Peter Jones’s article, ‘Making Sense of Political Toleration’, aims to set out a neutralist theory of toleration. This reply does not tackle that claim directly. Instead, I assess his attempt to deal with one line of objection to this theory, and the analysis of toleration that Jones mobilizes in its support.
Jones’s main thesis
Jones aims to show that neutrality and toleration are compatible: ‘It is not neutrality that, per impossibile, spawns toleration. Rather it is a particular sort of commitment to toleration that yields a case for neutrality.’Footnote 1
At the same time, Jones argues that toleration need not embody symmetry between the tolerators and the tolerated. The symmetry claim is that in the circumstances of toleration, where two civil society groups come into conflict, each side can level the charge of intolerance against the other.Footnote 2 For example, in Northern Ireland, where the Orange lodges wish to march through Catholic neighbourhoods, while the latter’s residents wish to stop them doing so, each side may well claim that the other’s proposed course of action – staging the marches, or preventing them – is intolerant, whereas permitting its own preferred action is tolerant. Accordingly, there may be no uniquely ‘tolerant’ course of action for the state.
It is not entirely clear how this aim, to refute symmetry, relates to the first one, of showing that neutrality and toleration are compatible. I conjecture that, in Jones’s view, the case against symmetry needs to be made in order to show how the state can behave neutrally towards vying parties in the circumstances of toleration. Only if it is clear when someone is behaving tolerantly or intolerantly can we construct an adequate account of how neutrality can be respected. If symmetry applies across the board in the circumstances of toleration, then there will be no uniquely tolerant course of action which the state can undertake, and hence neutrality will be violated – at least in so far as the state aims to respect the value of toleration.
In what follows, I focus on Jones’s argument against the symmetry claim. His attempt to refute it ties toleration to agency, as follows: for Jones, a person counts as intolerant only if he or she seeks to ‘curtail the agency’ of someone else. Jones seemingly arrives at his analysis via counterexamples to the symmetry thesis such as abortion. Here, an asymmetry seems to hold between a pro-choice woman, C, who wishes to have an abortion, and a pro-life campaigner, L, who wishes to stop her from doing so: L is behaving intolerantly in trying to stop C from having an abortion, but not conversely. Jones locates this intuitive difference in the fact that L seeks to curtail the agency of C.
In this connection, Jones distinguishes between agents, patients and observers. Agents are doers of actions, while observers watch agents, and patients occupy an intermediate category between agents and observers, the intuitive idea being that a patient has something done to her by an agent. Only if a patient’s agency is ‘curtailed’ can she ‘properly complain of intolerance’ – though her treatment may be objectionable on other grounds.Footnote 3
The unwelcome implication for the symmetry claim is that in the circumstances of toleration, a curtailment of agency occurs on one side only, so that only that side can properly complain of intolerance.
Critique
Jones’s linking of toleration to agency, and analysis of intolerance as agency-curtailment, raises several questions. I take these in turn.
(a) Normative Commitments
First, one can ask whether his analysis is meant to have normative commitments. On a normatively committed reading of the phrase ‘properly complain of intolerance’, the complainants would not be making a valid moral claim unless their agency had been curtailed, i.e. they would not be able justifiably to complain about their treatment. On a normatively non-committal reading, whether or not they could make a valid moral claim, they would not be making a linguistically proper claim in saying that they had been treated intolerantly unless the other party had curtailed their agency: whatever else might be said, theirs would be a misuse of the term ‘intolerance’.
Either reading poses problems. Take the normatively committed reading. Jones says that ‘not all intolerance is wrong’,Footnote 4 but if the mark of intolerance – namely the curtailment of agency – is what makes intolerance wrong, why could someone not justifiably complain of having her agency curtailed, in cases where this treatment is ‘not wrong’? Of course, it could be that agency-curtailment is only wrong prima facie. But Jones does not say this, and nor does he indicate that a normative account of freedom, which could explain why curtailing a person’s agency was unjustifiable, should be supplemented or supplanted in those cases where curtailment is not wrong.
