Abstract

In this paper I focus on religious pluralism and on the possible conflicts arising from it. I couch my thoughts within a liberal horizon, in which toleration plays a crucial role. My argument will develop in three stages as follows. First, I intend to point out some accounts of toleration with special regard to the contested version of toleration as recognition. I will then refer to critics who invoke a return to toleration as simple noninterference. Second, I will argue for reasonableness instead of toleration as a better instrument by which to accommodate differences in the political community. And third, I will defend a "modus vivendi" as a way to include people who do not subscribe to the requirements of reasonableness, i.e., to so-called public reasons, understood as reasons that all should accept; in such a "modus vivendi" people may coexist peacefully in spite of not sharing the same moral values.