by Phil Parvin
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have discussed how Rawlsian liberalism might be understood as neutral with regard to different conceptions of the good, and have outlined two important criticisms of liberal neutrality: a criticism made from within liberalism by comprehensive and perfectionist liberals who argue that liberalism should be grounded in a particular conception of the good life over others, and the criticism of comprehensive and political liberalism made by Iris Marion Young, who argues that liberalism entrenches dominant ways of life at the expense of minority values. We will pick this final point up in Chapter 17, in our discussion of multiculturalism.
Key ideas
Neutrality of effect: The idea that, in order to be neutral, the state would need to ensure that all the conceptions of the good that any individual might choose could be chosen.
Neutrality of justification: The idea that principles should be neutral in the sense that they are not justified by any particular comprehensive doctrine. This is the conception of neutrality defended by Rawls and other political liberals.
Perfectionist liberalism: A form of comprehensive liberalism premised on the idea that liberal states should promote ways of life which are valuable, and discourage ones which are not.
Dig deeper
Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Fact-check
1 What sort of state neutrality does Rawls advocate?
A Neutrality of effect
B Neutrality of justification
C Neutrality of outcome
D Neutrality of oppression
2 What, according to Rawls, should the state be neutral between?
A Conceptions of the good
B Conceptions of justice
C Liberalism and anti-liberalism
D All of the above
3 Which of the following could Rawls endorse?
A Subsidizing opera because it is better than football
B Subsidizing football because it is more popular than opera
C Subsidizing opera because it would die out without subsidy
D None of the above
4 Which of the following objections apply to neutrality of effect?
A It is difficult to achieve
B It is undemocratic
C It is inefficient
D All of the above
5 What is liberal perfectionism?
A The claim that liberalism is perfect
B The claim that liberals are perfect
C The claim that liberals should defend state neutrality
D The claim that liberals should reject state neutrality
6 What is liberal about Raz’s liberal perfectionism?
A It is based on autonomy
B It is compatible with a variety of valuable ways of life
C It does not try to coerce people into one particular conception of the good
D All of the above
7 Which of the following would Raz endorse?
A Subsidizing opera because it is a valuable art form
B Subsidizing football because it is more popular than opera
C Subsidizing opera because it is very expensive
D All of the above
8 Why, according to Raz, is state subsidy sometimes justified?
A Because state officials are cleverer than citizens
B Because it is important to protect a range of valuable ways of life
C Because liberty is unimportant
D Because inequality of resources means that subsidy is required
9 Why does Iris Marion Young reject the idea of neutrality?
A Because neutrality is impossible
B Because neutrality conceals oppression
C Because ‘neutrality’ tends to mean the views of the dominant
D All of the above
10 Why is state neutrality bad for gender equality, according to MacKinnon?
A Because women reject state neutrality
B Because state neutrality leaves social inequality intact
C Because political leaders are usually men
D Because feminism conflicts with equality of justification
16
Multiculturalism
The question of whether, and how, liberal states should remain neutral with regard to different conceptions of the good is central to the debate about how states should respond to cultural diversity. Anglo-American political philosophy was dominated throughout the 1990s by debates about multiculturalism. Do cultural and religious minority groups have an equality-based claim for special treatment? Should certain groups be exempted from general laws if these laws can be shown to conflict with their cultural or religious beliefs? Is it appropriate for states to distribute public resources to religious and cultural groups in order to ensure their continued ability to practise their beliefs? Furthermore, does liberal toleration require tolerating illiberal cultures and practices? Should liberal states allow sexist religious groups to constrain the freedom of their female members through the enforcement of strict gender norms, or homophobic religious groups to punish or demean their members on account of their sexuality?
These questions summon fundamental philosophical debates about the nature and scope of liberal neutrality, the coherence of the liberal distinction between public and private, and the redistribution of resources in liberal states. They are also very important and controversial political questions. In this chapter, we outline the dominant philosophical defence of ‘liberal multiculturalism’ advanced by thinkers like Will Kymlicka and Joseph Raz, and then discuss some criticisms of it. It is important to distinguish multiculturalism as a fact from multiculturalism as a normative position. Viewed as a fact, multiculturalism refers to the existence of cultural diversity. As a normative position, multiculturalism refers to the idea that justice must take special account of culture, with special policies needed that go beyond standard, culture-blind liberalism. This chapter focuses on multiculturalism as a normative position. The criticisms discussed will be criticisms of this normative position, not criticisms of the fact of cultural diversity.
