Abstract
The ‘agents’ of toleration can be divided into three categories: public institutions, groups and individuals. If it is mostly accepted that both public institutions and individuals are capable of toleration, it is not clear that such a capacity can be attributed to groups, although in daily discourse we seem ready to say that a certain social group is (in)tolerant. This article aims to address this issue by investigating the relationship between collective agency and social groups. Formal groups (e.g. corporations) have internal rules and collectively recognized decision-making procedures that constitute a collective behaviour. However, it is not clear if and in what sense such a capacity is also upheld by informal groups. This article discusses some competing criteria to define informal groups and proposes the shared convictions criterion. In conclusion, this criterion is applied to toleration-related issues, so as to reconcile our ordinary understanding of groups’ toleration with a more technical analysis.
Introduction
Much has been said about the nature, the implications and the possible groundings of toleration. But comparatively little has been said about the subjects of toleration, and in particular about groups as agents of toleration. This article aims to investigate this issue; in particular, it tries to fill this lacuna with respect to informal groups, that is, sets of individuals having something in common (such as beliefs, features, goals or attitudes), but lacking an organization, common rules and representatives. In general, the possible ‘agents’ of toleration can be divided into three broad categories: public institutions, groups and individuals. If we understand toleration to mean that an agent is both capable of principled action and of refraining from intervention in some situation that is subject to disapproval, it is mostly uncontroversial to hold that public institutions (such as, for instance, states and other public agencies) and individuals can be agents of toleration. Attributing this capacity to groups qua groups is more controversial. Andrew Cohen’s definition of group toleration seems to apply the same conditions of agency to both groups and individuals: ‘[w]e can define group toleration as: group A’s (or its members’) intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed group B (or its members, or its or their behavior, etc.) in situations of diversity, where group A (or its members) believes it has the power to interfere’. 1 Can we hold that group toleration is the same as that of individuals? Do conditions of agency for groups apply in the same way as for individuals? As we shall see, formally organized groups – such as corporations – may easily be attributed a collective agency, whereas informal groups, such as people sharing ideological or religious beliefs, seem at first glance to lack the requisite conditions of agency.
In general, the nature of social groups is per se a controversial issue and many have claimed that group agency is reducible to the individual agency of constitutive members. Against this background, some theorists have tried to outline the conditions upon which a collective entity could be considered a proper moral agent, capable of performing intentional actions, and subject to moral responsibility. 2 However, such attempts primarily focus on formally organized groups, such as corporations. But these kinds of groups do not include all the social groups that are relevant in toleration-related issues, such as ascriptive groups 3 or other informal groups. Questions of toleration are clearly relevant to, for example, Muslim communities or environmental activists. While such groups have been investigated qua possible objects of toleration, the aim of this article is to try and propose some criteria to be met in order to consider these informal groups as possible ‘agents’ of toleration. If my attempt succeeds, we would come up with a conceptual framework capable of reconciling our common-sense intuitions about the agency of informal groups with philosophical analysis which in most cases reduces group agency to the agency of particular individuals. 4
Generally, two main approaches have been employed in the analysis of social groups: the individualistic approach and the holistic one. The former approach draws on the fundamental assumption that the social sciences do not observe discrete entities identifiable as ‘groups’. Rather, what we commonly call groups result from and can be reduced to mere aggregations of individuals. Thus, individualists argue, what we commonly call groups are mere fictions. 5 Conversely, the holistic approach relies on the idea that a group must be conceived as an entity having features irreducible to those held by individuals. 6 With respect to this debate I shall assume a weak individualist position, that is, I shall not assume a priori that there are irreducible entities such as informal groups, but I shall start from individuals and their relations. Despite the individualist starting point, my account intends to be, hopefully, also compatible with some forms of holism. I shall start from rather ordinary cases in which we seem ready to attribute a collective action to some groups. When we say that, for instance, a certain Muslim community is intolerant, or on the contrary that Quakers, Waldenses or Buddhists are more likely to tolerate other religions, are we simply reifying commonly held but irreducibly individual behaviours or is there a philosophically justifiable sense in which we can make such statements?
