Toleration

In Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, he develops several lines of arguments that are intended to establish the proper spheres for religion and politics. His central claims are that government should not use force to try to bring people to the true religion and that religious societies are voluntary organizations that have no right to use coercive power over their own members or those outside their group. One recurring line of argument that Locke uses is explicitly religious. Locke argues that neither the example of Jesus nor the teaching of the New Testament gives any indication that force is a proper way to bring people to salvation. He also frequently points out what he takes to be clear evidence of hypocrisy, namely that those who are so quick to persecute others for small differences in worship or doctrine are relatively unconcerned with much more obvious moral sins that pose an even greater threat to their eternal state.
In addition to these and similar religious arguments, Locke gives three reasons that are more philosophical in nature for barring governments from using force to encourage people to adopt religious beliefs (Works 6:10–12). First, he argues that the care of men's souls has not been committed to the magistrate by either God or the consent of men. This argument resonates with the structure of argument used so often in the Two Treatises to establish the natural freedom and equality of mankind. There is no command in the Bible telling magistrates to bring people to the true faith and people could not consent to such a goal for government because it is not possible for people, at will, to believe what the magistrate tells them to believe. Their beliefs are a function of what they think is true, not what they will. Locke's second argument is that since the power of the government is only force, while true religion consists of genuine inward persuasion of the mind, force is incapable of bringing people to the true religion. Locke's third argument is that even if the magistrate could change people's minds, a situation where everyone accepted the magistrate's religion would not bring more people to the true religion. Many of the magistrates of the world believe religions that are false.
Locke's contemporary, Jonas Proast, responded by saying that Locke's three arguments really amount to just two, that true faith cannot be forced and that we have no more reason to think that we are right than anyone else has. Proast argued that force can be helpful in bringing people to the truth “indirectly, and at a distance.” His idea was that although force cannot directly bring about a change of mind or heart, it can cause people to consider arguments that they would otherwise ignore or prevent them from hearing or reading things that would lead them astray. If force is indirectly useful in bringing people to the true faith, then Locke has not provided a persuasive argument. As for Locke's argument about the harm of a magistrate whose religion is false using force to promote it, Proast claimed that this was irrelevant since there is a morally relevant difference between affirming that the magistrate may promote the religion he thinks true and affirming that he may promote the religion that actually is true. Proast thought that unless one was a complete skeptic, one must believe that the reasons for one's own position are objectively better than those for other positions.
Jeremy Waldron, in an influential article, restated the substance of Proast's objection for a contemporary audience. He argued that, leaving aside Locke's Christian arguments, his main position was that it was instrumentally irrational, from the perspective of the persecutor, to use force in matters of religion because force acts only on the will and belief is not something that we change at will. Waldron pointed out that this argument blocks only one particular reason for persecution, not all reasons. Thus it would not stop someone who used religious persecution for some end other than religious conversion, such as preserving the peace. Even in cases where persecution does have a religious goal, Waldron agrees with Proast that force may be indirectly effective in changing people's beliefs. Much of the current discussion about Locke's contribution to contemporary political philosophy in the area of toleration centers on whether Locke has a good reply to these objections from Proast and Waldron.
Some contemporary commentators try to rescue Locke's argument by redefining the religious goal that the magistrate is presumed to seek. Susan Mendus, for example, notes that successful brainwashing might cause a person to sincerely utter a set of beliefs, but that those beliefs might still not count as genuine. Beliefs induced by coercion might be similarly problematic. Paul Bou Habib argues that what Locke is really after is sincere inquiry and that Locke thinks inquiry undertaken only because of duress is necessarily insincere. These approaches thus try to save Locke's argument by showing that force really is incapable of bringing about the desired religious goal.
Other commentators focus on Locke's first argument about proper authority, and particularly on the idea that authorization must be by consent. David Wootton argues that even if force occasionally works at changing a person's belief, it does not work often enough to make it rational for persons to consent to the government exercising that power. A person who has good reason to think he will not change his beliefs even when persecuted has good reason to prevent the persecution scenario from ever happening. Richard Vernon argues that we want not only to hold right beliefs, but also to hold them for the right reasons. Since the balance of reasons rather than the balance of force should determine our beliefs, we would not consent to a system in which irrelevant reasons for belief might influence us.
Other commentators focus on the third argument, that the magistrate might be wrong. Here the question is whether Locke's argument is question begging or not. The two most promising lines of argument are the following. Wootton argues that there are very good reasons, from the standpoint of a given individual, for thinking that governments will be wrong about which religion is true. Governments are motivated by the quest for power, not truth, and are unlikely to be good guides in religious matters. Since there are so many different religions held by rulers, if only one is true then likely my own ruler's views are not true. Wootton thus takes Locke to be showing that it is irrational, from the perspective of the individual, to consent to government promotion of religion. A different interpretation of the third argument is presented by Tuckness. He argues that the likelihood that the magistrate may be wrong generates a principle of toleration based on what is rational from the perspective of a legislator, not the perspective of an individual citizen. Drawing on Locke's later writings on toleration, he argues that Locke's theory of natural law assumes that God, as author of natural law, takes into account the fallibility of those magistrates who will carry out the commands of natural law. If “use force to promote the true religion” were a command of natural law addressed to all magistrates, it would not promote the true religion in practice because so many magistrates wrongly believe that their religion is the true one. Tuckness claims that in Locke's later writings on toleration he moved away from arguments based on what it is instrumentally rational for an individual to consent to. Instead, he emphasized testing proposed principles based on whether they would still fulfill their goal if universally applied by fallible human beings.

Toleration

Toleration :: تعاليق

Toleration