Abstract

There is a fundamentally important philosophical problem with the notion of ideological freedom: If an individual is ideologically free, it means she may hold a certain body of beliefs and may act on the basis of principles derived from this body of beliefs. When the same freedom goes for other individuals, different world-views emerge leading to different body of actions in the same context among those people living together. Different actions will naturally conflict. These conflicting actions resulting from different world-views can be ordered by laws and rules in order to ensure the peace of this group of individuals, but the internal systems of beliefs that these individuals possess will not accord with their restricted actions. Nor will it comply with some of others’ actions allowed by the established order. The situation will ultimately give rise to an “axiological tension” for most of the individuals. In order to ease this tension, it is usually put forward that some social behaviors such as “tolerance,” “connivance,” and “allowance” should be implemented among individuals of different ideologies. This paper claims that such a behavioral approach that aims to implement the above social behaviors does not resolve the problem. On the contrary, it creates further problems. The paper, instead, claims that the background metaphysical and epistemological beliefs should be the focus and it examines three apparent options in this sense: revising the extant, stressing on the common, and generating new metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that can be shared by all relevant parties. The last option, this paper claims, is the most promising one to overcome the problem of axiological tension.