Abstract
In this paper, I take issue with Peter Balint’s recent account of the value of
toleration as an instrument for securing freedom-maximising outcomes in pluralistic
societies. In particular, I question the extent to which the ideal of toleration
can be entirely reduced to someone’s intentional withholding of negative interference
whose value lies in the protection of individual negative freedoms. I argue
that couching the value of toleration entirely in these freedom-maximising terms
fails to do justice to the relational value of toleration. To see this value, we must
also have in sight the drastic changes that appeals to toleration make to the
nature of what goes on between the tolerator and the tolerated, not only to the
state of affairs that is created by their relation.