tolerance as an intellectual virtue: given how little humans can be certain about, claiming to suppress others' beliefs is a form of arrogance.
4. The long history of religious persecution in Europe, where Catholics and Protestants took turns burning each other's followers at the stake, demonstrated to Voltaire that certainty in matters of faith is a dangerous illusion.

Forms of Tolerance and the Problem of Power

1. Contemporary political philosophy distinguishes between several forms of tolerance. Permission tolerance grants a dominant group the power to permit minority practices.
   1. Coexistence tolerance treats tolerance as a mutual arrangement among groups of roughly equal power. Respect tolerance requires genuine acknowledgement of others as moral equals, even when disagreement persists.
2. The question driving this topic is whether tolerance, in any of these forms, is sufficient for justice.
   1. As the analysis of marginalised groups in 8.2.1 demonstrated, formal non-interference often coexists with deep structural inequality. The tolerated group may be permitted to exist but denied the conditions for genuine flourishing.
3. Tolerance presupposes an asymmetry of power: someone in a position of authority or social dominance decides to tolerate those who are different.
   1. This structure preserves the hierarchy between tolerator and tolerated, even as it prevents outright persecution. The tolerator retains the power to withdraw tolerance at will.
4. This power dynamic reveals that tolerance is fundamentally a conditional arrangement. Minority groups are tolerated so long as they remain within boundaries set by the dominant group.
   1. Practices deemed too threatening to social order, cultural norms, or political stability may be excluded from the scope of tolerance, often with the tolerated group having no say in where those boundaries fall.

Tolerance Versus Genuine Equality

1. The central philosophical question is whether tolerance falls short of treating minority groups as equal citizens. If equality means that all members of society possess the same fundamental worth and are entitled to the same rights, opportunities, and recognition, then tolerance may be necessary but insufficient for achieving it.
2. Wendy Brown argued in Regulating Aversion (2006) that tolerance in liberal democracies works as a tool of social management that controls diversity without fixing inequality. Tolerance frames the presence of minority groups as a problem to be managed rather than a form of social richness to be embraced.
   1. Brown identified a crucial distinction: tolerance strips politics out of inequality by recasting structural problems as matters of personal attitude. When racial or religious conflict is framed as a failure of tolerance, the solution becomes changing individual dispositions rather than transforming the institutions that produce inequality.
   2. Corporate diversity training programmes that address individual attitudes ("be more tolerant") while leaving hiring structures, pay gaps, and promotion patterns unchanged illustrate this point. The structural problem is recast as a matter of personal disposition.