Pluralism - Conference Programme Session 9

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 9: Ethics, Tolerance and The Political
Chair: Cecile T. Lowe

On the Significance of Ethics for Modern Social and Political Institutions
Stefan Riegelnik
Vienna University of Economics, Vienna, Austria

In the past decades new institutions such as supranational unions, various forms of think tanks and other organisations have been founded with the aim of coping with contemporary problems. With the occurrence of these new institutions, new forms of political and social relations have arisen, too.
Along with this development, serious misgivings have been expressed about the low degree of transparency in political decision procedures. The lack of background information leads to disenchantment with politics and to mistrust in the relevant reports in various media. A lot of people claim to know the ‘real’ reason for the last war on Iraq, but who can justify these claims to be well founded? And who has a grasp of all the well-elaborated decisions of institutions of the European Community? In brief, the conditions or theoretical frame of various decision-procedures seem not to be comprehensible.
As a reaction to this situation, new laws have been approved in the United States, e.g. the “Lobbying and Ethics Bill”, which ought to regulate the activities of lobbying organisations in order to gain more transparency. Also in the European Community, questions about the implementation of legal or ethical norms have been discussed vividly more recently. But contrary to the United States, remedy is sought by laying down ethical codes, e.g. the “Code of Lobbying Ethics”.
I will argue that neither laws nor ethical codes can play a decisive role for improving this situation. Since it cannot be regarded to be desirable that all our behaviour gets determined by fear of sanctions, viz. by laws, and since the norms laid down in ethical codes are notoriously not specific enough (partly because the are negative and partly because they have no specific content in order to function as guidelines), the need for a new form of ethical reasoning seems to be obvious in the face of all the challenges of the 21st century. In my argumentation I will appeal to the general ethical considerations about the developing a modern kind of virtue ethics, as suggested by G.E.M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Ursula Wolf, Robert Spaemann, and Charles Taylor.
I will show, too, that one of the essential conditions of correcting certain political or economical practices is the formation of a “virtuous” character rather than a restriction of behaviour through norms imposed by ethical codes. But as a consequence of these considerations, it should be clear, too, that essential changes of social ‘frame’-conditions are required; only talking about virtues in a world with enormous inequitable allocation of goods, exploitation of labour, and destructive treatment of the environment seems prima vista futile.

The Concept of Tolerance and Ethical Relativism
Gabriele M. Mras
Institute of Education and Philosophy, Vienna University of Economics, Austria

Modern societies have to cope with the fact that there are different criteria of evaluating human behaviour: what is judged to be permissible in one society is regarded to be wrong in another. Given that modern moral philosophy cannot provide a method that justifies some of these standards as unconditionally right ones, “toleration” of “others”, i.e. different beliefs or principles of acting, seems to be an attitude that has itself value, insofar it is supposed to enable a kind of social interaction that is characterised by respect.
The applicability of the principle of toleration, for which centuries ago philosophers as Spinoza, Locke, or Mill argued, has nonetheless always been questioned, too, most recently because it was supposed to justify restrictions onto the extent to which expressions of religious belief are allowed to be criticised. The tendency to make claims in the name of “toleration” that are in fact expressions of intolerance is one usage of this concept in which its original significance gets perverted. I want to focus on an understanding of “toleration” that seems to me equally wrong, namely the equation of its meaning with a particular view, namely value relativism.
Value Relativism as alleged implication of “toleration” is not only put forward in some theoretical discussions, but also used to defend the permissibility of certain economic practices in third world countries. (Examples of how the exploitation of particular economical conditions and dependencies is defended by appeal to different social evaluation standards are well known). The possibility of ab-/ misusing a concept like “toleration” for sure cannot prove it to be problematic as such. It must, nonetheless, be acknowledged that a purely formal understanding of “toleration” – as moral philosophers have warned us since the times the concept of “tolerance” got promoted in the 17th and 18th century – gives us no means to judge various unwanted application of this concept to be misguided. One expression of this problem is a paradox that arises, if one takes as meaning of “tolerance” the required attitude of acceptance of practices one is opposed to. Since this meaning suggests that it would be ethical acceptable to do something that is morally wrong, the meaning of (ethical) requirements vanishes completely. This does count on my view as an argument against value relativism as a position one person, one community, or one society could possibly be in (see Bernard Williams, Joseph Raz). But, since the criticism of value pluralism only shows that the acceptance of standards, one is opposed to, must not be understood in this way, still no qualitative content is given to the very principle in question. Thus, if “toleration” is to be a concept that limits the permissibility of certain behaviour that violates the esteem of others, one has to analyse the sources that allow the paradox of toleration to arise.
I will – following Scanlon and Raz – try to give such an analysis. This will include showing that as long as “toleration” is understood as acceptance of particular factual social standards of evaluations the problem of determining the conditions under which it should be exhibited and in consequence the question of how to justify any limitations to this principle will necessarily remain.

Beyond Tolerance
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Research & Project Development Director, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain