My new book, Toleration and Freedom From Harm: Liberalism Reconceived, is now available from Routledge and on Amazon.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize some of the views I defend in it, including my defense of parental licensing.  I also offer a refinement of my previous conceptual analysis of toleration and a detailed explanation of my (Feinbergian) account of harm as well as explanation as to how I think we ought to understand the harm principle.  That provides a basis for my view regarding the moral limits of toleration of cultural differences and toleration internationally as well as (of course) the limits of toleration of individual behavior.  Those limits, I think, are generally limits any libertarian should be happy with.

Here’s the advertisement:

Toleration matters to us all. It contributes both to individuals leading good lives and to societies that are simultaneously efficient and just. There are personal and social matters that would be improved by taking toleration to be a fundamental value. This book develops and defends a full account of toleration—what it is, why and when it matters, and how it should be manifested in a just society. Cohen defends a normative principle of toleration grounded in a new conception of freedom as freedom from harm. He goes on to argue that the moral limits of toleration have been reached only when freedom from harm is impinged. These arguments provide support for extensive toleration of a wide range of individual, familial, religious, cultural, and market activities. Toleration Matters will be of interest to political philosophers and theorists, legal scholars, and those interested in matters of social justice.  [I had toyed with calling the book Toleration Matters.]