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No Abiding City: Hume, Naturalism, and Toleration1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Abstract
This paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime.
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References
2 King, Preston, Toleration (New York: St Martin's Press, 1976)Google Scholar.
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6 Dees, Richard, ‘ “The Paradoxical Principle and Salutary Practice”: Hume on toleration’, Hume Studies 31 (2005), 145–64, 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to this article in setting out Hume's explicit account.
7 As Robert Frost didn't quite say, ‘A sceptical tolerator is someone too broadminded to take her own side in directing public power’.
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14 I want to thank Martin Bell for pressing me on this point.
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19 Nelson, op. cit. note 8.
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26 I agree, then, with Bricke, John, who argues that ‘it is a fundamental mistake to assume that one of the characters in the Dialogues serves as the author's primary spokesman’ (‘On the Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues’, Religious Studies 11 (1975), 1–18, 3)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bricke argues for this conclusion on quite different grounds: ‘[N]either Philo nor Cleanthes could speak for Hume, for each is less of a philosopher than Hume is, each at times expresses distinctly un-Humean views, and neither develops a reasonably clear, well-argued, and consistent position’ (13). Although Bricke argues for the same hermeneutic as I do, he does not apply it to draw any conclusions about the message of the Dialogues.
27 Op. cit. note 12, 4.
28 Hume, David, History of England (8 vols, London: Talboys and Wheeler/W. Pickering, 1826)Google Scholar; The Natural History of Religion ed. James Fieser (London: Macmillan 1992); ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ in Selected Essays ed. Stephen Copley & Andrew Elgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38–43.
29 Op. cit. note 12, 85.
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34 Op. cit. note 12, 82.
35 Op. cit. note 12, 83.
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37 This paragraph draws particularly on Rawls, John, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’ in Freeman, Samuel ed., Collected Papers (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 303–58Google Scholar and on Rawls, Political Liberalism, op. cit note 5, Lecture III. It ignores a range of interpretative and historical questions about the development of Rawls's views, but is, I believe, accurate to the spirit of his eventual position. It further ignores Rawls's suggestion that ‘political liberalism applies the principle of toleration to philosophy itself’ (Political Liberalism, 10) simply because I don't understand what that means.
38 Wiggins, David, ‘Claims of Need’ in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (3rd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1–58Google Scholar.
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40 Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, op. cit. note 37, 306. This increasing particularism is, I believe, partly a consequence of Rawls's encounter with Michael Walzer. I have argued against Walzer's distinctive version of particularism in Clark, Samuel, ‘Society Against Societies: the possiblity of transcultural criticism’, Res Publica 13 (2007), 107–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 David Brink has argued that Rawls attempts, illegitimately in his own terms, to make the ideal of the citizen exempt from this process of modification towards consistent reflective equilibrium: ‘Rawlsian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987), 71–90.
42 A stable and successful theocratic regime might not physically harm anyone (although this seems unlikely on the historical record of such regimes). Even if so: first, there are long-standing and plausible enlightenment arguments that such regimes do psychological and developmental harm; second, there are arguments I have already canvassed in discussing Hume, above, that theocratic regimes are inherently unstable and must expect to face internal opposition which will eventually lead to violence.
43 I want to thank Derek Edyvane for pressing me on this point in several conversations.
44 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (revised edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, section 21.
45 Op. cit. note 12, 53.
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