Rethinking Toleration in Multicultural States. Legitimate Interference and Costs Containment

One of the most heated debates in the liberal literature on multiculturalism revolves around the scope and limits of toleration in liberal-democratic states. One explication of this debate focuses on whether practices legally forbidden by existing laws have nonetheless to be allowed (e.g., for reasons of minoritarian religious or cultural affiliation) and to what extent such permissions conflict with legal equality. A critical aim of this paper lies in arguing that this debate, though descriptively grasped through a negative conception of toleration, should be normatively properly covered by an ideal of the legitimacy of state interference. Indeed, a respectful representation of the claimants in the public debate provides reasons to prefer legitimacy as an ideal which authentically questions the limits of the state interference without assuming, as traditional references to toleration implicitly do, that such interference is already justified. But, arguing that the political scope of toleration does not lie in providing criteria for state interference in people’s practices is not to agree with those critics who declare toleration to be a useless ideal for contemporary politics. To show this, the positive part of the paper investigates whether a distinctive normative function for toleration could be located by denying that the binary approach of legitimacy – is the interference legitimate or not – exhausts the whole normative spectrum for political action. By showing “issues of toleration” as problems of the legitimation of the action, I defend a positive conception of toleration as costs containment which is compatible with the liberal ideal of neutrality. For, in such circumstances, a decision that interference is legitimate need not invalidate the relevance of the claims. Rather, toleration requires some alternative accommodation of the claimants’ requests, in contrast with winner-takes-all approaches to cultural conflicts.