Tolerance gets a bad rap these days. Its foes are many and vocal. Traditionalists suspect that tolerance ends in relativism, indifference, or what they deem the intolerant tolerance of liberals. Liberals lament the unjust distribution of tolerance among conservatives: “zero tolerance” for some, “maximum tolerance” for others.

1 The tolerated, in turn, denounce tolerance as so much liberal condescension. They want acceptance and affirmation, not tolerance. Christians join the chorus with calls to replace tolerance with love and forbearance. Still, others contend that tolerance is difficult to sustain and generates resentment among the tolerant and tolerated alike—hardly a tonic for the ails of pluralistic democratic societies. Conversely, friends of tolerance tend to exacerbate the concerns of its foes, even as they offer, at best, a weak endorsement. In their view, tolerance is a modern invention that enables us to preserve some measure of peace despite our disagreements. If we could get by without it, we would. They do not imagine that it is a timeless virtue that perfects all citizens, a good of all political communities. Given the disputes among friends and foes of tolerance, among the other differences that divide, our situation may appear bleak.

A wise writer bestows hope, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests, by revealing new regions of thought and so imparting “new activity to the torpid spirit.”

2 John Bowlin’s original and sophisticated book, Tolerance among the Virtues, does just this. Drawing on the work of Thomas Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bowlin places tolerance among the virtues and so sheds considerable light on disputes among its contemporary friends and foes. By identifying tolerance as a moral virtue annexed to justice, he distinguishes the virtue of tolerance from the acts it perfects, the imposters it resembles, and its sibling virtue, forbearance. In doing so, he provides a nuanced moral vocabulary for talking about the differences that divide us and the proper response to these differences. Some differences are objectionable. Some objectionable differences deserve tolerance. The tolerant habitually discern which objectionable differences deserve tolerance and willingly respond with acts of tolerance, of which patient endurance is paradigmatic. The truly tolerant, Bowlin writes, “object to the right differences, intend the right ends, take note of the right circumstances, and respond with the right actions, all with the ease of habit” (165). By placing tolerance among the virtues, this book makes a considerable contribution to several important conversations today. I will mention a few of these, and suggest some new regions of thought and activity that this text generates.

First, perhaps it goes without saying that this book contributes to conversations in political philosophy, theology, and ethics about pluralism, democracy, and the common good. How should we respond to the facts of pluralism, to the differences—moral, religious, political, racial, and ethnic—that characterize our shared life? Some fear that pluralism and democracy undermine the common good, while those with dystopic leanings dismiss the ideal of the common good as mere fantasy or dangerous ruse. Both perspectives produce resentment about tolerance. Bowlin, rather, argues that the virtue of tolerance perfects citizens and their relationships, constituting a common good of all political communities. It enables citizens to respond to objectionable differences with patient endurance, to act justly and so enjoy the common goods that are shared when relationships are set right (95). He accepts pluralism as an ordinary fact of life, present to some extent in every time and place (18).

Given this fact, citizens of modern democracies need to discern which differences are objectionable and which are not. Among objectionable differences, they must distinguish which are tolerable, and which require a different response, such as contestation, coercion, constraint, expulsion, or withdrawal. Membership in any moral, political, scholarly, or ecclesial community requires this discernment. Readers seeking a definitive list of tolerable and intolerable actions, views, or policies will search in vain. All such lists are contingent and open to revision. Instead, Bowlin provides examples: from the Civil Rights era (66, 132ff.) to Uncle Halvor’s unsavory bigotry at holiday dinners (120), from his son’s taste in music (130–41, 239) to the Cockfights at the Collinsville Game Club (242–49). The book begins and ends with his visit to a cockfight in Collinsville, Oklahoma. He uses this example to demonstrate how the distinctions drawn throughout the book matter for the sorts of differences democratic citizens face. And this new region of thought—tolerance as a virtue—generates new activity for the torpid spirit. Rather than resentment about the challenges of pluralism, we find hope. Bowlin’s examples are splendid, but they are not our own. His account of tolerance gives readers the tools to reflect more deeply about the need for tolerance among all citizens, and what the virtue demands in light of the objectionable differences we face in our own time and context, given our own roles and responsibilities.

Second, this book contributes to conversations about modernity and its continuities and discontinuities with its premodern past. Friends and foes alike tend to think of tolerance as a modern, liberal invention, a response to the religious wars generated by the Protestant Reformation. This standard history generates their disputes: both assume that tolerance just is a liberal innovation and censure or endorse it as such. But Bowlin aptly notes that tolerance has a much longer, indeed ancient, legacy. So too, Aquinas commends acts of tolerance in medieval times, even if he does not theorize it as a virtue. Given that pluralism is to some extent a feature of all societies, we should expect to find discussions of tolerance across time and place. And indeed, Bowlin confirms, we do. But if the standard history does not hold, then neither do the standard assumptions about tolerance. If rather tolerance is a natural virtue that comes packaged with our humanity—along with certain concepts and judgments—then it perfects human beings in all times, places, and societies, modern and premodern alike (see especially chapters 2 and 5).

This revisionist history opens new regions of thought and inquiry. Tolerance is not new. Nonetheless, we might query, is there anything novel or distinctive about the role of tolerance, as a central feature of our discourse, or legislation, in modern democracies? Is the modern addition simply “the relatively long list of courses and lives that liberals are willing to tolerate” (191)? If so, how do these lists, these social and legal norms, change over time? For instance, what does the long history of increasing legislative religious toleration in England—from the Toleration Act in 1689 to the Unitarian Toleration Bill of 1813 and the Roman Catholic and Jewish Relief Acts (1832, 1858)—reveal about the process of increasing social and legislative toleration, of social and legal transformation? Put differently, what are the relations among law and virtue? Can just laws be a tutor of the virtues? Do laws of toleration help to form tolerant citizens? Or do tolerant citizens and legislators form more tolerant laws? Given that the transformation from unjust to just laws is often the result of pressure from dissenters and nonconformists, how do we form citizens in the prudence and justice required to tolerate and protest the right things, in the right ways, at the right times? For good reason, Bowlin does not fully address all of these questions, but his work encourages others to take them up anew.