To give a starting example of the issues I shall deal with, consider the case of a neo-Nazi group. 7 This group typically has no formal representatives or common rules but is at minimum formed by people sharing the same set of racist convictions. For instance, consider actions of intolerance against immigrants, say from verbal to physical assaults, performed by neo-Nazis scattered all over a country. We would clearly, and correctly I think, tend to attribute part of the moral responsibility of such actions to the group of neo-Nazis as a whole, although only individuals actually performing those assaults could be considered legally responsible. Why? Because we would, correctly, attribute the source of those wrong actions to the shared beliefs of hatred. Attributing different weights to individual or common responsibilities is a controversial issue which will not be addressed here; my aim, instead, is to provide some criteria to be met in order to confer a conceptual and moral status to informal groups, such as neo-Nazis.
The article will proceed as follows. In the next section I shall propose a standard definition of toleration. Then I shall address in greater detail the issue of group toleration; first by specifying what kind of groups I am talking about, and second by discussing critically how others have proposed to explain these kinds of groups. Then, I shall lay down some criteria to account for the agency of these (informal) groups. Finally, I shall draw conclusions from this discourse on group toleration for the overall analysis of toleration.
Defining toleration
Following Cohen’s and other standard accounts of toleration, in what follows I shall lay down a definition of toleration meant to highlight the salient features of toleration as contrasted with related notions, such as indifference and acquiescence. A more complete analysis of the relations between these notions would require more space. This section will be rather brief and I will go on to employ the notion of toleration in the next sections on groups.
In general, toleration is an intentional act of forbearance from interfering with another’s behaviour or belief, where that behaviour or belief is disapproved of or deeply disliked by a subject who has the capacity to interfere with the person whose behaviour or belief is objected to. 8 From this definition, the following features are of particular interest for group toleration.
(a) Requirement of intentionality
First, by describing toleration as an intentional act, I mean that toleration does not derive from a lack of perception of others’ behaviour. If one is not aware that a neighbour is behaving in a way that might be deeply disturbing, this person is not tolerating but simply non-perceiving and therefore non-acting.
(b) Object of toleration
Toleration is typically applied to a range of objects, such as beliefs, behaviours, practices, traditions, cultures or identities. To make this issue easier to deal with, I shall refer only to beliefs or behaviours, to which other objects are in principle reducible. 9 Showing why and how they are in principle reducible would require a longer argument. Therefore, in what follows, for the sake of simplicity let me assume that beliefs and behaviours are the two fundamental objects of toleration.
(c) Reasons to object
There has been a wide debate on the reasons for which toleration is an appropriate response to a belief or behaviour. Peter Nicholson famously claimed that the only way to understand toleration as a moral notion is to assume that a person could tolerate only actions that she deems morally wrong. 10 But Nicholson’s thesis, if taken in its strict version, has been contested, for it yields the famous ‘paradox of toleration’: if one were to tolerate only actions to which one morally objects, there would be no space for toleration, for either an action is morally wrong and thus ought to be prevented, or it ought not be opposed because it is not morally wrong. 11 Either way toleration should not apply. But the requirement that reasons for objection should be moral ones, thus demanding that one tolerate something that is morally wrong, is perhaps too strict a criterion or a misleading one, for uncontroversially discriminating between moral reasons and non-moral ones is a very thorny issue, and there are many good reasons for opposing something which are not necessarily moral reasons. This uncertainty is particularly relevant when dealing with group toleration, for collective behaviours and beliefs typically rest on common identities, traditions or ideologies, whose content does not fall within an unambiguously moral domain, but is nevertheless of vital importance for groups. As I cannot solve this controversy here, in what follows I shall simply assume a comprehensive approach, holding that a necessary precondition of toleration is some form of objection to a belief or behaviour, whether on moral or non-moral grounds.
(d) Refraining dimension
Toleration results mainly in a negative action of self-restraint from possible intervention, when the beliefs or behaviours of another person or group are deeply disapproved of or disliked. Intervention must be possible, because acceptance of some disapproved-of belief or behaviour out of mere incapacity, lack of power or practical impossibility is acquiescence rather than toleration. This condition does not imply that toleration can obtain only in cases in which the tolerating agent has full capacity to prevent the action in question, as between majority and minority groups, or between a state and individuals. Rather, it must simply be the case that the tolerating agent has some capacity to interfere in the tolerated belief or behaviour that it declines to exercise.