An alternative would be to say that while intolerance itself is picked out in some other way, its curtailing agency is what makes it wrong. But this raises questions about how curtailment relates to the property which marks intolerance. Jones is also clear that curtailment itself is that property.Footnote 5
On the non-committal reading, the term ‘intolerant’ and its cognates are only correctly used of actions which curtail someone’s agency. To curtail someone’s agency is not simply to do something she dislikes, such as my grabbing the last special offer pizza on the shelf before you.Footnote 6 Rather, agency involves the capacity for action, so that curtailing someone’s agency makes them somehow less fit for action than they otherwise would be. But not all intolerant action curtails agency in this sense. For example, the ritualistic abuse of each other by Glasgow Rangers and Celtic football fans seems the epitome of intolerance. But the supporters do not thereby curtail each other’s agency. Admittedly, Jones does have a further story to tell here: I consider this below in section (c).
(b) Agents, Patients and Observers
Jones’s distinction between agents, patients and observers is adduced in support of his agency-based attempt to reinstate asymmetry into the circumstances of toleration. In the abortion example, it seems, on the one hand, that the claim of the pro-lifer of having suffered intolerance will not stick unless she is in Jones’s special sense a patient of the pro-choicer, someone to whom the act of having an abortion is done; but abortion is not something which is done to a third party who happens to disapprove of it. On the other hand, the pro-lifer’s attempt to deprive the pro-choicer of the right to abortion is an attempt to curtail the latter’s agency, and so may be properly described as intolerant.
One might then think that Jones brings in ‘patienthood’ as a way of picking out the cases where intolerance occurs by curtailing agency. But this cannot be right, for more than one reason. For one thing, as already noted, not all intolerance curtails its victims’ capacity for action. Moreover, many paradigmatic instances of toleration involve the use of agency against others, in which case the intolerant are more appropriately described as ‘agents’ than ‘patients’: a genocidal act like the Holocaust is an obvious example. Intolerance towards Jews and others during the Third Reich did not consist in the Nazis finding themselves in the position of patients with respect to the Jews, except perhaps in Goebbels’s propagandistic fantasies. Rather, it consisted in the Nazis’ use of their own agency to persecute the Jewish populations under their control.
This suggests that there is no helpful way to align the distinction between behaviour which is and is not intolerant, on the one side, with that between patients who curtail others’ agency, and other kinds of agents on the other. Part of the problem is that there is no clear line either between patients and observers, or between agents and patients. In the circumstances of toleration, insisting on the clarity of these lines is likely to prove especially contentious, just because they are so often marked by mutual accusations of intolerance. But, beyond that, it is fruitless to try to align those who act intolerantly with patients, and those who suffer intolerance with agents, or would-be agents. The most basic way to make the point that intolerance does not respect the division between doers and objects of action is to reiterate that intolerance often involves the use of agency.
(c) Extending Agency
I said earlier that Jones has a further story to tell about agency, which is designed to forestall the criticism that the agency-curtailment analysis leaves too slender a basis for understanding intolerance. Accordingly, he introduces a broader understanding of ‘agency’, which extends to ‘manifesting a particular identity, [and] holding particular beliefs and pursuing of a particular way of life’.Footnote 7 The motivation for this is that many acts of intolerance do not in any obvious way reduce individual victims’ capacities for action. Some operate at a symbolic level. So, for example, someone who desecrates the Koran expresses intolerance of the Islamic religion, but it is not clear that individual Muslims’ agency – their capacities for action – are thereby reduced.
It is clearer how an act like desecrating the Koran could be thought of in some way as an attack on Muslims’ identity than how it could impede their agency. Even so, the act will not necessarily undermine their ability to ‘manifest’ their identity. In fact, the curtailing-agency explanation misses the point from the perspective of the Muslims themselves, as it repackages the grounds for their revulsion in liberal form: presumably, they will object to the desecration as being an insult to the Prophet, rather than seeing it as curtailing their agency. Furthermore, whether or not a given act manages to curtail the agency of its intended victims will depend on contingent external factors. For example, an isolated individual who expresses his intolerance of Islam by desecrating the Koran will not thereby curtail the agency of Muslims if he lives in a country with an overwhelmingly Islamic population. It is hard to see why this fact makes the act itself any less intolerant.