Third, this book makes a significant contribution to conversations in virtue theory and Christian ethics. Jeffrey Stout, on the back cover, calls this “the most original and instructive account we have of a single virtue.” By focusing on this single virtue, Bowlin sheds light on conversations in virtue ethics about action, habits, character, moral formation, perfection, virtues’ semblances, the unity of the virtues, and pagan and Christian virtues. Like Aquinas, Bowlin is a master of distinctions. Consider the distinction between acts and habits. An act of tolerance does not always indicate a virtue of tolerance. An act may or may not reflect a settled, habitual disposition of the will. Likewise, one may act tolerantly for a number of reasons, motivations, and aims that are more or less just. An act of tolerance may reflect indifference or acceptance, rather than the patient endurance of an objectionable difference. At the same time, what may appear to be an act of tolerance does not arise from the virtue of tolerance if the difference patiently endured is not objectionable. The virtue of tolerance is rather a habit that disposes one to respond to objectionable differences with patient endurance, among other acts. In this way, Bowlin distinguishes the virtue from its semblances. Confusing the semblances, vices dressed in virtue’s garb, for the virtue itself fuels the resentment of tolerance that Bowlin aptly describes (chapter 1). Using Aquinas’s distinctions, he argues that tolerance is a natural virtue that perfects human beings in all times and places (chapter 2). So too, he clarifies that tolerance is a moral virtue, a perfection of the will, annexed to justice. These matter for distinguishing tolerance which pertains to justice from forbearance which, in its natural and graced forms, grows out of love and friendship (see chapter 6, to which I will return).

By placing tolerance among the virtues, Bowlin illumines this single virtue as well as its relation to other virtues. We should hope, as he does, that this new region of thought, “the determinate account of tolerance [he] provide[s] and the vocabulary of virtue that [he] develop[s] can be used as models for those who might work up these other virtues” (10). There is work to be done, and it would be a great service to citizens who are torpid in spirit, tired by the challenges posed by our differences. For, tolerance stands, he notes, “among a number of moral virtues that matter for those of us concerned with educating students, building teams, exercising citizenship, forming coalitions, and maintaining friendships” (10). Yet at this point, one may wonder, why so much attention to one virtue? What is to be gained by such a detailed examination? Does having a robust moral vocabulary which the virtues provide help one to cultivate the virtues themselves? Surely, throughout history, long before this excellent account of tolerance arrived on the scene, there have been tolerant persons (Bowlin provides examples, but with one exception no exemplars). Will reading his account make us more tolerant? As suggested above, it may at least cause readers to desire to become more tolerant. This book is not primarily about the formative practices, exemplars, and communities that, as the author knows, form us into more virtuous persons. Nonetheless, the hope throughout seems to be that a better moral vocabulary and examination of the relevant distinctions moves the conversations about tolerance forward, beyond resentment and toward an appreciation for the just, even loving, patient endurance of objectionable differences on which all societies depend.

Fourth, this book contributes to conversations in Christian ethics, specifically with regard to pagan and Christian virtues. The questions are various: what, if anything, is distinctive about Christian virtues? What are the theological or infused virtues and what is their relation to their pagan or acquired counterparts? Do the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) have natural analogues? Are acquired, pagan virtues true virtues or mere semblances? In Christian theology, these are questions about the relation between nature and grace. Bowlin’s account of toleration and forbearance bears on each. Pace Christians who would replace tolerance with forbearance or love, he preserves their distinction (to a point) and insists on the need for both. This means that tolerance is a true virtue given the kinds of creatures we are and the differences that characterize our earthly life. In the final chapter, Bowlin provides an account of tolerance’s natural sibling, forbearance. Whereas tolerance is annexed to justice, natural forbearance is annexed to love and abides in ordinary friendships. Both are distinct from the forbearance annexed to charity, to the friendship for God and neighbor that comes by grace alone. What distinguishes the tolerant and forbearing is not only the form of their patient endurance—whether out of justice or love, duty or gift—but the distinct hopes they have, sorrows they endure, and the social relationships in which these virtues reside. Having brought the reader this far, this master of distinctions softens them by considering “(1) the effects of friendship’s love on tolerance and (2) the effects of divine charity on the naturally acquired versions of both tolerance and forbearance” (212). The one exemplar of the book, the person who embodies the perfection of forbearance, is, Christ. What does Christ’s forbearance mean for Christ’s followers?

Again, this new region of thought generates new work. Here I have in mind the concerns of womanist, mujerista, feminist, queer, black, Latinx, and other Christian theologians and ethicists. And, so does Bowlin (even if he does not elaborate them or develop the implications of his account of forbearance with regard to them). By point to Christ as the perfection of forbearance, he does not want to encourage masochism or sadism (230n28, 231). He is well aware that “inequalities of power and the lust to dominate only encourage [the] misuse” of the “theological symbolics” of Christ’s passion (231). His account of love, friendship, and forbearance is meant to guard against these tendencies. But Christ’s example of forbearance complexifies things. With tolerance, the waters are not so murky. “The tolerant,” Bowlin says, “have a list of actions and things they find so objectionable that the relationship must be abandoned . . . but those who endure with the forbearance of Christ proceed with no equivalent list” (225). They must distinguish between “sins that harm persons or threaten the common good” and those that do not (225). Those that do such harm, require in addition to charity’s forbearance “the just correction that protects persons and safeguards the common good as it restrains the sinner and deters those tempted to emulate his sin” (225). Those who have lived on the underside of oppressive relations and institutions can appreciate such safeguards. But these distinctions seem to be somewhat in tension with Christ’s example, at least in the passion. Christ’s negative velleity toward his death answers one set of questions (see 230n28). Nonetheless, we might ask, did not Christ forebear all sins to the point of death, without either just correction that protects persons or seeking to safeguard the common good?

Bowlin grants that victims of these symbolics, those who have suffered under their misuse, will reasonably want to do without them. But he thinks that virtue’s ideal offers another response. After all, “forbearance always comes with voice, with criticism and correction that accompanies its willingness to endure” (231). “Forgive them father,” is surely as profound a protest as one could utter from a Roman imperial cross. Greater love has no one than this. Yet virtues’ ideals seem more manifold than this exemplar suggests. In an age of #metoo, police brutality, church sex abuse scandals and coverups, and a perduring epidemic of domestic violence, the work of discerning the ideals and naming exemplars of forbearance remains. Martin Luther King Jr. is certainly one. In “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon delivered at the Detroit Council of Churches’ Noon Lenten Services, he argues that Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies is not “the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer” (422). In a quintessential display of forbearance with voice, criticism, and correction, he proclaims: “Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you. . . . And we will still love you . . . and we will still love you. . . .” comes the refrain (428). “But be assured that we will wear you down (Yes indeed) by our capacity to suffer (Yes) And one day we will win our freedom, but not only will we win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process (Yes, Lord) And our victory will be a double victory. . . . Love is the absolute power” (428). Here love perfects, not tolerance, but protest or criticism. So too, womanists, feminists, and those concerned with power, sacrifice, and love may help us to understand how it is that in tolerance and protest perfected by forbearance and charity, we gain a double victory.

After reading John Bowlin’s book Tolerance among the Virtues, my idea of tolerance has shifted. Prior to reading John’s text, I saw tolerance as an ethically weak practice lauded by political and religious liberals, often involving a paternalistic and accommodating attitude toward “others” who are imagined as not having the moral capacity to critically discern right action. John offers a different account of tolerance that is exacting and rigorous, an account that does not easily succumb to my current idea of this term. I want to talk about what I believe John gets right in his book and also raise some lingering questions.

