Letters: Precautionary Principle, Toleration (Jan/Feb 2004)

The Precautionary Principle

I very much enjoyed Sam Kazman's discussion of the Precautionary Principle ("Better Never?" Navigator, December 2003). I just wanted to add one more example to his list under the section "Putting the Principle to the Test": if the Precautionary Principle were really a tool for averting risks, I think It's obvious that its proponents would unanimously have backed "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to pre-empt the risks posed by Iraq's possession (or even hypothetical possession) of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

As of March 2003, we had twelve years of solid evidence, consisting of hundreds of documented pages of research findings, to the effect that Iraq might have WMD programs. Both the weak and strong versions of the Precautionary Principle very clearly entail that something had to be done to prevent the potential risks posed by those (potential) weapons. All informed participants in the debate, including the U.N. weapons inspectors, agree that coercive inspections were the only way of preventing such damage. All informed parties also agree that war is the most coercive (and probably the most efficacious) form of weapons inspection. (See Hans Blix's agreement with this claim in an interview with the Toronto Star, Sept. 21, 2003.) So a consistent application of the Precautionary Principle would almost certainly have justified a war aimed at preventing harm (or even hypothetical harm) from Iraqi WMD. Strangely, one sees few environmentalists defending the war. The discrepancy demands an explanation. Do they really think that GM foods or DDT pose a greater threat to us than WMD?

I don't mean to imply that the Precautionary Principle is true, nor that it's the only way (or even a legitimate way) of justifying the war. I only mean that those who endorse the Precautionary Principle ought to explain how it applies to the conduct of foreign policy, where it seems to have fairly "hawkish" implications. Alas, I don't expect an explanation anytime soon.

Irfan Khawaja

Voltaire and Toleration

I enjoyed Roger Donway's article on Voltaire and toleration in the latest Navigator. I have two historical footnotes to add to what he said.

In addition to the two major arguments for intolerance that he mentioned, there was a third argument for intolerance based on Christian love. Tolerance was taken to mean indifference to the other person's fate in the afterlife. If one really cares about other individuals' salvation, Christians argued, one will use any techniques necessary, including persecution, to attempt to make non-believers reconsider. What are a few hours of physical pain compared to the possibility of eternal torment in Hell?

As Augustine put it, in a formulation that was later echoed by Luther, Calvin, and many Counter-Reformation leaders: "What then is the function of brotherly love? Does it, because it fears the short-lived fires of the furnace for a few, therefore abandon all to the eternal fires of hell?"

A second issue is the degree of Voltaire's debt to Locke for many of his arguments for toleration. Voltaire does indeed argue in Lockean fashion that "intolerance begets only hypocrites or rebels," though this is not an original extension of Locke's arguments. Locke had emphasized that point in his Letter concerning Toleration: "Oppression raises Ferments, and makes men struggle to cast off an uneasie and tyrannical Yoke."

This is not to undermine Voltaire's brilliance and importance but only to add to the power and comprehensiveness of Locke's argument.

Stephen Hicks

Roger Donway responds:

Stephen Hicks is quite right about the existence of an argument for intolerance based on concern for a heretic's own salvation, as well as concern for the salvation of those he might deceive. That, implicitly, was the argument Locke is attacking in what my article called his first reason for toleration: his assertion that intolerance cannot compel a man to believe what he does not believe; it can only force him to go through the motions.

But I am not sure the quotation from Augustine expresses this argument. He contrasts "the short-lived fires" for a few to the abandonment of all to eternal hellfire. That seems to be recommending intolerance toward the heretic because he is a deceiver, not because he is himself deceived. If so, Augustine is espousing what I called the first argument for intolerance, and it would be answered by Locke's second argument for toleration: The policy Augustine recommends confuses the role of the magistrate, which is to keep the peace between people, not to save their souls.

As for the degree to which Locke anticipated future advocates of toleration: that is a question I leave to scholars such as Stephen Hicks. In my reading, Lockeanism is fairly tolerant in the realm of theory but sanctions some use of the law to promote personal morality. Thus, in his Third Letter of Toleration, Locke wrote: "If [lawmakers] did not endeavor, with their best judgment, to bring men from their humours and passions, to the obedience and practice of right reason, the society could not subsist."

This two-tiered concept of toleration, it seems to me, created the basis for England's reputation as a land of tolerance and harmony. In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire wrote: "Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion." Exactly. When it comes to religious theory, members of the Exchange differ. But when it comes to behavior, they accept a common code. G.K. Chesterton remarked on the same phenomenon a century and a half later when he wrote that a lady in England does not hesitate to invite an anarchist author to her home, because she knows exactly how he will behave: He will behave like an English gentleman.