Spotlight: Canada
Canada is arguably the nation-state most committed to normative multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is affirmed in the Canadian constitution and at the federal level in the form of the 1988 Multiculturalism Act. The act affirms the social importance of immigration and of the diverse identities of Canada’s immigrant population, as well as the rights of so-called ‘first nations’ groups such as the Inuit and Aboriginal communities. Multiculturalist policies in Canada have historically included the allocation of public funding for the maintenance of ethnic and cultural minority activities, the introduction of a ‘multicultural’ school curriculum, affirmative action for historically disadvantaged cultural minorities, and exemptions from dress codes, the most symbolic and obvious being the provision that Sikh members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police could wear their turbans instead of the traditional head dress.
The argument for liberal multiculturalism
Defenders of liberal multiculturalism object to the ‘traditional’ liberal approach to cultural diversity on practical and philosophical grounds.
THE PRACTICAL OBJECTION
Until relatively recently, a broad consensus existed among liberals about the status of religious and cultural beliefs. Religion and culture were priv
ate in the sense that they were matters of conscience. As the liberal state does not enforce a particular conception of religious truth, so religious life was seen as appropriately belonging within the private sphere beyond the scope of the state. The liberal state should thus allow individuals to observe their religious beliefs, and to engage in the practices attendant to those beliefs, as freely as is commensurate with everyone else being able to do the same. Everyone may follow their religious beliefs, but no one may be forced to follow any particular religion. Most importantly, religious views would not figure in the justification of state authority, or in decisions made by state institutions about matters of public life (such as the redistribution of public resources). In Rawls’s terms, such matters would be placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’.
This approach, while dominant, became controversial in the wake of the communitarian critique of liberalism because it appeared to favour some religions over others. In particular, it permitted the observance of religious beliefs which could easily fit within the private sphere, and ruled out the observance of beliefs which required public expression. But many religions require their members to do things which cannot be easily fit within what liberals call the private sphere. Religious believers may be required to observe certain practices in public. So the policy of universal equal concern via privacy imposes unfair burdens on some groups and not others, and fails to provide clear guidance on how the public disagreements arising out of religious diversity might be best resolved.
For example, Islam requires women to cover themselves in public, while Sikh men are required to wear turbans. Such requirements inevitably thrust religion into the public sphere and raise public policy dilemmas. Many liberals and feminists, for example, have suggested that the Islamic requirement that women be covered in public embodies sexist attitudes toward women and, hence, should be discouraged or even outlawed on the grounds of equality. The French government has recently passed a law outlawing the public wearing of the burkha. Similarly, the Sikh requirement that men wear turbans is a public requirement which gives rise to conflicts. Should Sikhs be allowed to wear their turbans in the workplace, for example? If wearing the turban is a core requirement of their religious beliefs, then allowing employers to ban Sikhs from wearing them in the workplace seems to represent a substantial constraint on their right to practise their religion and to pursue their own conception of the good free from interference. However, if employers are required to permit Sikhs to wear their turbans in the workplace, then what happens when doing so hinders their ability to do their job in some way? For example, should Sikh men be exempt from UK laws which require all builders working on building sites to wear protective helmets? Should Sikhs be exempt from rules which require police officers to wear helmets as part of their uniforms?
The traditional liberal claim that religion is private does not seem equipped to resolve these questions. Liberal states which take the protection of religious freedom seriously may have to ensure that members of religious groups receive special treatment to enable them to practise their religion on an equal basis. That is, to use terminology which we introduced in Chapter 1, liberal states must protect not just formal freedom of religion, but also the effective freedom to engage in religious practices.
Such a view has important implications for one area of policy in particular: the just distribution of resources. The traditional universalist liberal approach, most obviously exemplified in Rawls’s justice as fairness, is clear: conceptions of the good should not affect resource distributions. Liberal multiculturalists argue that this approach entails the unjust ‘benign neglect’ of minority groups. Just as providing the disabled with the effective freedom to live a life that they have chosen on an equal basis with others might require the state giving them extra money or resources that are not available to non-disabled people, so providing members of minority groups with the effective freedom to engage in religious or cultural practices might require the state to give them money or other resources that are not available to others, like spaces in which to worship or time off to celebrate religious holidays.