Having addressed issues about the definition of toleration, we are in a position to analyse the issue of groups as subjects of toleration. As we shall see, condition a poses the greatest problem to groups as agents of toleration, whereas conditions b, c, and d are meant to make sense of the ordinary use of the notion of toleration in the light of its technical understanding. Indeed, condition b simplifies the types of objects of toleration, condition c also includes in cases of toleration those arising out of not necessarily moral reasons and condition d accounts for possible interactions in which toleration or intolerance occur, whether between state and a group, or between diverse groups.
What kinds of groups are we talking about?
As I suggested at the start of this article, there are three plausible candidates for the kind of agency required for toleration: public institutions (typically states and other public agencies), groups and individuals. The reason why a public institution or an individual can be an agent of toleration is rather clear; they both can have negative attitudes towards the object of toleration and are in a position to enact a rule or perform an action that might interfere directly with the practices of another agent. This depends on the fact that they are both capable of taking decisions and acting intentionally, albeit in a different way. 12 But what about groups as tolerators? How can a group meet the conditions included in the definition of toleration? This will depend, I argue, upon our understanding of groups. The rest of this article will investigate this issue.
The catalogue of criteria needed to make sense of groups is long. In what follows I do not aim to provide a comprehensive account, but, rather, simply focus on the context of group toleration and agency in particular. Here, the most fundamental distinction within the broad category of social groups is between formal and informal groups. 13 By ‘formal group’ I mean a set of persons having an organized structure, representatives authorized to speak in the name of the group, often having statutes and recognized decision procedures. A clear and unambiguous example of a formal group is a corporation that is ruled by appointed managers chosen according to pre-established procedures. Other examples of formal groups are associations, clubs and all other social groups, whether big or small, whose membership is clearly defined, where collective agency is dependent on rules and procedures agreed on by the members. Formal groups, through their rules, statutes, collective decisions, practices and conventions, can tolerate or not tolerate a belief or behaviour in a clear and not particularly controversial way. For instance, the governing body or the statute of a corporation may prohibit the wearing of certain clothes, or the public profession of beliefs which are considered in opposition to the corporation’s ideology.
But formally organized groups do not comprise all of what we mean when we talk about groups. Consider for instance the case of Muslim communities. With respect to other religions, Islam is much less formally organized: Muslims lack a centralized authority, and the actual life of Muslims in many cases is shaped by the way in which local habits and imams’ leadership interpret a comparatively basic set of shared beliefs. How are we to make sense of the possible collective agency of Muslim groups? We need criteria to establish whether and how a certain informal group might be said to tolerate or not. Consider for instance other religious communities lacking a central authority, such as the communities of Waldenses or Quakers. It seems quite uncontroversial to assert that any of these groups, qua such, have been comparatively more tolerant than other religious groups across history. We can make sense of the notion that, for example, Quakers have historically been more tolerant of Jews than have Catholics. Why do we say this? Why do we attribute a collective action to such groups? My argument tries to make sense of these ordinary statements. But before embarking on this, an inquiry into the nature of informal groups is in order.
In a preliminary sense, informal groups are all those sets of individuals lacking rules, structure and representatives, but sharing some feature such as an attitude, a goal and/or a belief, which are commonly recognized and typical of that group. Beyond this, it might seem as though informal groups can be defined only in a negative sense, i.e. as groups lacking an institutional or organized structure. This is not the case, as I shall explain. First, however, I shall further explore the question of the positive traits that individuals must share in order to constitute an informal group. This requires an engagement with arguments from the literature on social ontology.
Alternative theories of informal groups
Diverse sets of persons can have different things in common. At a minimum, people might simply share the fact of finding themselves in the same situation (e.g. on the same train or in a sinking boat). It might be discussed whether and how such kinds of groups count as social groups, but my interest here is not a general survey on the nature of social groups. Therefore, I shall simply skip such cases for they do not show how people might act in a common and persistent way.
