Toleration: Its Nature and Moral Justification

The complex topic of toleration is the focus of the upcoming Spectacle of Toleration conference No person shall bee any wise molested: Religious freedom, cultural conflict, and the moral role of the state which marks the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island’s 1663 Charter. Keynote speaker Brian Leiter will present the conference’s opening remarks in the lecture Toleration: Its Nature and Moral Justification on Thursday October 3, 2013 at 7pm.

Toleration becomes relevant when one group disapproves of the beliefs and practices of another group, but nonetheless “puts up” with the disfavored beliefs and practices. Leiter’s talk will examine how not every case of “putting up” with another group counts, however, as toleration. “We do well to distinguish cases of indifference, Hobbesian compromise and lack of means, from genuine, or principled, toleration,” Leiter explains in prepared remarks. “In principled toleration, one group disapproves of the beliefs and practices of another group, but nonetheless believes it is morally obligated to permit those beliefs and practices to persist. In the modern era, the Kantian and utilitarian traditions supply reasons in support of principled toleration. Importantly, those reasons favor principled toleration beyond the case of religious beliefs and practices, although no legal systems have yet extended the bounds of principled toleration that far.”

Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research interests are in general jurisprudence, moral and political philosophy, and the law of evidence. His books include Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge, 2001) (editor), Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002), The Future for Philosophy (Oxford, 2004) (editor), Naturalizing Jurisprudence (Oxford, 2007), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (co-editor), and most recently Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013).

This lecture takes place at Salve Regina University’s Bazarsky Lecture Hall. Admission is free, donations are welcome. To RSVP, visit: https://NewportHistory.eventbrite.com.

The Spectacle of Toleration: Learning from the Lively Experiment is a collaborative project between the Newport Historical Society, the Rhode Island Historical Society, John Carter Brown Library, George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, Salve Regina University and Brown University. It is supported by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. For details about the Spectacle of Toleration conference and other Spectacle programs visit: http://www.spectacleoftoleration.org/.