In the introduction, John asks us to rethink our assumptions surrounding tolerance as either a liberal virtue that sponsors democratic exchange or a vice that is oriented toward political utilitarianism. He agrees that when tolerant acts are merely signs of indifference or political calculation, in service to individual freedom or liberal autonomy, it is hard to speak of toleration as an ethical practice that helps us experience moral growth. Instead, John wants us to see tolerance as a virtue that belongs to the sphere of justice and perfects the work of love. This is his thesis. Although he employs a highly analytical method in his discussion of tolerance, John’s thesis has practical importance, as we must find ways to talk about loving and compassionate responses to serious disagreements and objectionable differences (8). And he spends the rest of his time in the book unfolding this argument, attempting to provide evidence that might point to why his account of tolerance is more intellectually honest and rigorous.

John couches his argument in what I would refer to as a critical realism. For him, tolerance is a natural virtue—it’s what we already practice in some measure. As a result, we are unable to simply write off tolerance, as it already finds its way into our lives as human beings. We are already making moral evaluations about when and where acts of toleration are best employed. This means that the debate is not over whether we need to exercise tolerance or not. Rather, John insists that we must attend to the perfection of this virtue by orienting it toward the love of God and neighbor rather than as mere acts of indifference and political expediency.

Because we already exercise tolerance in some measure, John proposes that tolerance as a virtue is only virtuous when understood from within a family of virtues, namely justice, love, and forbearance. He first identifies forbearance as a sibling of tolerance. What if tolerance and forbearance were seen as siblings, both possessing patient endurance in the work of love? Here, he wants to shift toleration from an act or policy to tolerance as a virtue and sibling to forbearance. This is where Thomas Aquinas does significant work for John. John acknowledges that Aquinas does not directly theorize tolerance or forbearance as a virtue. But Aquinas does share an interest in responding well to disagreement and objectionable differences through patient endurance (106). For Aquinas, patient endurance is the end result of love but this patient endurance is only formed within the moral agent through virtues such as forbearance and tolerance. Understanding tolerance as a sibling of forbearance is central to John’s argument, as both contribute to the work of patient endurance (which is necessary to practices of love and justice).

Justice and love are also part of the family of virtues in which tolerance finds its home. John argues that when “tolerance is annexed to justice, it resets its ends and intentions” (110). Justice is about what we imagine is due to each person within society. For John, what is often due one’s neighbor is forbearance or patient endurance to stay present to one’s neighbor despite any serious objectionable differences one might share with her. Tolerance is the natural virtue of having patient endurance in the right circumstances without seeking to convert or punish my neighbor for such objectionable differences. Tolerance therefore can contribute to the work of justice in being able to give people what is due them. It enables us to achieve peace within a society marked by objectionable differences. John emphasizes that his proposal of tolerance as a virtue is different from current liberal notions of toleration. Liberal notions of toleration are merely about an indifferent attitude toward those around me who I may object to, as I am tolerant out of respect for their personal freedom and autonomy. On the contrary, tolerance as a virtue is about having patient endurance toward my neighbor and her differences, as I know that this virtue enables a common life to unfold in which we are truly able to see each other’s humanity and perhaps be friends. The virtue of tolerance makes possible a common life of love that can also foster possibilities of justice.

I was very concerned with how one could distinguish tolerance as a virtue from tolerating unjust actions. John provides a way for the moral agent to discern tolerance as a virtue from its semblances. John maintains that the moral agent who is perfecting virtues through habit will be able to discern the need for this virtue in just circumstances as opposed to unjust situations. The habit-forming virtuous character of the moral agent enables the agent, over time, to rightly perceive unjust from just actions because this person has submitted herself to the virtue formation process. And John does consider the moral difficulties and complexities that arise as one discerns the good and just thing to do. I like that John places emphasis on the virtuous person in evaluating the moral status of an action rather than depending on fixed, absolute principles when evaluating what makes tolerant acts morally virtuous. Yet, John is not naïve—I think John would agree that moral agents can rightly perceive injustice in one situation while wrongly perceiving in another situation. For certain, John takes into account the moral growth that any agent experiences through the habit-forming process associated with virtue formation.

Yet, I want to linger a bit longer on how cultural pluralism affects or shapes a moral agent’s understanding of virtue and her ability to know the right thing to do. There are different cultural accounts of virtue within American society itself, which impacts a moral agent’s ability to know and discern. I am aware that John acknowledges the diversity of human cultures and conventions yet I think he makes too quick a leap in asserting that societies possess certain “shared ontological and moral commitments” and ethical judgments about the “goodness of certain ends and truth of certain empirical propositions” (87). I know he is drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Aquinas. But I am not certain here. I think I am shaped more by Charles Long and Derrick Bell. There is a certain opacity to the moral life and how we come to discern the goodness and truth of certain ends and empirical propositions. I do think that part of what we are experiencing in our national dialogue is an incommensurability of moral universes. Often, we don’t actually share basic ontological and moral commitments, and these colliding accounts on the meanings of moral life lead us to a huge impasse. We don’t have a “shared moral history,” if at least what we mean by this term is shared meanings about our moral worlds. How does John wrestle with or respond to a claim on the “incommensurability of moral worlds” and how it affects the moral agent’s understanding and discernment of virtue itself (and therefore tolerance)?

A second question I have is related to John’s conversation on friendship and virtue. I appreciate John’s insistence that relationships and friendships enable a different engagement with objectionable difference. I agree with John that one is patient out of the love one has for a friend. Where there is no friendship, acts of forbearance and tolerance are unlikely. As John says, “it is the antecedent friendship that generates my obligation to endure” (220). John does anticipate his critic in relation to this claim. What if no prior friendship exists? This tends to be the case when we are talking about the cultivation of civic virtue within our national political community, where little engagement transpires between communities across objectionable differences. To be fair, John asserts that where there is no friendship, the potential desire of friendship among enemies could make possible tolerance, forbearance, and patient endurance. Yet, I would like to invert this question about the desire to friends: as an African American woman, should I desire to be friends with others who overtly make clear that their central goal is to refute the equal humanity of blacks and other non-white Americans? Do I fail the test of virtue if I reject those who refuse my humanity? I am quite compelled by feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman’s argument that certain dominant accounts of virtue “burden” marginalized groups. Given the enormous power dynamics within any society, how do we speak about the desire and practice of friendship as virtuous without allowing this account to become an example of burdened virtue in which oppressed groups bear an unfair moral cost? I have enormous anxieties over the language of friendship, especially when privileged groups are calling on the necessity of this virtue.

Moreover, I am left wondering how this possibility or desire is, if at all, related to our current pluralistic moment in which various communities neither have the desire to be nor see the possibilities of being “friends.” If friendship is not even desired in this current political moment, where does that leave us? Is the telos toward which John’s account of tolerance is directed a practical possibility if friendship is simply impossible?

