Part II | Outline

Category B | Principles

Topic 11 | Tolerance, respect, love

Tolerance, respect, and love are important and valuable concepts, but each is most efficacious in different spheres of legal, political, moral, and religious life. It is helpful to think of tolerance as primarily a legal and political principle, respect as primarily a political and moral principle, and love as primarily a moral and religious principle.

Tolerance  

• The value of tolerance. Tolerance is a valuable legal and political principle that places an obligation on the state, and often on people, to forebear the views, speech, and actions of others, even if they don’t like or agree with them. The adage “I disagree with what you believe, say, or do but will defend your right to believe, say, or do it” is a succinct summary of the meaning of tolerance.

• Religious tolerance. John Locke argued that religious tolerance is key to social stability and security. Forced religious uniformity in the form of a privileged state religion constitutes oppression, leading to unrest and social instability. Conversely, when government tolerates and treats all forms of religion equally, religious adherents of all faiths will, in turn, support the state.

  • The limits of tolerance. Locke cautioned, however, that toleration has its limits: religious intolerance is a danger to society and should not be tolerated. For that reason, any legal system mandating tolerance of others will place limits on tolerance.

    • The “harm principle.” The most important limit is the “harm principle,” which stipulates that your rights end where my nose begins.

      • Caveat. The idea of harm can be viewed so broadly that the limits on tolerance may become overbroad. We should be careful when tolerance is limited due to unreasonably heightened sensitivities or the proclivity of some to take offense in order to limit the rights of others.

• Critics of “mere” tolerance. People often assert that “tolerance is not enough; we must respect people’s differences,” including religious differences.

  • Response. While respect is an attractive political or moral principle, legally mandating respect would be unwise because doing so would create a legal obligation to offer a measure of approval and endorsement of beliefs, words, or actions that may be unwarranted.

Respect  

• The value of respect. Respect is a political and moral principle that goes beyond mere tolerance or forbearance to include an approval and admiration.

  • Caveat. We can respect people without respecting their views.

• Legally mandating respect is unwise. Respect is in some measure deserved or earned. Legally mandating respect could also result in amorphous “crimes against honor” that are defined by some people’s inclination to take offense and are easily subject to abuse and discriminatory enforcement.

Love  

• The value of love. Love is best understood as a moral or religious principle.

• Religious obligation. For some people, their religious faith requires them to love their “neighbor,” a term interpreted very broadly to include all people.

• Secular bases for love. Others may have nonreligious reasons for believing that we, simply as human beings, are obliged to love all people.

• Types of love. There are many different types of love. The Greeks, for example, distinguished between self-love (philautia), familial love (storge), romantic love (eros), friendship (philia), and love of humankind (agape).

• Legally mandating love is untenable. While love in many forms can be an admirable religious and moral principle, it would seem self-evidently unwise to legally mandate any type of love through secular law. Love is more like a gift we give each other in an exercise of agency, rather than a right we can demand from one another. A legal regime that attempted to enforce a duty to love would almost certainly devolve into a dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion, selective enforcement, and abuse of power.