The wider point is that, at least where it takes the form of insult (as I assume it does in the desecration case), intolerance is an intentional notion. Someone can act intolerantly by intentionally giving offence to the bearers of some identity, such as Muslims, whom he seeks to denigrate. Whether or not he intends to curtail their agency by so doing, in the sense of limiting their capacity to manifest their identity, is a contingent matter. It may not be possible coherently to intend this, given what he knows about the social or political setting in which the act takes place. The only way to make the link non-contingent would be to incorporate the notion of curtailing agency, duly extended, into the intolerant person’s intentions. But it is hard to think of a reason for doing this, other than to rescue the theory.
Seen in this light, Jones’s attempt to extend the notion of agency to encompass bearing an ‘identity’ looks misconceived. It recognizably follows from his need to square two things, namely his agency-based explanation of intolerance, and the manifest fact that many acts of intolerance, like the Koran-desecration example, assail not what their victims do, but who those victims are, or perceive themselves as being. But purely symbolic acts of intolerance need not prejudice their victims’ ability to manifest their identity. What is objectionable about the sectarianism of purely expressive intolerant acts is not that they must curtail the agency of their intended victims, even in Jones’s extended sense, but that they constitute a symbolic expression of hatred.
In fact, intolerance is often part and parcel of ‘identity’. In some situations, including some involving extreme expressions of intolerance, the ‘identity’ of intolerant groups exists in symbiosis with that of the anathematized ‘other’. The Rangers and Celtic football rivalry (albeit with strong sectarian overtones) is one, relatively mild, example. Some of the most virulent and murderous factionalism of recent times has stemmed from identities defined against a hated other – such as Jews and Palestinians, Belfast Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis. Any satisfactory account of toleration that engages with the politics of ‘identity’ has to begin by acknowledging that the bearers of identities are often not just victims of intolerance, but its perpetrators. Can those who are prevented from manifesting their identity in this way – repeated attempts have been made in Scotland, for instance, to curb sectarian chanting at soccer matches – properly complain of intolerance? Are such attempts intolerant because they seek to stop the supporters from manifesting their identity?
Agency and symmetry
Thus, analysing intolerance as the curtailing of agency looks like a Procrustean bed. Adding on ‘identity’ to agency does not solve the lack of fit with intolerance. As noted earlier, Jones launched the analysis as part of his critique of the symmetry claim. His thought was apparently that symmetry was implausible, because the circumstances of toleration often involve an asymmetry between those who wish to act, and others who wish to stop them acting – which lay behind the distinction between agents, patients and observers. The initial idea that intolerance was visited by patients on agents failed, not just because patients do not always suffer intolerance, as Jones says, but because intolerance is often ascribable not to patients, but to agents. Indeed, the circumstances of toleration can make it hard to disentangle the very categories of ‘agent’ and ‘patient’. This led on to an attempt to locate intolerance not in a categorization of the parties involved in the circumstances of toleration, but in the notion of agency. I have highlighted what I see as the main problems facing that idea.
However, someone may think that symmetry is implausible, even if Jones’s attempt to explain why it is implausible is unsatisfactory. To go back to the abortion example: surely, it may be said that there is a significant difference between C’s procuring an abortion despite L’s opposition to it, and L’s preventing C from doing so. L wants to do something to C, stop her from having an abortion; but C’s going ahead and having an abortion does not do anything to L.
However, this mis-describes the level at which symmetry applies. Certainly, the dispute between pro-lifer and pro-choicer cannot be settled to the satisfaction of both, and this poses problems for neutrality. Of course, a case can be made that a pro-abortion stance is more tolerant than one which bans abortion: it tolerates an act, abortion, which would not be tolerated under a regime of prohibition. However, the pro-lifer can say that such a regime tolerates something which is really intolerable, namely the killing of foetuses, which she regards as unborn children. She could also add that a regime of permission would be ‘tolerant’ in the same way that a regime which permitted members of certain races to be killed without criminal penalty would be tolerant. It could then be said that a regime which prohibited such intolerance would itself be tolerant.