Sharing features and causal capacity
Another way in which potentially to aggregate individuals is by virtue of the possession of some shared, permanent trait (for instance, the fact of being red-haired, left-handed, gay or lesbian, or Afro-American). Let us call these feature-based informal groups. In such cases, what the individuals share is not contingent, but the common feature is not necessarily socially relevant and does not provide per se a common reason for action. If the notion of informal groups were taken as a residual category – formed by all those not-organized sets of persons sharing something – any collection of more than one person with shared permanent features might count as an informal group. But the informal groups I wish to take into account are not mere populations 14 or aggregates of individuals, for I am interested in explaining why people think and behave commonly. 15
Another possible criterion to single out informal groups is that of collective causal capacity, as outlined by Virginia Held. Held explores informal groups in the context of potentially attributing moral responsibility to a ‘random [i.e. not-organized] collection of individuals’. This is relevant for our analysis, for attributing moral responsibility requires the attribution of a kind of agency. It is doubtful whether a random collection can be ‘aware of the moral nature of its action’ … in ways that will satisfy the requirements for moral responsibility … But if the action in question is one which could only be taken by the random collection as a group, can a random collection ever be morally responsible for the performance or non-performance of a collective action?
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Another interesting proposal is that of Elizabeth Cripps’s non-intentionalist account of social collectivities. Her idea is that a ‘set of individuals constitutes a collectivity if and only if those individuals are mutually dependent for the achievement or satisfaction of some common interest or shared purpose, goal or fundamental interest, whether or not they acknowledge it themselves’. 18 This sort of mutual-dependency-based informal group is meant to lay down mutual obligations between the members of such a group, e.g. with respect to environmental problems or economic cooperation. This is a promising criterion to account for informal groups. But here I want to explain collective informal agency, and it seems to me that, for collective agency to occur in this type of group, we must draw on other considerations outside her account, whether based on collective intentions or beliefs.
The intentionalist approach
The most important and developed type of explanation of the nature of groups, including informal groups, is the intentionalist approach. Of particular importance are Margaret Gilbert’s theory of plural subjecthood, and Raimo Tuomela’s theory of we-mode and I-mode attitudes to social relations. 19
Gilbert’s theory is an attempt to overcome the individualist–collectivist divide by applying notions usually reserved only to individuals – such as intentionality, commitment and the holding of beliefs – to collective subjects. On her account groups are formed by a collective readiness to share in an action. 20 Her theory is meant to explain daily discourse and also ephemeral ‘groups’, such as the action of two persons walking together, or the common activity of building a house. She claims that individualist approaches fail to explain group formation, for many collective behaviours cannot be reduced to the mere sum of individuals doing and acting in a certain way. When two persons walk together, it is not merely the case that two individuals separately intend to walk together, for when two persons walk together, the two persons form a we, that is a plural subject and a collective intentionality. From this minimal example Gilbert constructs a theory of social interaction, aiming to explain the properties of collective entities, in particular the properties of people doing something together.
Although I share some of her assumptions and outcomes, I claim that Gilbert’s account is incapable of explaining the nature and possible agency of some groups we daily talk about, such as neo-Nazis, Catholics, Muslims or environmentalists. These groups may occasionally share a common goal or have a shared intentionality, but I doubt this is the relevant feature constituting them. Gilbert’s focus on intentionality and commitment, even when dealing with common beliefs, is meant to explain first what people doing something together means. She broadens this idea by admitting that no joint action must actually be performed to form a group, for joint readiness to share in an action is a sufficient condition to form a group. As with the position I am staking out, this theory is meant, contra reductionist and individualist approaches, to do justice to vernacular attributions of group status and agency to many daily human interactions, like walking together. But it is, I claim, incapable of explaining cases of groups who do not actually or virtually perform any action together. As I shall explain, in some relevant cases we can attribute a common action to people who are members of a group, but who do not perform anything together, that is, without sharing a purpose or intention.
In a similar vein, but perhaps with an even more general scope, Raimo Tuomela explores the structure of collective social action and distinguishes between we-mode groups and the I-mode groups. Put briefly, a we-mode group obtains when people collectively and jointly behave in order to attain a certain goal and/or maintain a certain ethos, only qua members of the group and for the sake of the group. An I-mode group obtains when people do something together as private individuals and not for the sake of the group. Tuomela claims that it is only in virtue of the we-mode perspective that we can make sense of many social phenomena. With respect to my concern here, his approach shares much with Gilbert’s, in particular the idea ‘that conceptualizing social life and theorizing about it requires the use of group concepts, indeed the we-perspective and, especially, the we-mode’. 21 This means that in his approach the model of intentional agreement is the fundamental structure in the light of which all other social relations are to be considered. Accordingly, all social behaviours that are not for the sake of the pursuit of a group’s goals are viewed under the I-mode perspective, that is, they are viewed as derivate and private attitudes. 22
In sum, both Gilbert and Tuomela claim that social groups and social facts in general are not performed by individuals qua individuals but only by individuals with a joint commitment towards a group. Collective phenomena, on these views, ought not be viewed as the mere sum of individual behaviours.