For certain, John has offered a formidable account of tolerance that breaks open a new conversation. I began reading his book, filled with innumerable hesitancies. I finished his book quite compelled to continue this discourse on new ways of thinking about tolerance.

It is one of life’s epistemological tricks that intolerance is so easy to spot in others, but impracticable to see in oneself. I opened the first pages of Tolerance among the Virtues self-satisfied and self-assured that toleration had slim place among the virtues. I participate in the scholarly retrieval of virtue ethics, drawing heavily on premodern sources mentioned in the first pages of the book (3). The tables were soon reversed on me as I found reasons to begin to consider tolerance within the tradition of the virtues and to appreciate that its embodiment might encourage “honest and transparent debate about the disagreements and differences that unsettle our political lives and social relationships” (8).

Bowlin’s book creatively constructs from its very foundations the classical anthropological and emotional architecture of tolerance—

(1) a virtue that attains a mean between two extremes,

(2) its internal structure as a virtue of the will associated with justice, and

(3) a virtue that scales out to relationships with other passions.[/NL]

His book deals extensively with this repertoire of concepts as he sorts them in right relationship to one another. It will make sense to the reader that he builds an elaborate and careful conceptual framework—in part if they are familiar with Bowlin’s previous work on contingency in Aquinas’ ethics, but also—because Bowlin wants to shift our attention from tolerance as act and policy to tolerance as a virtue. This is the cumulative effect of the first several chapters of the book and I will focus on Bowlin’s framing of tolerance as a virtue.

(1) The Mean between Two Harmful Extremes

Aristotle’s definitions of virtue are difficult to improve upon, and Bowlin implicitly takes his starting point from him. Bowlin describes toleration as a virtue that attains a mean between two extremes (34). Recall Aristotle’s definition of the mean from Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics:

In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the thing itself or relatively to us; and the equal is an intermediate between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all; for the intermediate relatively to us that which is neither too much nor too little—and this is not one, nor the same for all. For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object; for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this is the intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little—too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises. The same is true of running and wrestling. Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this—the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us. (1106a27–b7)

Aristotle’s extremes concern the measure of the thing itself relative to us—its arithmetical proportion. With justice, for instance, the excess is to exceed in one’s external operation what was dictated by the mean—a student deserves an “A” on the paper, and in addition the professor is now offering to do the student’s dry cleaning. The deficiency is to fall short of what is dictated by the mean of justice—a student deserves an “A” on the paper, and in addition the professor docks the student’s grade for not liking his personality. Both fall short of the mean of justice.

Let’s grant that tolerance is “the license given to the one who is endured to speak and act in certain ways across certain lines of disagreement and difference, or the activity of enduring some objectionable difference” (18n1). Reconsider tolerance’s excess and deficiency. Its excess would seem to be allowing all lines of disagreement and difference to be crossed with no regard for distinction or differentiation—vacuousness. It implies negligence of something crucial, a live-and-let-live of something vital. This might be construed from different sides of what are taken to be our current political commitments. For example, then Cardinal Ratzinger writes that modern life is ruled by the “dictatorship of relativism” (21); or, for example, negligence in the sense of anything that reaffirms and reinstates insidious sexist racist power dynamics. For the other extreme, tolerance’s deficiency, would be an inability to allow any difference or differentiation whatsoever—prejudice. This is the sense that any difference posed becomes immediately “unbearably harmful,” and this is a pain of which Bowlin writes throughout his book. This deficiency is the human default that overwhelmingly concerns Bowlin—the collective “we” Aristotle invokes frequently in the Nicomachean Ethics. Thus we have, thanks to Aristotle, tolerance taken to be a mean with two extremes of vacuousness and prejudice. There is a problem here. Bowlin construes the two extremes of toleration as “harmlessly unobjectionable” and “unbearably harmful,” which are problematic on Aristotelian grounds (28). The excess and the deficiency of toleration must necessarily be harmful as extremes. Aristotle concludes: “Virtue is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate” (1106b 25–28). To my mind, Bowlin does not need a significant conceptual shift to set this aright. I would, however, love to hear more from Bowlin on the vices contrary to tolerance. Also, might he go further in specifying these “harms”? They are introduced in the context of their being intolerable and unbearable. It would be wonderful to see a catalog of examples bearing these out.

(2) Tolerance as Primarily a Virtue of the Will

Bowlin is such a skillful interpreter of Thomas’s thought that readers may not appreciate that they have, with Bowlin’s help, handily navigated some highly contentious matters regarding the operations of intellect and will. Namely—that tolerance is a virtue that emerges at the level of desire and willing, but also requires a transformation of one’s cognition. (For a deeper treatment of these topics, consult Bowlin’s expert “Psychology and Theodicy in Aquinas,” where he traces Aquinas’s debts to Augustine at the same time as he sketches Aquinas’s relationship to Scotus’s voluntarism [114n8]). For Aquinas, the intellect moves the will by default. For example, this Thanksgiving I decide that it’s in everyone’s best interest not to say anything to upset the family dynamic and so goes my desire to, despite their worst provocations, keep everything copacetic. (The pumpkin pie always helps.) There are, Bowlin admits, certain moments “in the Christian drama of salvation that compel [Aquinas] to imagine a will that moves itself quite apart from reason’s judgment about the good that is best” (114). Of course this concerns cases where we choose something less than ideally desirable for ourselves—when I had decided that it was in everyone’s best interest not to upset the family dynamic (based on the intellect’s judgment), I had wanted not to upset the collective family goodwill (based on the will’s desire), but then, in a free movement of the will, I act out desire that was previously forbidden and proclaim my anarchist sympathies to the shock and dismay of all (will breaking from intellect’s judgment about what’s good and best, regarding some lesser good of the shock and awe campaign as better). Tolerance works along these lines, Bowlin tells us, in that tolerance’s judgments are primary in its act. Could Bowlin say more about toleration as an act of the will, as requiring a certain formation of will, as a recognizable virtue of the will that justice itself is? In short, I would love to have an account of what it would look like for a will to be habitually, dispositionally tolerant. Returning to Aristotle, we find a definition of virtues as dispositions or inclinations to act or feel in certain ways. What would it be to have your habitual, first response to the world be a “tolerant” response? Teasing this out further to individuals who have shown tolerance to be a “second nature”—are there saints known for their tolerance? Moral exemplars of tolerance? Are there examples of historical and contemporary societies that have flourished by giving tolerance a central role?

(3) Is Tolerance Passionate?

