ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the debate concerning the exact scope for practices of toleration in a liberal, multicultural democracy grounded in the principle of equal respect for persons. To clarify my domain of investigation, I need to mention explicitly one fact, one normative presupposition, and one challenge compressed in the previous sentence:
The fact: contemporary democracies are inhabited by different cultural and religious minority groups who are the bearers of beliefs and practices informing ways of life that may be perceived as alien with respect to the mainstream.
The normative presupposition: liberal democracies are morally justified qua the best political institutional instantiation of the principle of equal respect for persons, which requires that someone's moral status as a person be reckoned with while interacting with her. Such a status derives from someone's moral personality, which I take to consist in her possessing the basic capacity for self-legislation: the capacity to form and pursue a life-plan articulated through rules of which an individual can regard herself both as the author and the addressee (see Bird 1996; Boettcher 2007; Forst 2010; Larmore 2008).
The challenge: how can liberal democratic institutions treat all members of society, including those belonging to some minority group, in a way that is consistent with the demands of the principle of equal respect for persons?