Although the intentionalist approach is capable of explaining many social facts, it does not seem to cover the examples from which we started. Indeed, for instance, the group of environmentalists comprises people who are intentionally committed to doing something together, for example boycotting a corporation extracting oil, as well as people who share the values of environmentalism without being committed to performing an action together. A person may be a member of the environmentalist group, even if she understands her membership to entail making lifestyle choices capable of reducing her environmental impact, whatever other people do. The environmentalists form a group to which we correctly ascribe a group agency, whose constitutive trait is not reducible to shared intentionality or the performance of joint actions.
Sheehy’s realism
Finally, let us consider Paul Sheehy’s theory, the most important recent holist stance. 23 Sheehy claims that social groups are existing material things, having an autonomy which cannot be reduced to that of their individual members. He grounds his claim on two arguments. First, he argues, all attempts to explain the social world in purely individual terms fail for the simple reason that groups are necessary to provide meaningful explanations of social phenomena. Second, groups have irreducibly collective causal efficacy; they make things happen in a way that mere individuals cannot. From these two arguments and from the assumption that the best scientific theory we have is a form of realism, holding that the ontological nature of existing things must be explained in realist terms, he draws the conclusion that groups are irreducible autonomous entities having a material existence. Therefore, despite this technical justification, Sheehy ends up claiming that the way we commonly understand social groups, that is, as autonomously existing entities, is necessary to explain social facts. It is hard to deny the claim that our common understanding of groups is explanatorily meaningful and unavoidable. One problem with Sheehy’s materialism is an absence of criteria for verifying the material existence of a group. He relies upon the assumption that, in order to develop a complete taxonomy of existing entities, we must admit the existence of social groups as they are commonly understood. This seems to imply claims about the material existence of groups, which is strange from an ontological point of view and can be verified only in an intuitive and common-sensical sense. Moreover, this material understanding of collective entities seems ill equipped to explain the blurred boundaries of those groups having no institutional rules for memberships: how can a group be a ‘material entity’ if it is unclear how we are to draw its defining limits?
A more plausible position with respect to the existence of informal groups is ontological agnosticism; that is, we may use groups as heuristics with which to explain social phenomena without thereby attributing any ontological standing to them. If corporations have an organization and institutional structure that make them persistent over time and independent of the actual individuals included in the group, informal groups lack by definition such structure and stability over time, and do not have formal rules constituting the institutional collective agency. Of course if we say that a certain group tolerates something or acts in a certain way, we assume that that group, in some sense, exists, but this does not compel us to show in what sense we mean that that group does exist.
Conviction-based informal groups
As these criteria and theories prove unsatisfactory to account for the nature and possible agency of the groups I have mentioned, in what follows I shall propose a different criterion. This criterion is primarily meant to address the issue of toleration, but it may also be applied to other areas. As we have seen, the criterion of sharing a feature does not necessarily provide a reason for action. The criterion of producing an outcome that would not have been produced by an individual alone rules out cases in which individuals or groups might have similar capacities to generate effects. The criterion of mutual dependency does not seem sufficient to explain agency alone. The criterion of joint commitment makes sense only for groups having a common purpose and acting together for the pursuit of a specific goal. Finally, Sheehy’s theory includes a controversial stance on the ontological existence of groups. Instead, to account for toleration or intolerance by informal groups, we need criteria capable of explaining an action of a collectivity, which might also be performed by individuals alone, which is not dependent on the sharing of a specific goal, and whose temporal span is not restricted.
The criterion I propose is based on the twofold idea of shared convictions that are reasons for acting in a common way, and whose authority derives from their being shared with other persons who are members of a group. There are a number of groups, that we appropriately call groups in our daily discourses, whose binding feature is the sole sharing of a common ideology, way of life or set of values. The sense of these groups, such as environmentalists, does not rest on the fact of doing something together as the intentionalist approaches claim, for the goals they certainly share (for instance the goal of reducing human impact on the Earth) may also be discharged by individuals alone, unlike walking together. But the people forming these groups nevertheless act in a certain sense as a group, in virtue of the convictions they share and the collective authority – namely, the capacity to guide individual behaviour – of these convictions.