Bowlin is a singular writer who can piece together many virtues and the passions and seamlessly segue between them, understanding keenly the complexity of our inner lives. One grouping includes tolerance, patience, and endurance. Tolerance is associated with justice, whereas patience and endurance are two passions that are traditionally associated with the virtue of courage. They are intimately related to one another, Bowlin shows, through a deeper unity of the virtues (151). This is a fascinating move, though I wonder if Aquinas would be on board. In making tolerance out to be a virtue that necessarily requires patient endurance, Bowlin builds passionate responses into the heart of a virtue that is meant to be an act of justice. According to Aquinas, though, justice is not meant to be about the passions—as are the other moral virtues—but about operations (ST II-II 58.9). Strictly speaking, justice is meant to be without the passions, disengaged from an emotional register in its operations. Other passions may accidentally accompany its operations, but not necessarily. Again the passions surface when Bowlin makes tolerance out to be difficult. This sends us back to Aquinas’ early treatment of the passions (ST I-II 23.1). Some passions regard something as good or evil absolutely—joy, sorrow, love, hatred; some passions regard something as good or evil as difficult to obtain or arduous—daring, fear, hope. When Bowlin writes about tolerance near perseverance, he makes it sound like the latter, that it can be difficult and arduous (147). However, if tolerance were truly allied to justice, it would regard the good simply and absolutely (ST II-II 58.10.ad2). Thus there are aspects of tolerance that, if it were allied to justice, would actually seem to thwart some of the aspects of the emotional repertoire that Bowlin wants to highlight. I am inclined to doubt that these are inherent limitations in Aquinas’s account so much as our needing to reach for further workarounds to help facilitate Bowlin’s insights into tolerance using Aquinas’s nimble anthropology. Perhaps might even consider re-narrating some affective responses that Bowlin describes in his book? Many of the experiences of tolerance that Bowlin does describe sound painful, irritating, or agonizing. Yet there are some examples of tolerance—for example, the monks at Tibhirine—whose affective experience appeared a sense of peace of which Augustine writes in the latter chapters of Book XIX of the City of God. Perhaps Aquinas’ treatment of the fruits, beatitudes, and gifts of the Holy Spirit under the auspices of charity—joy, peace, and mercy—would help provide the intellectual grist that Bowlin is searching for?

The monks of Tibhirine may show us something further: tolerance turns out to be not only an eminently pragmatic virtue for our times, but one that may even have overwhelmingly stronger underlying motivations. For the monks, their tolerance was a hallmark of their living in harmony with their Muslim neighbors. And this tolerance even became a source of tension when it was extended toward the Islamic fundamentalists who began to threaten the stability in the region and who were ultimately blamed for their martyr deaths. But tolerance was not, perhaps, the most important virtue of all the virtues that marked their lives together. They lived charitable lives of remarkable friendship to the Algerian people and faith in Christ. So, too, there are background virtues that inform and shape even our mundane tolerance. “Consider Uncle Halvor. Prone to racist innuendo and cruel bigotry across the holiday dinner table, you tolerate him nonetheless,” Bowlin writes. “You tolerate his presence and his odious remarks for the sake of the society you share with him in the company of these others. You secure this common good for him insofar as he is a member, but you should shed no tears if Aunt Hildegard would leave him and if he would depart the family. So it goes” (120). To be fair, Bowlin provides an academic account of our relationship to Uncle Hal, but it feels abstract. When we tolerate Uncle Hal, we probably also have in mind that he invited us to his farm that one Christmas when Grandma lost electricity and he made everyone hot chocolate. And we appreciate that he still struggles to keep the small-scale family farm going despite his knee problems. We plan to visit the farm again this summer when the calves are born. One day we do plan to attend Uncle Hal’s funeral and we do expect to cry—well, maybe only a little—for this person, who, yes, is prone to abhorrent racist remarks, but a person all the same. We tolerate his presence not just for the sake of the common good and not just for the sake of the family at large, but for the sake of our genuine love for this human being. This is why I especially loved that Bowlin’s book on tolerance brought us back to a treatment of friendship and charity, in the end. If there is any hope for tolerance, it will be forged through friendships and the abundance of life-giving love.

John R. Bowlin’s book on tolerance could not have been published in a better time: 2016 was the year of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump won the primaries to become the president of the United States in the following year. Many countries from Western to Eastern Europe register an unprecedented rise of populist figures and movements whose common denominator is intolerance. Using the favourite strategy to blame others for our problems, they fuel hatred towards everyone who fits the description of “not us”: foreigners or foreign countries (the EU), intellectuals (experts), minorities, women, the down and out people. The success of this populist hate strategy has often been correlated with the expansion of new social media that facilitate such channelling of negative emotions and enclose people into what has become known as “social bubbles.”

The year 2016 was also when the EU-Turkey deal ended the European refugee crisis that in 2015 divided not only the EU itself, but also most of its membership countries, including those who do not have almost any immigrants such as the Czech Republic or Poland. The heated debate about immigration in whose flames many populists added their fuel sharpened the feelings of the two opposing parties and escalated the conflict that now divides not only countries and political parties, but also families and friends (see Anne Applebaum’s alarming record of Poland in Applebaum 2018).

Such expansion of intolerance calls for a focused research on tolerance, but also represents a special challenge: the general theory has to connect with actual cases and attempt to make sense of them. It has to do it sensitively and intelligibly, using the vocabulary and conceptual framework of the time and place. Whereas I greatly appreciate that Bowlin attempts to build a concept of tolerance that covers both the political and the personal domain, I believe his exclusive reliance on Thomistic analysis of virtue does not give him conceptual resources for a detailed moral psychology that such a broad conception would require.

Tolerance, according to Bowlin, is a virtue—that is, a disposition to act tolerantly both in personal relationships and in political communities when they are divided by disagreement and difference. The act of tolerance consists in the “patient endurance of the objectionable difference.” Contrary to alternative responses such as coercion, constraint, expulsion, and withdrawal, tolerance aims at unity and peaceful coexistence with others that includes respect for their autonomy.

The virtue of tolerance, similar to other virtues in the Aristotelian-Thomistic analysis, has a habitual component and a component concerning judgment. Bowlin is absolutely right to emphasise that tolerance does not only concern the responses to objectionable differences, but also the very judgment of what is objectionable: surely, someone who disapproves of any difference exhibited by other people cannot be counted as tolerant irrespective of her consequent actions. Further, tolerance also integrates the judgment of what is tolerable: the tolerant person knows the limits of tolerance and is ready to intervene in cases the offence is intolerably harmful.

While there is a lot to discuss here, I am more interested in Bowlin’s analysis of the habitual (and affective) part of the virtue of tolerance that I believe suffers from his exclusive reliance on Thomistic moral psychology and avoidance of contemporary research on virtue, action, and emotions. The main problem is that following Aquinas, Bowlin limits the “habitual” component to the agential aspects of tolerance: it is a setup of will, desire, and passions that makes the tolerant person prone to act tolerantly (107, comp. also 116). External action certainly is important, but one might be inclined to think that tolerance is one of the virtues that perfect also the inner life of the tolerant person, such as her emotions (comp. Hursthouse 2001, 11–12). Bowlin specifies the necessary end (or “motive” as I would call it) of the act of tolerance, namely the common good and individual autonomy. Nothing, however, is said about the emotional responses to the objectionable difference that the tolerant person patiently endures in the act of tolerance. Yet, similar to the cases of misplaced judgment we saw above, there are emotions that the tolerant person simply cannot have whether or not she acts on them or only patiently endures them.