I am not suggesting that the pro-lifer’s case is stronger than the pro-choicer’s case. Nor is there any reason why the arguments between them have to mention toleration. But if they do, the concept of toleration does not require the case to be made by means of claims about agency. As I have argued, there is no compelling reason conceptually to tie toleration – as the absence of intolerance – to the notion of agency. So any asymmetry in the claims which could be made about agency, for example in the abortion case, would not show that the symmetry thesis did not hold with regard to toleration. Symmetry can arise at the level of the mirror-image claims which each side can make, in the circumstances of toleration, about a situation in which their opponents’ favoured regime is imposed.
Conclusion
This leads to a final point. It is striking that Jones ties toleration conceptually to agency, when his main aim, as identified at the start of this response, is to present a structural theory of toleration, in which a regime counts as tolerant if its institutions and procedures embody a certain ideal of toleration. I have suggested that agency will often be differentially valued by those in the circumstances of toleration, so it is over-optimistic to think that appealing to ideals of agency will ground a tolerant regime which supports neutrality. There is, in any case, ample room for disagreement about whether, or when, a person’s agency has been justifiably curtailed. Anarchists like Proudhon saw this curtailment as a pervasive feature of life under the state, as did Marxists of life under capitalism. They may be wrong, but they will not be wrong because they cannot plausibly cast their claims in terms of agency.
Relatedly, people will disagree, in particular cases and in general, about how important a given act of curtailing agency is in the wider political scheme of things. Given that Jones, as noted earlier, accepts that intolerance is justifiable in some cases – which presumably means on his analysis that acts of curtailing agency can be justified – an argument remains to be had about which curtailments, on what grounds, are justifiable. This is a very basic question. It arises immediately when we consider the move from a non-political to a political arrangement of human affairs. Political life can already be understood as curtailing agency: it trades certain pre-political freedoms for certain political liberties.Footnote 8
If curtailment is unjustifiable in itself, then anarchism must be the default position. It is clearly not Jones’s position. But if curtailment is not always unjustifiable, the normative content of the claims which one side can make against the other in the circumstances of toleration – that the other side is curtailing its agency – will not be decisive in themselves. And then there are few grounds for Jones’s confidence that the claims which can be made for toleration will enjoy the authoritative backing of a wider theory of political justification, ultimately rooted in an ideal of justice.
%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
Peter Jones’s article, ‘Making Sense of Political Toleration’, aims to set out a neutralist theory of toleration. This reply does not tackle that claim directly. Instead, I assess his attempt to deal with one line of objection to this theory, and the analysis of toleration that Jones mobilizes in its support.
Jones’s main thesis
Jones aims to show that neutrality and toleration are compatible: ‘It is not neutrality that, per impossibile, spawns toleration. Rather it is a particular sort of commitment to toleration that yields a case for neutrality.’Footnote 1
At the same time, Jones argues that toleration need not embody symmetry between the tolerators and the tolerated. The symmetry claim is that in the circumstances of toleration, where two civil society groups come into conflict, each side can level the charge of intolerance against the other.Footnote 2 For example, in Northern Ireland, where the Orange lodges wish to march through Catholic neighbourhoods, while the latter’s residents wish to stop them doing so, each side may well claim that the other’s proposed course of action – staging the marches, or preventing them – is intolerant, whereas permitting its own preferred action is tolerant. Accordingly, there may be no uniquely ‘tolerant’ course of action for the state.
It is not entirely clear how this aim, to refute symmetry, relates to the first one, of showing that neutrality and toleration are compatible. I conjecture that, in Jones’s view, the case against symmetry needs to be made in order to show how the state can behave neutrally towards vying parties in the circumstances of toleration. Only if it is clear when someone is behaving tolerantly or intolerantly can we construct an adequate account of how neutrality can be respected. If symmetry applies across the board in the circumstances of toleration, then there will be no uniquely tolerant course of action which the state can undertake, and hence neutrality will be violated – at least in so far as the state aims to respect the value of toleration.
In what follows, I focus on Jones’s argument against the symmetry claim. His attempt to refute it ties toleration to agency, as follows: for Jones, a person counts as intolerant only if he or she seeks to ‘curtail the agency’ of someone else. Jones seemingly arrives at his analysis via counterexamples to the symmetry thesis such as abortion. Here, an asymmetry seems to hold between a pro-choice woman, C, who wishes to have an abortion, and a pro-life campaigner, L, who wishes to stop her from doing so: L is behaving intolerantly in trying to stop C from having an abortion, but not conversely. Jones locates this intuitive difference in the fact that L seeks to curtail the agency of C.
