ABSTRACT
Faced with conflicts between groups like the Catholics and Huguenots of sixteenth-century France, we desperately want to find a compelling argument for why everyone should accept toleration, at least in principle. We could then claim that reason offers a clear solution to the problem and that anyone who rejects toleration does so on the pain of irrationality. Such an argument, we might hope, would show why toleration is rational for anyone, so it would not depend for its success on the vagaries of the situation or on any particular historical context. While we could then recognize that reason does not always carry the day, we would have a program, endorsed by rationality, that we merely need to find some means to implement.