To explain how the authority of common convictions works, an example of becoming a member could be useful. Consider a person who comes to know the environmentalist culture, via friends, associations or TV broadcasts. The beliefs expressed by this culture are convincing enough that this person comes to believe and behave accordingly. Although, at the beginning, the appeal of the environmentalist culture was due – say – to similarity with beliefs already held by that person, for instance her innate and spontaneous appreciation of natural beauty, after a while that person starts thinking that environmentalist values are convincing by themselves without the support of motivations coming from other domains. Then, suppose also that that person actively engages with the study of environmentalism and learns that some of her favourite habits, like eating pineapples, produce high carbon emissions because of the distance they must travel. If she decides to stop eating pineapples, because she now thinks that her practice is unjust, precisely because she now recognizes that creating extensive carbon emissions is a wrongful practice, she may enter the environmentalist culture and become a new member of the environmentalist group. In other words, if she is deeply convinced by the environmentalist culture, i.e. if she is a real, albeit new member of the environmental group, she may decide to stop eating pineapples because she now thinks that her practice is unjust, precisely because she now recognizes that creating extensive carbon emissions is a wrongful practice, as part of the shared beliefs of the environmental culture. This is not simply a case of independent formation of personal beliefs, for the vehicle of conviction is the recognition that the environmentalist culture is a source of valid reasons and values. How does it happen? A person recognizes the authority of the values of a group when she identifies herself, and her values and convictions, with those of the group, that is, when a person recognizes that the values and convictions of that group are also hers. This process of ‘merging’ of values and convictions ends up creating a new identity of the new member. Once the new member is ready to declare herself ‘environmentalist’, the environmentalist culture exerts its authority on her. This quite ordinary example shows that a set of beliefs might become authoritative, that is, recognized as a valid source of influence on one’s behaviour, even in the absence of institutional enforcement or direct social pressure. This principle can also be extended to many other cases – such as cases of people becoming members of an informal religious group – and may explain situations of established members recognizing the authority of the shared group convictions. Let us call this type of informal groups conviction-based informal groups.
One may object that many cases that could fall under the category of conviction-based informal group do in fact have a formal dimension, namely associations or lobbies claiming to represent the interests or identity of the members of the group. For instance, environmentalists form a typical example of a conviction-based informal group, but one may counter this by pointing out environmental associations, such as Greenpeace, that, qua association, can be considered a formal group in virtue of its rules for membership and representatives. This example in fact highlights what is unique about conviction-based informal groups, however; namely, the fact that not all members of the group recognize the legitimacy of the purportedly representative association. In many cases diverse associations make competing claims to legitimate representation of an informal group.
As I shall explain soon, the criterion I am proposing not only provides a definition of those groups that share nothing other than a set of convictions, but may be usefully applied beyond obviously informal groups, for many relevant formal groups cannot be reduced completely to their formal dimension. Consider, for instance, the Catholic Church. It is both a formal group, for it can be defined as a highly organized and institutionalized group (with the Pope, bishops, priests, canon law, etc.), as well as a conviction-based informal group, for the Church is also the total amount of believers. This means that, even when Catholic believers live in contact with the institutional dimension, for instance, when they receive the sacraments, their life as believers, that is, as members of the group, is not reducible to the contact they have with the formal dimension and may involve a number of frequent situations and behaviours which the formal dimension has nothing to do with. One may counter my claim by saying that in the case of the Catholic Church the informal dimension of shared convictions is importantly determined by the formal one, for the set of principles and beliefs affirmed by any given member of the Catholic Church is recognized as Catholic only if scrutinized and accepted by the Church’s authorities. In a sense this is true, but a group as complex as Catholicism comprises a vast number of ideas and recommendations developed over long periods of time, at least some of which may be mutually contradictory. Moreover, any given idea is subject to a range of interpretations by the actual leaders of the Church, by the local clergy and by individual believers. This means that, despite the Church’s attempt to exert control over the convictions and ideas forming the Catholic identity, this control cannot be complete. The presence of interpretive grey areas or even outright dissent suggests that the formal dimension is not exhaustive, and the notion of a conviction-based informal group might provide additional insight into nominally formal groups. In cases of formal groups, the informal dimension also shows the possible divergence between formal membership and actual behaviour. A person might be a member of a group having a formal organization, and yet behave in a way that is not compliant with the group’s requirements, precisely in virtue of her belonging to another informal group.