In this connection, Jones distinguishes between agents, patients and observers. Agents are doers of actions, while observers watch agents, and patients occupy an intermediate category between agents and observers, the intuitive idea being that a patient has something done to her by an agent. Only if a patient’s agency is ‘curtailed’ can she ‘properly complain of intolerance’ – though her treatment may be objectionable on other grounds.Footnote 3
The unwelcome implication for the symmetry claim is that in the circumstances of toleration, a curtailment of agency occurs on one side only, so that only that side can properly complain of intolerance.
Critique
Jones’s linking of toleration to agency, and analysis of intolerance as agency-curtailment, raises several questions. I take these in turn.
(a) Normative Commitments
First, one can ask whether his analysis is meant to have normative commitments. On a normatively committed reading of the phrase ‘properly complain of intolerance’, the complainants would not be making a valid moral claim unless their agency had been curtailed, i.e. they would not be able justifiably to complain about their treatment. On a normatively non-committal reading, whether or not they could make a valid moral claim, they would not be making a linguistically proper claim in saying that they had been treated intolerantly unless the other party had curtailed their agency: whatever else might be said, theirs would be a misuse of the term ‘intolerance’.
Either reading poses problems. Take the normatively committed reading. Jones says that ‘not all intolerance is wrong’,Footnote 4 but if the mark of intolerance – namely the curtailment of agency – is what makes intolerance wrong, why could someone not justifiably complain of having her agency curtailed, in cases where this treatment is ‘not wrong’? Of course, it could be that agency-curtailment is only wrong prima facie. But Jones does not say this, and nor does he indicate that a normative account of freedom, which could explain why curtailing a person’s agency was unjustifiable, should be supplemented or supplanted in those cases where curtailment is not wrong.
An alternative would be to say that while intolerance itself is picked out in some other way, its curtailing agency is what makes it wrong. But this raises questions about how curtailment relates to the property which marks intolerance. Jones is also clear that curtailment itself is that property.Footnote 5
On the non-committal reading, the term ‘intolerant’ and its cognates are only correctly used of actions which curtail someone’s agency. To curtail someone’s agency is not simply to do something she dislikes, such as my grabbing the last special offer pizza on the shelf before you.Footnote 6 Rather, agency involves the capacity for action, so that curtailing someone’s agency makes them somehow less fit for action than they otherwise would be. But not all intolerant action curtails agency in this sense. For example, the ritualistic abuse of each other by Glasgow Rangers and Celtic football fans seems the epitome of intolerance. But the supporters do not thereby curtail each other’s agency. Admittedly, Jones does have a further story to tell here: I consider this below in section (c).
(b) Agents, Patients and Observers
Jones’s distinction between agents, patients and observers is adduced in support of his agency-based attempt to reinstate asymmetry into the circumstances of toleration. In the abortion example, it seems, on the one hand, that the claim of the pro-lifer of having suffered intolerance will not stick unless she is in Jones’s special sense a patient of the pro-choicer, someone to whom the act of having an abortion is done; but abortion is not something which is done to a third party who happens to disapprove of it. On the other hand, the pro-lifer’s attempt to deprive the pro-choicer of the right to abortion is an attempt to curtail the latter’s agency, and so may be properly described as intolerant.
One might then think that Jones brings in ‘patienthood’ as a way of picking out the cases where intolerance occurs by curtailing agency. But this cannot be right, for more than one reason. For one thing, as already noted, not all intolerance curtails its victims’ capacity for action. Moreover, many paradigmatic instances of toleration involve the use of agency against others, in which case the intolerant are more appropriately described as ‘agents’ than ‘patients’: a genocidal act like the Holocaust is an obvious example. Intolerance towards Jews and others during the Third Reich did not consist in the Nazis finding themselves in the position of patients with respect to the Jews, except perhaps in Goebbels’s propagandistic fantasies. Rather, it consisted in the Nazis’ use of their own agency to persecute the Jewish populations under their control.
