Tolerance and theocracy: how liberal states should think of religious states.

• Author: Blake, Michael
• Position: CAPSTONE ESSAY - Essay

Liberal democracies think of themselves as morally bound to respect the rights of their individual citizens. The decisions these states make, however, affect the interests of both citizens and foreigners. It is difficult to determine how the interests of foreigners might be integrated into the moral calculus constraining what a liberal state may legitimately do. The task, however, is a necessary one. In all areas of international political philosophy--from global distributive justice to the analysis of territorial sovereignty--we stand in need of more thinking about the appropriate moral status of foreign communities and persons.

The present paper is an attempt to understand what moral constraints exist on the foreign policy of a liberal state. In particular, it is an attempt to determine how considerations of toleration may constrain the policies of a liberal government towards a non-liberal--in particular, a theocratic--form of government. The foreign policy of a liberal state may support or undermine the government structure of foreign societies; it may enable or make more difficult political decisions made abroad. It is therefore appropriate for a liberal state to determine whether there are moral reasons to regard certain non-liberal states as having rights to non-interference in the perpetuation of their particular forms of government. It is appropriate, that is, to ask whether there are at least some non-liberal states that deserve to be treated with the distinctive moral attitude known as tolerance.

Before we answer this question, it is important to be clear about what is meant here by tolerance. We might distinguish between two sorts of moral reasons to avoid interference in the affairs of another state, even when that state's form of government violates rights we ourselves regard as valid and important. The first stems from such simple home truths as the need for international stability and the value of avoiding costly and fruitless international confrontation. (1) It is important to note that this sort of consideration, while it may seem at first merely a set of prudential worries, is a source of moral reasons in its own right. Undermining the stability of the international system for comparatively minor moral wrongs is not just a bad idea, but a deeply immoral one. To engage the mechanisms of international coercion--through economic sanctions or warfare--is to use tools that inevitably cause enormous human damage, in both the short and long runs. To use these tools badly, without adequate cause, is both morally and prudentially wrong. (2)

This sort of moral reason, however, should be distinguished from tolerance itself. I understand tolerance, in this paper, as a moral reason to restrain from intervening in the affairs of another party, even when that interference would be neither useless nor counterproductive. The distinctive attitude expressed by tolerance begins with the idea that we ought to forbear from interference even when we might effectively correct what we view as that other party's deep moral error. In this, what is important about tolerance is that it is compatible with a judgment that the other party truly has made an error, and that this error might be at the least made less egregious through some action on our part. Tolerance, on this view, combines a negative judgment about the other party's view with a moral reason to allow that party to continue their mistaken way; it is an expression neither of moral skepticism nor of nihilism. The attitude is found, we might think, in the case of religious believers who would refuse to coercively convert non-believers, even if such coercion might be both politically and theologically effective. (3) Tolerant religious believers, on this account, regard even mistaken religious views as generating certain rights to non-interference. The attitude of tolerance is found, more generally, wherever individuals or a political system argue that some questions--and some forms of human activity--are important enough that even the mistaken answers deserve principled respect. In this, toleration is sometimes referred to as the impossible virtue; it requires us to assert both the truth of our own view, and the moral importance of someone else's mistake. (4)

It is clear that toleration, so understood, is an important characteristic of a liberal state's foreign policy. If there is ever a right to get certain things wrong, this right is surely held by at least some political communities whose forms of government we regard as morally mistaken. Even if it were possible--and costless--to convert a theocratic government into a liberal democratic one, I suspect most of us would at least worry about the moral quality of our action in doing so. Surely, we think, there are some cases in which we ought to respect the forms of political life with which we cannot agree.

There are, however, at least two explanations for this form of tolerance--each of which has associated with it a particular view about the limits of this tolerance. Each of these, that is, identifies a set of reasons why we might forbear from interfering in foreign political communities even when we regard them as making moral errors in governing. (5) The first view which I will call the strong view of tolerance--is associated with the later work of John Rawls. It begins with the idea that non-liberal views are themselves worthy of respect, as one would respect the mistaken theological views of a fellow citizen in a democracy. While there are limits to tolerance--not all forms of political life are deserving of principled respect--we understand the nature of tolerance in terms of the respect owed by liberal governments to alternative ways of understanding the moral basis of politics. The second view--which I will call the weak view of tolerance--takes a more modest approach. It will not argue that non-liberal forms of government deserve respect in themselves; the analogy between a sincere religious believer and an illiberal government is simply mistaken. Nonetheless, some forms of mistaken political organization--including, perhaps, some states that understand themselves as theocracies--may deserve principled respect. This is not because liberalism ought to tolerate governments opposed to the core values of liberalism; liberalism can justly insist that its own values are universally appropriate, and that governments opposed to these values deserve at most prudential consideration and respect. Instead, it is because the core values of liberalism are general and abstract, and cannot be easily linked to any single specification of those values. Liberal states ought to regard the task of working out these values as worthy of the sort of respect embodied in tolerance. In this, however, it is possible that some theocracies may deserve the principled forbearance the attitude of tolerance demands.

The argument will proceed in two parts. Part I introduces the strong conception of tolerance, and argues that it cannot be made compatible with the values liberalism must accept as true. Part II will develop the weak conception of tolerance, and will argue that it may be sufficient to give liberal states reason to tolerate at least some theocratic governments.

PART I: THE STRONG CONCEPTION OF TOLERANCE: RAWLS AND THEOCRACY

John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is the most theoretically sophisticated version of the strong conception of tolerance, but it is not the only exemplar of that conception. (6) The conception itself begins with the simple descriptive fact that not all societies have endorsed the values implicit in liberal democracy. To this descriptive fact, a normative idea is added: the idea that liberalism ought to properly regard itself as simply one among many political philosophies worthy of being respected and tolerated. The idea of toleration becomes relevant, here, in that liberalism is accused of being intolerant of competing ways of life if it insists upon its own validity in the face of competing sets of norms. This particular form of tolerance has a home in public political discourse as well as in philosophy Lee Kwan Yew's defense of "Asian values" as a set of political values uniquely appropriate for Asian societies reflects the idea that liberals would be arrogantly intolerant to insist upon the universal validity of their own theoretical positions. (7) Increasingly, these views are echoed by those who defend religion as a basis of government. The furor over the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammad was met with general criticism of liberal democracy as a form of government, depicting its defense of freedom of expression as parochial and biased. (8) If liberal democrats insisted upon free speech in such cases, it was sufficient evidence that liberal values could never pretend to be universal in the sense their defenders assumed. (9)

Rawls himself would not agree with these political uses of the strong conception--his own view of tolerance is considerably more nuanced and restrictive, as we shall see--but the general format of argument is common between the two. What they share is a view that liberal values are too controversial for any liberal government to insist upon their validity as foundations for foreign policy, given the widespread disagreement such values can be expected to generate among foreign political communities. This is not the same as moral skepticism; Rawls is careful to articulate his own belief that liberalism is a better theory of politics than any potential competitor. Rawls does, however, take the fact of disagreement as a basis for liberals to refrain from asserting the superiority of their own beliefs. Liberalism is, in his words, too contentious a theory for it to be the basis of an appropriate theory of international political justice. (10)

We may take Rawls as an exemplar, then, of a particular pattern of political argument, based upon the idea that liberal values are...