Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice By Kok-Chor Tan (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 228 pages.)

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, ...