This suggests that there is no helpful way to align the distinction between behaviour which is and is not intolerant, on the one side, with that between patients who curtail others’ agency, and other kinds of agents on the other. Part of the problem is that there is no clear line either between patients and observers, or between agents and patients. In the circumstances of toleration, insisting on the clarity of these lines is likely to prove especially contentious, just because they are so often marked by mutual accusations of intolerance. But, beyond that, it is fruitless to try to align those who act intolerantly with patients, and those who suffer intolerance with agents, or would-be agents. The most basic way to make the point that intolerance does not respect the division between doers and objects of action is to reiterate that intolerance often involves the use of agency.
(c) Extending Agency
I said earlier that Jones has a further story to tell about agency, which is designed to forestall the criticism that the agency-curtailment analysis leaves too slender a basis for understanding intolerance. Accordingly, he introduces a broader understanding of ‘agency’, which extends to ‘manifesting a particular identity, [and] holding particular beliefs and pursuing of a particular way of life’.Footnote 7 The motivation for this is that many acts of intolerance do not in any obvious way reduce individual victims’ capacities for action. Some operate at a symbolic level. So, for example, someone who desecrates the Koran expresses intolerance of the Islamic religion, but it is not clear that individual Muslims’ agency – their capacities for action – are thereby reduced.
It is clearer how an act like desecrating the Koran could be thought of in some way as an attack on Muslims’ identity than how it could impede their agency. Even so, the act will not necessarily undermine their ability to ‘manifest’ their identity. In fact, the curtailing-agency explanation misses the point from the perspective of the Muslims themselves, as it repackages the grounds for their revulsion in liberal form: presumably, they will object to the desecration as being an insult to the Prophet, rather than seeing it as curtailing their agency. Furthermore, whether or not a given act manages to curtail the agency of its intended victims will depend on contingent external factors. For example, an isolated individual who expresses his intolerance of Islam by desecrating the Koran will not thereby curtail the agency of Muslims if he lives in a country with an overwhelmingly Islamic population. It is hard to see why this fact makes the act itself any less intolerant.
The wider point is that, at least where it takes the form of insult (as I assume it does in the desecration case), intolerance is an intentional notion. Someone can act intolerantly by intentionally giving offence to the bearers of some identity, such as Muslims, whom he seeks to denigrate. Whether or not he intends to curtail their agency by so doing, in the sense of limiting their capacity to manifest their identity, is a contingent matter. It may not be possible coherently to intend this, given what he knows about the social or political setting in which the act takes place. The only way to make the link non-contingent would be to incorporate the notion of curtailing agency, duly extended, into the intolerant person’s intentions. But it is hard to think of a reason for doing this, other than to rescue the theory.
Seen in this light, Jones’s attempt to extend the notion of agency to encompass bearing an ‘identity’ looks misconceived. It recognizably follows from his need to square two things, namely his agency-based explanation of intolerance, and the manifest fact that many acts of intolerance, like the Koran-desecration example, assail not what their victims do, but who those victims are, or perceive themselves as being. But purely symbolic acts of intolerance need not prejudice their victims’ ability to manifest their identity. What is objectionable about the sectarianism of purely expressive intolerant acts is not that they must curtail the agency of their intended victims, even in Jones’s extended sense, but that they constitute a symbolic expression of hatred.
In fact, intolerance is often part and parcel of ‘identity’. In some situations, including some involving extreme expressions of intolerance, the ‘identity’ of intolerant groups exists in symbiosis with that of the anathematized ‘other’. The Rangers and Celtic football rivalry (albeit with strong sectarian overtones) is one, relatively mild, example. Some of the most virulent and murderous factionalism of recent times has stemmed from identities defined against a hated other – such as Jews and Palestinians, Belfast Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis. Any satisfactory account of toleration that engages with the politics of ‘identity’ has to begin by acknowledging that the bearers of identities are often not just victims of intolerance, but its perpetrators. Can those who are prevented from manifesting their identity in this way – repeated attempts have been made in Scotland, for instance, to curb sectarian chanting at soccer matches – properly complain of intolerance? Are such attempts intolerant because they seek to stop the supporters from manifesting their identity?