The differences and possible contrasts between formal and informal dimensions of a group point to the problem of discrepancies between the behaviour of the group’s institutional apparatus and that of (at least a number of) its members. This fact may pose the problem of whether the ‘dissenting’ parts of a group may still be considered members, to the extent that they reject principles or decisions viewed (rightly or wrongly) as necessary conditions for institutional membership. Let us consider the case of a Catholic believer dissenting with some of the Church’s decisions regarding, for instance, sexual behaviour and euthanasia. It would be strange not to consider that person still a Catholic if she continued to identify herself as such. On the other hand, some areas of dissent seem obviously fatal to continued inclusion in the Catholic Church – rejecting the belief in Jesus, for example. A dissenting person might still be considered a member of the Church to the extent that her dissent is based on (a different interpretation of) some principles of the doctrine and does not touch the core beliefs. In such large and complex groups as the Catholic Church, although the membership may be completely dependent on formally regulated criteria (being baptized, not being excommunicated), the actual life of a member includes a number of relevant situations and decisions, many of which are by and large independent of the group’s formal dimension. Complex formal groups, such as the Catholic Church, or informal groups like environmentalists, frequently include a number of possible diverse interpretations of beliefs and subsequent behaviours. When clear formal criteria to be a member of a group are in place, these trump informal criteria (one cannot declare oneself Catholic if one has been excommunicated or is not baptized), but where formal criteria are not in place, the way in which we can explain if and how a Catholic behaves as a Catholic depends on the set of convictions, considered authoritative and reason for action, she holds. Accordingly, subgroups within the domain of Catholicism may be singled out depending on the coherence, or lack thereof, between the group’s official ideology and the actual convictions of subgroups of members (e.g. the group of those Catholics who do not comply with the Church’s prescriptions on homosexuality or euthanasia).
One might object that the notion of informal groups thus specified is too inclusive, for it may also be applied to too many and generic groups, and non-economic, for it tends to create multiple subgroups. In both cases it might be said that it risks diluting its explanatory relevance. On the first critique, I should like to remark that the idea of conviction-based informal groups is meant to explain informal group agency, thus applying only to cases in which people behave according to common convictions. Therefore, for instance, atheists or anti-abortionists might be groups falling within my account only to the extent that their members are motivated on the basis of a clearly recognizable set of convictions, that are commonly held to be authoritative. 24 A person who is anti-abortionist for idiosyncratic reasons, and not on the basis of typical reasons (such as the sacred value of life) is not part of the group in the sense I mean here, but only from a sociological point of view. On the second objection, similar considerations may be staked out. If we take seriously the idea that convictions must be authoritative, it is likely that the feared proliferation of subgroups, were it a problem, would not occur. But here also general considerations of relevance and utility may limit the indefinite proliferations of subgroups.
As a final objection, it might be said that the idea of conviction-based informal groups has a problem in ascertaining the membership, for the relation between one’s conviction and one’s behaviour is impossible to verify. This may be true, but it is also the structural problem of other informal categories. Although the threshold defining the membership is impossible to draw in this case, degrees of strong or weak membership might easily be observed by looking at one’s commitment to follow certain common convictions.
How can a conviction-based informal group tolerate?
In what follows I shall try to understand the implications of this account of informal groups for the question of toleration. Drawing on the criterion outlined for conviction-based informal groups, we might say that an informal group tolerates another individual’s or group’s belief or behaviour when two conditions obtain:
the large majority of individuals belonging to that group tolerate a belief or behaviour; individual toleration is motivated by authoritatively shared collective reasons, in two respects: (a) individual members of the group share the reason for which a certain belief or behaviour is disapproved of or disliked; (b) individual members of the group are motivated to refrain from intervening with the disapproved belief or behaviour by a shared conviction belonging to the common culture of the group.
The first condition is the precondition for the empirical existence of a tolerating group. Lacking institutional agency, group toleration is ‘parasitic’ and not free-standing, in the sense that it rests upon the tolerating behaviour of individual members.