It is for example very natural to be at times angry or irritated by other people’s weaknesses, such as stupidity, shallowness, and arrogance, or by the acts that exhibit these. Yet it is quite a different thing if such disapproval of a partial characteristic gives rise to hostile feelings against the whole person, such as hatred, spite, contempt, or repulsion. To adapt Bowlin’s example: it is one thing to patiently endure the neighbour’s son’s irritating music, but it is quite a different matter if what one endures is rising contempt or hostility towards the little ignoramus and towards the social group his musical taste represents. Similarly, it is one thing to hate Uncle Harvor’s (or one’s mother’s, brother’s, sister’s) racism, but quite another to hate Uncle Harvor (or one’s mother, brother, sister). Such personal enmity, albeit suppressed, is more threatening to the unity and peaceful coexistence with others than open conflicts and confrontations that are conducted with an underlying sense of fellowship. It is this secretly endured, unexpressed hostility that finds indirect expression, support and dangerous enhancement on social media and in the speeches of populist politicians. Such emotions are at the very root of intolerance. Any account of tolerance must give us means to distinguish them from the innocuous responses to objectionable difference.

Yet, even if the concept tolerance is amended in this way, I do not think that it represents the best way to deal with conflicting difference. Patient endurance is a private response of self-restraint that does not reach for the other. It prevents constructive resolution of disagreement and conflict, better understanding and deeper acceptance. This is most obvious in the domain of personal relationships in which the differences often lead to painful conflict, in which anger is the prominent emotion. Contrary to the broader and more anonymous domain of social groups, however, there is the important tool of direct communication to deal with conflict. Anger does not have to be destructive, something to be only endured. When rightly felt, it is a constructive emotion that helps overcoming the conflict by focussing attention, enforcing communication and hopefully reconciliation (Nussbaum 2016, 31–40). It is not the difference itself that leads to alienation and estrangement as Bowlin claims (149–57), it is the way we approach it and I claim that the passive and self-controlled tolerance does not help.

I am now getting to the second point in which I believe Bowlin’s account suffers from inadequate moral psychology that concerns his understanding of difference and of the attitude to difference. Let us first consider the typical situation in which tolerance of some difference is invoked. Bowlin makes it look like the objection the tolerant person raises, her negative judgment of the other’s beliefs, behavior, way of life, etc., is something objective, or at least something most people in the community (and potentially the criticised person herself) can share. That gives the impression that coercion, constraint and expulsion would actually be possible and in a way justified. This point is most pressing in Bowlin’s discussion of forbearance on the example of a moral wrong (215–19). Yet, the case of objection to moral wrongdoing is special in many ways: First, there is the cluster of suitable responses that are not available in other kinds of objection, such as punishment or forgiveness. Second, moral wrongdoing is a relatively independent and separate action. The object of tolerance, on the other hand, is typically something more permanent, such as a character trait, belief or emotion, value or preference that affect the person’s overall behaviour and her way of life.

Far from the objective judgment of a moral wrong, the typical situations that call for tolerance are those in which there is no way of advocating between the two differing, but equal parties, and yet they find each other objectionable, wrong, even abhorrent. Since they are on equal footing, there is also no question of using coercion, constraint, or expulsion. There is no way of changing the other and it does not even seem right. Imagine the difference between a small-town elderly couple and a couple of millennials who decided to spend their holidays in the small town. We can easily guess that there will be lots of mutual disapproval: political orientation and the assessment of the past and future, attitude to sex and family, to foreigners and foreign countries, etc. The two couples will probably dislike and avoid each other, spend some time lamenting about how terrible the others are and blame them for all kinds of imaginable things, including the state of the world. I think this is the kind of setup in which we would like to invoke the spirit of tolerance.

But what we mean and recommend here is not patient endurance. The spirit of tolerance brings a whole new attitude to difference, an attitude of understanding, generosity, and open-mindedness. We want the elderly couple to accept that it is perfectly normal that young people are different, we want them not to be prejudiced against them and start to appreciate the positive aspects that youth brings, such as vivacity and playfulness. We want the young couple to understand that people change when they age and that the time and society in which they grow affect the way they see the world. It does not necessarily mean that they will approve of the other one’s old-fashioned views of family that they see as homophobic and sexist. It means that they will learn to accept that there is this difference, stop being irritated by it and try to cope with it in the way that enables them to meet and enrich each other by the different experience they had in life. Tolerance thus goes hand-in-hand with respect for the difference and with the humble acknowledgment that my objection is only my belief and does not have to be shared by others.

Works Cited

Applebaum, Anne. “A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come.” Atlantic, October 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/.

Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Nussbaum, Martha. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

It gives me great pleasure that philosophers such as John Bowlin have now joined intellectual historians and at least some of my fellow political theorists in recognizing the vanity of the myth that liberalism has spun for decades about its supposed monopoly on toleration. Those of us who have, during the past twenty-five years or so, argued otherwise—that a plurality of principled approaches to tolerance existed historically and cross-culturally and remains relevant today—sometimes feel like dingoes howling in the outback: no creature hears save other dingoes. Judging from Tolerance among the Virtues, it appears that a non-dingo audience for our howling has lately begun to gather. (Please forgive the extended metaphor.) In the present paper, I am not going to praise the many virtues (no pun intended) of Professor Bowlin’s contribution to the discussion, with a single exception, namely his claim that toleration properly understood enjoys a familial relationship—a common genealogy—with what he terms “patient endurance.” He thereby achieves two interrelated goals. First, he demonstrates, convincingly in my opinion, the vacuity of liberalism’s discomfort with a more robust conception of tolerance, of the sort Bowlin proposes. Second, he ties his argument to the achievements of medieval thinkers, most obviously Thomas Aquinas. My purpose at the moment is to offer an alternative path, premised on both of Bowlin’s accomplishments together with the idea of patient endurance, which reaches a nearly identical substantive conclusion, but follows a route I regard as more theoretically condensed (or perhaps just less sophisticated) and practically tenable.

Defense of my position begins, perhaps surprisingly, with reference not to a historical, but rather a contemporary, source. In a little-cited paper, entitled “Judgemental Toleration,” Michael Sandel suggests a theory according to which tolerance may be afforded to otherwise unacceptable ideas or practices for the sake of attaining some other, greater good or avoiding some greater evil.

