page_title: Toleration
section_title: Mill
hierarchical_section_title: Toleration / In the nineteenth century / Mill
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Ernest Renan (1823-1892)
context_page_description: Toleration is the allowing, permitting, or acceptance of an action, idea, object, or person which one dislikes or disagrees with. Political scientist Andrew R. Murphy explains that "We can improve our understanding by defining "toleration" as a set of social or political practices and "tolerance" as a set of attitudes.". Where Random House Dictionary defines tolerance as "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one's own;" toleration is the practice of applying those attitudes within a social or political setting.
  Both these concepts inherently contain the idea of alterity, the state of otherness. Additional choices of how to respond to the "other," beyond toleration, do exist. Therefore, in some instances, toleration has been seen as ‘a flawed virtue’ because it concerns acceptance of things that were better overcome. Toleration cannot, therefore, be defined as a universal good, and many of its applications and uses remain contested.
context_section_description: John Stuart Mill's arguments in "On Liberty" (1859) in support of the freedom of speech were phrased to include a defense of religious toleration:
   Let the opinions impugned be the belief of God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality... But I must be permitted to observe that it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less if it is put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions.
caption: Renan
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa", "Image DateTime": "2010:10:10 17:21:31", "Image ExifOffset": "78", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "314", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4407", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "828", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1035", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "831", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "1040", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "178", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "802cdc5a4848e85965810ae3056669f7"}