The first objection to the traditional liberal approach to cultural and religious diversity is therefore that the liberal state must engage in deliberate and explicit reform of the public realm (through public policy and law) to secure for all individuals the effective, rather than merely the formal, freedom to practise their cultural and religious beliefs on an equal basis with others.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL OBJECTION
The second objection is more philosophical in nature: a person’s culture at least partially defines their identity and, as such, is crucially bound up with their capacity to be free. This claim is made by liberal multiculturalists such as Will Kymlicka and Joseph Raz (e.g. Kymlicka 1991 and 1994). They argue that, insofar as liberalism is concerned to encourage individual autonomy (that is, one’s ability to choose and pursue a way of life for oneself), then it must also be committed to protecting the integrity of those cultural values which provide the background against which these choices about how to lead one’s life are taken.
Drawing on communitarian insights about the importance of community membership in shaping our ideas about the world and ourselves, multiculturalist liberals like Kymlicka argue that the state has a role in politicizing minority cultural groups in the name of individual freedom. Kymlicka argues that we live our lives within a particular cultural context of values and ideals which we inherit from our community. Our culture represents the background ‘context of choice’ which renders certain ways of life meaningful or meaningless, valid or invalid, desirable or undesirable, or moral or immoral. Culture is thus crucial to individual autonomy because it provides the historical and normative framework within which we make choices about how to live our lives. Consequently, the liberal state must ensure that all individuals are able to access their culture, and to engage in those practices which ensure the survival of that culture, as a means to protecting individual autonomy.
‘The decision about how to lead our lives must ultimately be ours alone, but this decision is always a matter of selecting what we believe to be most valuable from the various options available, selecting from a context of choice which provides us with different ways of life. This is important because the range of options is determined by our cultural heritage. Different ways of life are not just simply different patterns of physical movements. The physical movements only have meaning to us because they are identified as having significance by our culture, because they fit into some pattern of activities which is culturally recognized as a way of leading one’s life…’
Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 164–5.
Kymlicka’s argument has been incredibly influential in contemporary political theory, as it provides a specifically liberal justification for taking culture seriously. Kymlicka reconciles liberal individualism with communitarianism and defends a radical policy programme. He argues that the public recognition of cultural beliefs is necessary in order to satisfy the requirements of equality, freedom (understood as autonomy), and neutrality: if states simply treat all groups the same, and remove religious and cultural values from public deliberations about policies and justice, then there will be unfair burdens on some groups at the expense of others. For example, the timing of public holidays, the official language of the state, and default rules about uniforms will benefit some groups and not others. Typically, the groups which do worse will be small or weak minorities, many of which became small and weak as a result of suffering historical injustices in the past.
Liberal multiculturalism thus has radical philosophical implications. It also has quite radical policy implications. Three of the most important are:
1 It emphasizes the importance of rectifying historical injustice in general, and cultural and religious oppression in particular, to securing justice in liberal states. After all, if it can be shown that individuals need access to their culture in or
der to experience individual freedom, then the liberal state should be concerned for any individual who has, for whatever reason, been denied the opportunity of engaging in the life of their culture. Consequently, liberal multiculturalism suggests that members of first-nations or aboriginal populations in Canada, the USA, or Australia, who had their cultures all but wiped out by European settlers, might require group-specific rights enabling them to reclaim what they lost. Such rights might involve the ceding of territory, the right to establish certain social and political institutions, or the right to have their religious beliefs recognized in wider laws.
2 It suggests a shift from a policy of ‘assimilation’ (whereby all citizens are required to ‘become liberals’ in the sense that they accept the dominant liberal values of the state) to ‘integration’ (whereby the state ‘recognizes’ the divergent beliefs of its citizens and does not require people to relinquish their identities in order to create a homogeneous society).
3 It represents a critique of nationalism in general, and ethnic nationalism in particular, for excluding other, non-national forms of identity like culture and religion. In valorizing national symbols and national myths, states squash out minority identities and, hence, undermine the equality and freedom of minority groups.
Criticisms of liberal multiculturalism
The move toward liberal multiculturalism has been important and influential. It has also been controversial among politicians and academics alike. As mentioned above, the recent re-emphasis on common values and national unity in the face of terrorism and religious extremism has meant that the political agendas of many states have become less hospitable to multiculturalism. And many political philosophers have criticized liberal multiculturalism on a number of grounds. Three of the most important are discussed next.