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The second condition establishes the collective dimension of individual behaviour. This condition does not depend on the very controversial issue of the existence of separate and specific entities such as social groups (contra Sheehy’s claim); rather, it simply requires that individuals be moved by reasons that they recognize as reasons shared by other persons who are mutually recognized as members of that group. This motivation condition is twofold: 2(a) the reason to disapprove of or deeply dislike a belief or behaviour and 2(b) the reason to forbear from interfering with the disapproved of or disliked belief or behaviour. Condition 2(a) is necessary to single out a common pattern of behaviour: if a set of persons, defined as a group, had diverse beliefs and were moved to toleration by a variety of reasons there would be no basis on which to posit a group as a tolerating agent. This does not mean that there wouldn’t be a group for other reasons. Consider for instance the relation between Catholics and Jews across history. In many cases Catholics have tolerated Jewish communities for reasons unrelated to any shared convictions. For instance Jews have been tolerated for prudential reasons, or because it was more advantageous to the majority of members. Despite this we can certainly say that such Catholic communities did form a group, although in such cases they did not act collectively out of shared reasons when tolerating Jews.
If the members of a group satisfy only condition 2(a) and tolerate something on the basis of wholly individual reasons, we might say that this group tolerates extrinsically; whereas if the reason adopted to forbear from interfering with the disapproved of belief or behaviour is said to belong to the shared convictions of the group, thus satisfying condition 2(b), we might say that this group is intrinsically tolerant. For instance, let us consider two Christian denominations: Catholics and Quakers. Qua Christians both should be moved by the precept ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, but while pacifism and non-violence form central tenets of Quakerism, Catholic doctrine has in many epochs included a justification of holy war. 26 Therefore, in virtue of the doctrines backing the convictions we might say that Quakers as a group are intrinsically tolerant, whereas Catholics have been in many periods extrinsically tolerant, for their attitude towards other religions depended on other factors.
If these two conditions obtain, we would not say that an informal group acts in the same way as an individual or a public institution, but we should nevertheless recognize that individuals belonging to that group behave in virtue of common motivations that are sufficient reason to behave and think in such a way. This indirect attribution of the capacity to tolerate to a group, via individual recurrent behaviours and common motivations, has the advantage of being compatible with both individualistic and holistic approaches to discourses on groups. It is compatible with individualism by virtue of its ontological parsimony, assuming only individuals as the ultimate existing entities. It is compatible with holism in that the communal dimension is required in order to make sense of the authoritative convictions that make members of a group behave in a particular, shared way. Since the group dimension depends on collective authority, but actions ultimately rest with individuals, the relevant question here is not ‘who’s doing what?’, but rather ‘on what basis do individuals forming a group act?’ 27
Finally, let us reformulate the definition of toleration mentioned at the beginning to meet the conditions of conviction-based informal groups. A specified informal group might be said to tolerate other beliefs or behaviours of individuals or of other groups when most of its members forbear from interfering with those beliefs or behaviours, which are disapproved of by the group’s shared convictions, as a result of other and more important shared convictions (intrinsically tolerating group), or by other individual convictions aggregated in a manner conducive to temporary forbearance (extrinsically tolerating group).
Conclusion
Starting from a standard definition of toleration, I have questioned in this article whether and in what sense a group could be said to tolerate a belief or behaviour. To do so, I have investigated the nature of social groups. While formal (i.e. institutionalized) groups, with rules and decisional procedures, have a clear form of collective agency and the possibility of tolerating or not tolerating on this basis, the ascription of toleration-related agency to informal groups has required more detailed investigation. Five types of criteria to define informal groups have been considered (common feature, common causal capacity, mutual dependency, joint commitment and Sheehy’s holist account). I have argued instead for a conviction-based criterion in order to account for informal groups as well as informal parts of formal groups. Finally, I have reformulated the starting definition of toleration in accordance with the criterion of conviction-based informal groups so as to make sense of the common-sensical attribution of a capacity for toleration to such groups.
With this account, some of our common-sense understanding of groups may be reconciled with a technical understanding of the capacity to tolerate. The normative implications, concerning how informal groups are to be treated by public institutions (e.g. how should a public institution consider the claims coming from an informal group and how can an informal group be included in political participation?), and the kind of responsibility that might be attributed to them, exceed the scope of this article, which was primarily that of trying to lay down the conditions to recognize a conceptual and moral status to conviction-based informal groups.