TOLERATION

We are fortunate to live under institutions of toleration. Opinions that many of us deem false and pernicious are nevertheless held, and even imparted to others, with impunity. This is so in part because we hold legal rights to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Not only do these legal rights exist; they enjoy widespread support. Any effort to revoke them would be widely opposed. Those whose opinions were threatened with suppression would find many allies, even among those who most deplored their opinions.

But legal rights are far from the whole story. The institutions of toleration are in large part informal, a matter not of law but of custom, habits of conduct and thought. Even when the law lets us do as we like, many of us do not like to do anything that would make people suffer for the opinions they hold, or hinder their expression of their opinions. We may choose our friends and our casual acquaintances as we please, and we are certainly free to shun those whose opinions we find objectionable; but many of us exercise this freedom half-heartedly, or with a bad conscience, or not at all. An editor or a bookseller has plenty of discretion to assist in the spreading of some opinions and not others, and might weigh many different considerations in deciding what to publish or what to sell; but might very well think it wrong to give any weight at all to whether an author's opinions are true or false, beneficial or dangerous.