Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice

Abstract

In his book Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice, Kok-Chor Tan challenges the realist tradition's popularity and its assumption that the state of nature is essentially immoral. Instead, he points to the growing role of international government organizations ( e.g., the UN and the EU), which he states indicate morality's global predominance. Centered on the premise of liberalism's primacy- as an ideology and a practice- the book focuses on the philosophical tensions among liberals in terms of liberalism's meaning and scope. Two questions domjnate his analysis: First, what are the limits of liberal toleration, and should liberal states tolerate or criticize nonliberal states in the name of furthering liberalism? Second, is liberalism, based on the idea of individualism, compatible with collectivist cultures or societies? Within this context, the author examines liberalism's domestic and global consequences. Tan notes that if a society is formatted along the parameters of liberalism, then toleration and individualism compliment each other. However, as such compatibility does not exist in nonliberal states, the question becomes one of liberals' morality and responsibility in terms of whether such non liberal states should be tolerated. By posing this question, it appears that the author is alluding to the implications of liberalism in the international front, namely, whether liberal states have the jurisdiction to intervene in nonliberal states' matters of domestic jurisdiction. Another question is whether such intervention - in defense of individualism, morality, and autonomy - contradicts the very essence of liberalism, namely, its commitment to autonomy even for nonliberal states. The author phrases the question slightly differently by asking whether liberalism's emphasis on autonomy (defined in individual terms) defines the limits of tolerating non liberal states. ln addressing the questions surrounding the moral imperative of liberals vis-a-vis nonliberal societies and states, Tan distinguishes between two kinds of liberalism: political liberalism with an overriding emphasis on toleration (acceptance), and a comprehensive liberalism with an overriding emphasis on autonomy and individualism. In other words, those political liberals restrict their concerns only to those "uncontroversial concerns of society." Instead, the concern is on the design of political institutions and, ...