1 Sandel draws an analytical distinction between a liberal version of toleration, which he labels “non-judgemental,” and a “judgemental” alternative. Taking aim at the Rawls of Political Liberalism, he asserts that liberal toleration has as an essential feature a “bracketing” effect, “in the sense that it seeks to bracket substantive moral and religious controversies; it seeks to avoid passing moral judgment on the practices that it permits.”2 In other words, liberal toleration does not wish to get involved in the messy business of adjudicating the worthiness of the doctrines and practices to be tolerated. To the extent that those viewpoints or ways of life of which I disapprove do not interfere with my own viewpoint or chosen way of life, liberal toleration requires that I refrain from entering into any direct evaluation, let alone condemnation, of them, at least in the public sphere. In this sense, liberal toleration, at least in its dominant mood these days, assumes a strictly “political” orientation, setting aside theological, philosophical, or metaphysical considerations entirely.3

By contrast, “judgemental toleration,” Sandel says, “does not bracket. It assesses the moral worth or permissibility of the practice at issue, and permits or restricts it according to the weight of these moral considerations in relation to competing moral and practical considerations.”

4 Sandel maintains that we can honestly and competently evaluate the relative merits of competing moral claims and restrict or defend their practice as a result of deeper reasoning about the consequences thereof. This implies, it seems to me, that there are three possible categories of judgments available: (1) an act is permissible because there is no clear or compelling moral reason to restrict it; (2) an act is permitted even though there are moral reasons to restrict it because such restriction would itself produce a greater evil or preclude a greater good; and (3) an act is restricted because the moral reasons for such restriction are clear and compelling on the basis of considered deliberation. The second of these three possibilities is the really interesting and important one. On the one hand, it allows individuals and institutions to espouse moral judgments; on the other, it constrains their ability to act in restrictive fashion on the basis of such judgments.5

Sandel recognizes that his concept of “judgemental toleration” is rooted in a longstanding intellectual tradition that can be traced back to the Middle Ages, in particular, St. Thomas Aquinas’s attempt to grapple with the problem of tolerating various forms of faithlessness.

6 Sandel acknowledges that St. Thomas certainly held that the “sinfulness” of unbelief constituted sufficient warrant for its punishment. Thus, we might expect him to advocate penalizing Jews and other infidels. Yet Aquinas demurs, drawing an analogy between God’s tolerance for evils in the created world that might be avoided “lest without them greater goods might be forfeited or greater evils ensue” and the situation of “those who are in [earthly] authority rightly tolerat[ing] certain evils, lest certain goods be lost or certain greater evils incurred.”7 On this point, Aquinas cites a well-known dictum of St. Augustine to the effect that “if you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.”8 Thus, for Aquinas, the conferral of toleration depends upon a calculation of the relative moral merits of the beliefs to be judged. For example, “the rites of other unbelievers” will have to be judged according to their moral bases and consequences. In some cases, “they are by no means to be tolerated”; in other instances, they may be tolerable “in order to avoid an evil, e.g., the scandal or disturbance that might ensue or some hindrance to the salvation of those who, if they were unmolested, might gradually be converted to the faith.”9 In sum, we need not “bracket” the beliefs of infidels (not to mention our own beliefs) in order to accept good reasons to tolerate them, according to Aquinas.

Aquinas’s position should not be regarded as some version of the so-called “permission” conception of tolerance that has been (justly) criticized by modern liberals. According to this model, an asymmetry of power between institutions (such as the Church) and individuals whose conduct or beliefs violate institutional norms (morality, orthodoxy) means that any tolerance afforded “could be revoked at any time” and is thus “a fragile, precarious condition.”

10 So far as I can discern, “permission” so conceived has become the straw man at which liberals primarily take aim when they condemn the very possibility of the presence of a principled medieval theory of toleration. But this does violence to the argument St. Thomas sets forth. In his view, the determination about what to tolerate and what not to tolerate depends upon doing the hard work of moral differentiation between what can be tolerated and what is entirely beyond the pale in the name of some greater good or lesser evil. This forms the core of Sandelian judgmental toleration and the consequent critique of non-judgmental liberalism.

Sandel does not realize that his interpretation of Aquinas touches the merest tip of a massive iceberg. Nor is he to be blamed for this oversight, since he is an analytical philosopher, not a historian of political ideas. What he does not know is that Aquinas’s judgmental conception of toleration is reflective of an overwhelming hegemonic approach to tolerance found throughout early European thought. Permit me to assay an additional example of a medieval version of judgmental toleration, found in canon law. The patron saint of lawyers, the thirteenth-century Dominican Raymond de Peñafort (followed by a host of other canonists), proffered a distinction between three different forms of “permission,” none of which accords with the modern liberal understanding of that term, but which do parallel elements of Sandel’s judgmental toleration. To quote Raymond:

Permission is taken in three different ways. First, when something is allowed that is not forbidden by law. . . . Second, when something is indulged that runs counter to human rules. . . . This is properly called the true and absolute permission, and it excuses from sin. The third type of permission occurs when lesser evils are permitted so as to prevent greater ones. This is called permissio comparativa, and it does not excuse from sin. It should, however, be called tolerantia rather than permission.

11

Whereas liberal critics of judgmental toleration inaccurately regard permission to be a matter of ungrounded and temporary institutional forbearance, medieval canonists saw at work precisely the comparative aspect of tolerance in Aquinas’s sense. Thus, a modern critique of the “permission model” misses the point: permission was understood in medieval legal thought to be a form of rational normative judgment which assured unqualified protection even to those who violate established religious or moral standards. Here we see clearly the close relationship between the concepts of toleration and forbearance that Bowlin seeks to attain in Tolerance among the Virtues.

Versions of Sandelian judgmental toleration may be found strewn throughout the Latin Middle Ages, in the writings of philosophers, lawyers (both civilian and canon), theologians, and political theorists. In a plenary lecture presented at the 2015 International Medieval Congress and published in much expanded form the following year in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, I present an extensive survey of how many prominent medieval thinkers adapted and applied the judgmental approach to toleration to moral and religious concerns as diverse as the practices of money-changing and usury, prostitution and commercial caveat emptor (both strictly forbidden by natural law), justifiable deception, and the ritual sacrifice of innocent human beings by indigenous peoples of the Americas—venial sins all—as well as to the mortal sins of sodomy and heresy. I also developed there a case for the relevance of judgmental toleration to identifying limitations in the work of liberal theorists, contemporary (Guttmann and Thompson) as well as historical (J. S. Mill). Although I rely on some of this material here, I will not rehearse the details of my arguments; I commend the article itself to those who are curious.