Agency and symmetry
Thus, analysing intolerance as the curtailing of agency looks like a Procrustean bed. Adding on ‘identity’ to agency does not solve the lack of fit with intolerance. As noted earlier, Jones launched the analysis as part of his critique of the symmetry claim. His thought was apparently that symmetry was implausible, because the circumstances of toleration often involve an asymmetry between those who wish to act, and others who wish to stop them acting – which lay behind the distinction between agents, patients and observers. The initial idea that intolerance was visited by patients on agents failed, not just because patients do not always suffer intolerance, as Jones says, but because intolerance is often ascribable not to patients, but to agents. Indeed, the circumstances of toleration can make it hard to disentangle the very categories of ‘agent’ and ‘patient’. This led on to an attempt to locate intolerance not in a categorization of the parties involved in the circumstances of toleration, but in the notion of agency. I have highlighted what I see as the main problems facing that idea.
However, someone may think that symmetry is implausible, even if Jones’s attempt to explain why it is implausible is unsatisfactory. To go back to the abortion example: surely, it may be said that there is a significant difference between C’s procuring an abortion despite L’s opposition to it, and L’s preventing C from doing so. L wants to do something to C, stop her from having an abortion; but C’s going ahead and having an abortion does not do anything to L.
However, this mis-describes the level at which symmetry applies. Certainly, the dispute between pro-lifer and pro-choicer cannot be settled to the satisfaction of both, and this poses problems for neutrality. Of course, a case can be made that a pro-abortion stance is more tolerant than one which bans abortion: it tolerates an act, abortion, which would not be tolerated under a regime of prohibition. However, the pro-lifer can say that such a regime tolerates something which is really intolerable, namely the killing of foetuses, which she regards as unborn children. She could also add that a regime of permission would be ‘tolerant’ in the same way that a regime which permitted members of certain races to be killed without criminal penalty would be tolerant. It could then be said that a regime which prohibited such intolerance would itself be tolerant.
I am not suggesting that the pro-lifer’s case is stronger than the pro-choicer’s case. Nor is there any reason why the arguments between them have to mention toleration. But if they do, the concept of toleration does not require the case to be made by means of claims about agency. As I have argued, there is no compelling reason conceptually to tie toleration – as the absence of intolerance – to the notion of agency. So any asymmetry in the claims which could be made about agency, for example in the abortion case, would not show that the symmetry thesis did not hold with regard to toleration. Symmetry can arise at the level of the mirror-image claims which each side can make, in the circumstances of toleration, about a situation in which their opponents’ favoured regime is imposed.
Conclusion
This leads to a final point. It is striking that Jones ties toleration conceptually to agency, when his main aim, as identified at the start of this response, is to present a structural theory of toleration, in which a regime counts as tolerant if its institutions and procedures embody a certain ideal of toleration. I have suggested that agency will often be differentially valued by those in the circumstances of toleration, so it is over-optimistic to think that appealing to ideals of agency will ground a tolerant regime which supports neutrality. There is, in any case, ample room for disagreement about whether, or when, a person’s agency has been justifiably curtailed. Anarchists like Proudhon saw this curtailment as a pervasive feature of life under the state, as did Marxists of life under capitalism. They may be wrong, but they will not be wrong because they cannot plausibly cast their claims in terms of agency.
Relatedly, people will disagree, in particular cases and in general, about how important a given act of curtailing agency is in the wider political scheme of things. Given that Jones, as noted earlier, accepts that intolerance is justifiable in some cases – which presumably means on his analysis that acts of curtailing agency can be justified – an argument remains to be had about which curtailments, on what grounds, are justifiable. This is a very basic question. It arises immediately when we consider the move from a non-political to a political arrangement of human affairs. Political life can already be understood as curtailing agency: it trades certain pre-political freedoms for certain political liberties.Footnote 8
If curtailment is unjustifiable in itself, then anarchism must be the default position. It is clearly not Jones’s position. But if curtailment is not always unjustifiable, the normative content of the claims which one side can make against the other in the circumstances of toleration – that the other side is curtailing its agency – will not be decisive in themselves. And then there are few grounds for Jones’s confidence that the claims which can be made for toleration will enjoy the authoritative backing of a wider theory of political justification, ultimately rooted in an ideal of justice.