experience to bestow on the claim that an intolerant act is obligatory because it is
divinely commanded an epistemic status greater than that of a conflicting principle of
moral wrongness that does not have a fairly high epistemic status. In that case, according
to my Baylean argumentative strategy, it is the moral principle that is to be rejected. The
strategy seems to yield a good argument for intolerance in this particular case.
It is at this point, I believe, that the negative epistemic consequences of religious diversity
do something to advance the cause of religious toleration. The existence of religious
diversity will (for those who are aware of it) reduce the epistemic status of claims that
God has commanded and thereby made morally obligatory intolerant conduct to levels
below those that they would occupy were there no negative epistemic consequences of
religious diversity. So when my Baylean strategy is applied using moral principles that
are less than certain or evident by the natural light, it is likely to succeed more often,
given the negative epistemic consequences of religious diversity, than it would otherwise.
Religious diversity thus both creates the need for toleration and contributes to the
epistemic grounds for it. It is probably impossible to say with quantitative precision how
many cases of success will result from this factor. And there is no guarantee that, even
with its assistance, the strategy will succeed in all the cases in which liberal champions of
religious toleration would like to have strong arguments against intolerant actions or
social practices (see Quinn 2001).
Of course, contemporary liberal political theories typically have strong doc trines of
religious toleration built into them. Thus, for example, the liberal political conception of
justice constructed by John Rawls (1993, 58–62) can provide internal reasons for
extensive regimes of religious toleration. But opposed political conceptions can no doubt
offer internal reasons for various sorts of religious intolerance. The results of our
examination of some classical arguments for religious toleration will surely seem
disappointing to those in search of independent reasons for the tolerant habits now
widespread in liberal democracies. There are powerful objections to Locke's argument,
and my Baylean strategy may well lack the power to support the full array of tolerant
practices dear to the hearts of contemporary liberals. I therefore judge that the arguments
we have inherited from the early modern champions of religious toleration leave some of
its practices resting on rather shaky philosophical grounds.
A Novel Opportunity: Definitions of Religion
Immanuel Kant presents a famous definition of religion in Religion within the Boundaries
of Mere Reason (1793/1996). According to Kant, “Religion is (subjectively considered)
the recognition of all our duties as divine commands” (177). This simple formulation
illustrates one sort of problem that arises when a philosopher attempts to define religion.
It is generally acknowledged that Theravada Buddhism is a religion. However, its
doctrines do not include belief in a personal divinity capable of issuing commands. So it
seems that recognition of duties as divine commands on the part of its adherents is not a
necessary condition for being a religion. It thus appears that Kant's formulation does not
specify the correct extension for the concept of religion; it seems to fail to provide
conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for being a religion. If we agree that this