12

“What has all of this specifically to do with Bowlin’s book?” you might well ask. My answer: a great deal. In Toleration among the Virtues, he briefly notes the same position advocated by St. Thomas of which Sandel made such great use: “For my purposes, what matters is that he [Aquinas] recognizes the judgment and moral significance of the act. He knows that toleration’s patient endurance can be good, that in certain circumstances it can be right and required” (179). But Bowlin evinces little real interest in the terms of toleration per se as Aquinas proposes it in this form. He quickly moves along to the issue of why Thomas declines to claim tolerance as a virtue. Frankly, I am unsure whether or not judgmental toleration can or even should count as a virtue in the sense Bowlin (following Aquinas) means. Aristotelian/Thomist moral psychology is closely connected to hexis/habitus and character formation, which ill comports with the flexibility required by judgmental toleration.

I think my point may be applied very well to Bowlin’s example of his nine-year-old son, who “retires to his room to listen to music that I despise” (129). He imagines the following scenarios as potential responses to his extreme disapprobation of his offspring’s musical preferences:

(1) “Use my paternal office to coerce his conduct in the hope that his taste in music in might follow” (129);

(2) “I could cultivate a settled indifference to this thumping offense that resounds down the hall” (130);

(3) “I suppose that I could go native and get hip. I could learn to love what I once loathed” (130);

(4) “I am able to endure patiently precisely because I am confident that this too will pass, that in time musical maturity will come, our tastes will converge, and my need for tolerance will fade” (154);

or (5) the preferred option: “What my son deserves is my patient endurance, period. In this instance, it is his right, his just due, and I will fall short of true tolerance if I ignore this right” (155).

On the basis of the judgmental toleration that I have discussed, I would like to propose a sixth, and not implausible, alternative: Bowlin should formulate a judgment about his son’s choice in music, because a failure to do so poses real potential for greater harm. Popular music of all sorts is never distinct from a culture that surrounds it (think of rock in the 1960s or R&B a decade or so earlier—and probably jazz before that). Let us consider the rock music of roughly my generation. There were certainly definite interactions between it and other cultural manifestations, some positive (opposition to war) and some dangerously negative (use of life-threatening drugs). I agree with Bowlin’s preference for scenario (5), but does his responsibility as a parent to patiently endure entail the reckoning of no moral constraints whatsoever? Bowlin’s son will probably be just fine, and I am not suggesting there is a causal link between a genre of music and concomitant lifestyle. Yet there always also remains a chance (however slight) that the musical culture in which he is immersed might lead him, say, to skinhead acid rock (my wife, who raised three boys during their tween and teen years pretty much on her own, assures me that there is such a thing) and perhaps into a life that is profoundly repugnant. At some point, refraining from the exercise of moral judgment in the name of a greater good or a prospective evil in the name of the right of Bowlin’s son to become a white supremacist Nazi is an abdication of one’s own moral compass. Monitoring behaviors associated with the preferred music of one’s offspring needn’t interfere with that choice per se. Of course, the skinhead son may always resist or refuse Bowlin’s judgment, but that does not absolve him from making and expressing it anyway.

Might it not be objected that the standards on the basis of which one formulates moral judgments are arbitrary or subjective, thus opening the door for prejudice of all sorts to become the foundation for the limits set to toleration? While prima facie reasonable, this retort assumes that moral judgments are forged in a vacuum, without any appeal to reason. Valid appeal to the terms set by judgmental toleration demands that there be some clear and accessible justification for one’s determination that is open to evaluation. To illustrate my point, let me borrow one example from among many that I have incorporated into my scholarship concerning toleration in the Middle Ages: the Apologia (translated as In Defense of the Indians) by the fifteenth-century Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de Las Casas. The book is a lengthy refutation of scholastic defenses of the Spanish conquest of the “New World,” and the subsequent enslavement, slaughter, or forced conversion of its inhabitants. Throughout the Apologia, Las Casas invokes a judgmental framework. For instance, one argument in favor of Spanish suppression of the Indians’ way of life arises from their supposed practices of human sacrifice and even cannibalism as part of their religion, forms of worship so morally repugnant that the Spanish conquerors had a duty to God to intervene by force in order to protect the innocent. Las Casas responds to this claim by invoking the principle of permissio comparativa: “In trying to prevent the death of a few innocent persons we should not move against an immense multitude of persons, including the innocent, and destroy whole kingdoms. . . . Instead, war must be avoided and that evil tolerated for a while—and, in some cases, permanently.”

13 Beyond his observation, based on his own experience, that the slaying of innocents is uncommon among native peoples, Las Casas appeals to the normative weighing of reasons from multiple sources. First, he says, Aristotle countenances as a “rule of right reason [that] when we are confronted by two choices that are evil both as to moral guilt and punishment and we cannot avoid both of them, we ought to choose the lesser evil. For in comparison with the greater evil, the choice of a lesser evil has the quality of a good.”14 This position, according to Las Casas, is reinforced by natural law, which also teaches the immorality of preferring the greater evil to the lesser.15 He calls such a violation of natural law “a sin, which, although not mortal, is very serious indeed,” invoking the authority of St. Thomas.16 Finally, he appeals to the doctrine that “the doctor jurists give concerning the well-known permission, which happens when evils and even serious sins are permitted so that more serious evils may be avoided or so that the good by which the condition of the state is strengthened should not be obstructed.”17 Indeed, Las Casas overtly employs the language of tolerantia, in the same manner as both Aquinas and the canonists.

One may be repulsed by the idea of forbearing the death of innocents—as Las Casas surely was—but far greater injury and immorality arises from the destruction of a civilization and its people in order to eliminate that practice. His conclusion is defensible judgmentally in the absence of some reasonable alternative, given that saving small numbers of Amerindians from sacrifice and protecting all inhabitants from death are not both possible. Las Casas is hardly advocating tolerance for all instances of ritual execution. Only under conditions like those specified would or should one forebear such practices. This is not a subjective determination; it emerges from a process of difficult moral reasoning. In similar fashion, arrival at the decision to cease patiently tolerating music that licenses and promotes morally abhorrent behaviors must reflect careful consideration of all relevant circumstances. Could intervention in a son’s choice of musical appreciation produce resentment that pushes him into the embrace of the evils that a parent wishes him to avoid? Could some other conduct on the parent’s part—say, monitoring a son’s friends and associates or places he frequents—have a salutary effect? Is it possible to engage in ongoing reasoned conversation between parent and son in which the former lays out concerns about the potential implication of the latter’s music listening habits? Judgmental tolerance is warranted as long as another course of action is likely to produce a greater evil or when moral considerations and practical circumstances suggest that patient forbearance (at least pro tempore) is likely to lead to some greater good. Perhaps the son will, by his own reflection and volition, recognize that his choice of music carries potentially harmful implications. Maybe he is simply enthralled to the latest popular culture fad, which will soon fade. No matter how much one hates the music, judgment involves asking oneself seriously whether the context requires some response beyond a quite acceptable and justifiable expression of distaste: “Son, I don’t like ‘this thumping offense that resounds down the halls’ [Bowlin’s words (130)], but translating my repulsion into intolerant action neither generates a greater good nor constitutes a lesser evil.”