Toleration is the ‘virtue’ most valued in an age that is shy of moral judgement. If there is no objective moral foundation for the good, only a series of value judgments, with no objective criteria to decide between them, then there are no objective standards with which to compare these judgments and decide between them. Toleration, then, is the key virtue on a terrain in which the question of moral truth can never be settled. In a world that is ‘beyond good and evil’. All that remains is ‘tolerance’, which, of course, presumes antagonistic, individualistic relations, no genuine embrace of the other, mere sufferance.
But it is a self-contradictory notion. For all of the importance of toleration within a liberal framework that is value neutral, the idea of toleration necessarily involves judgement in that it presupposes the disapproval of or objection to positions which we judge to be objectionable and yet tolerate for reasons of peace. In this respect, the much vaunted virtue of toleration in the modern world is not the real thing, which is based on love, affection and respect for others in the context of the good, but is a pseudo-tolerance born of an agnosticism towards the good. If the world is objectively valueless and if value is created by the human subject, then we live in a world of myriad value judgments without the means of deciding between them. All views are equally right, and equally wrong, we are beyond good and evil. Ultimately, such toleration is empty. It is a short step from agnosticism to indifference, from the view that we do not know the good to the view that we can never know the good. And from there, there is no step at all to the denial that the good even exists. This being so, there is a failure to see moral controversies as attempts to settle something of real value, with something more substantial at stake than interests, perspectives and positions. Hence the degeneration of the moral terrain into indifference, the sense that it makes no difference at all which value should win out in the competition in the moral market place. This false value of toleration, then, denotes a society incapable of discerning the good, a society that has lost the grounds for true judgement and which, as a result, is without conviction, commitment, concern and consideration. True toleration presupposes love and respect, a sense of the good, the conviction that moral judgments matter and make a difference. (apologies for the long passage, but this is something I am currently writing on, how we can recover our ethical and political commons to give us a common ground on which to constitute the common good).