I have generously benefitted from many colleagues, professors and friends for along many years in the realization of this book. Suffice to mention their names with the ample hope that they will recognize their thoughts in some of the arguments and critiques that they will find all along these pages.

At the very beginning of his Law and Disagreement, Jeremy Waldron gives us quite an accurate description of the world we live in:

As previously stated in the introduction, the purposes of this book are to analyze how modern deontological liberalism conceptualizes and justifies tolerance and to show the theoretical tensions that tolerance generates within this particular philosophical structure.

In Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical, John Rawls defended the idea that a political conception of justice must be independent from any religious, philosophical or ideological doctrine. To put it otherwise, justice must be independent from those conceptions which are not necessarily...

In the first two chapters, modern deontological liberalism has been characterized as a theory of justice based on three main features:

Today’s debate about tolerance is divided by a series of irreconcilable postures regarding its concept and foundations. In contemporary philosophical literature, it is possible to find examples of widely dissimilar stances, such as the following:

There are different types of injuries and all of them vary in their levels of intensity. For example, many legal systems in the world recognize at least four different degrees of injuries: very mild, mild, severe and very severe; and two types of injuries: physical and mental. There are other legal norms that speak of moral injuries, such as those contemplated by almost every civil code and...

The previous chapter gave us the opportunity to appreciate the fact that most of the authors who speak about the concept of tolerance refer to the necessary power or competency to detain, stop or prohibit the object of tolerance. Such is the case...

Taking into consideration the description in section I of the Deontological Moral System and the conceptual aspects considered by modern deontological liberals discussed in section II, we can assume, first, that modern deontological liberalism defends a moral conception of tolerance. Or, that deontological liberalism understands tolerance as a virtue of justice that can only be justified...

In Keep your dirty hands off Mozart,1. Garzón, “No pongas, “ 181–198. Ernesto Garzón defines tolerance as a dispositional property that is “tested in diverse and reiterated circumstances” which he calls, like other philosophers, circumstances of tolerance. Before I...

Rainer Frost’s analysis of toleration covers three different stages: the conceptual analysis, the study of different conceptions of toleration, and the justificatory analysis of tolerance.

According to what has been presented so far, it seems that there are still many doubts regarding the deontological mechanism of justification of tolerance, and particularly, regarding the connection that deontological authors suggest between the basic normative system (which contain our ethical, religious, philosophical and aesthetic values) and the justificatory normative system of moral...

Setting limits on tolerance is one of the most difficult philosophical tasks for any moral and political theory. Which are the limits that a tolerant person must reach for either not becoming utterly permissible or obstinately recalcitrant, is far from being clear. In the particular case of liberalism, this...

So far I have only considered problems related to settling limits on tolerance and showing some of the tensions that these problems create within different conceptions of justice and structures of practical reason. Now I will consider in specific terms one of the problems that tolerance creates within a deontological structure of practical reason. These conflicts in particular are the kind of...

Tolerance understood as a moral ideal entails a problem that contemporary moral philosophy has qualified as “paradoxical.” D. D. Raphael illustrates this situation as follows:

I have raised several criticisms and objections to the deontological moral system. The main purpose of this has been to show the impossibility of a deontological moral system to host tolerance understood as a moral ideal. In this last part I will make explicit which are the three features that make impossible this relationship. Under the above perspective, the three features I am referring to are:...

The general idea that has been defended in part IV is that tolerance understood as a moral ideal is incompatible with the logical requirements imposed by a deontological structure of practical reason. This claim has been reinforced by showing how the Deontological Moral System cannot give plausible answers to the two main problems generated by the normative nature of tolerance: (1) the problem...

In chapter 11, two ideas regarding the concept of tolerance were advanced: The first one was taken from Rainer Forst’s statement according to which tolerance is a normatively dependent concept. What Forst defends with this idea is the substantial vacuity of tolerance which has to be filled by referring to specific conceptions of justice which have to be in accordance with a...

Until now I have argued that tolerance by being a virtue (as a dispositional property) is not compatible with a scheme of practical reason that is exclusively based on the idea that following rules or principles which only respond to a ‘right/wrong’ criterion is the essence of morality. If tolerance is a virtue, it requires what other virtues do: a perspective of practical reason...

Ackerman, Bruce, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

René González de la Vega is professor of political and moral philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is the author of La Filosofía del Derecho de Ernesto Garzón Valdés: Una Biografía Intelectual sobre la primera parte de su obra, and with Guillermo Lariguet, he published the book Problemas de...