Will Kymlicka: Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
The Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka intends to articulate a form of liberalism located between radical individualism and communitarianism. The critiques of liberalism offered by Marxists and feminists, as well as those enunciated by such contemporary thinkers as Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor dissatisfy him, but so do the replies to those critiques which liberals have advanced, critiques often denoting “indifference or hostility to the collective rights of minority cultures.” “Liberalism, as a political philosophy, is often viewed as being primarily concerned with the relationship between the individual and the state, and with limiting state intrusions on the liberties of citizens.” Liberals are thus suspicious of rights claims advanced on behalf of collectivities. Kymlicka argues that these two kinds of rights do not necessarily contradict one another and may indeed be brought to reinforce one another.
Is there, then “an interest in cultural membership which requires independent recognition in the theory of justice,” distinct from but not interfering with the rightful interests of individuals? Kymlicka divides his book into three parts, mimicking the thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure of Hegelian logic: liberalism first, then communitarianism, finally “liberalism and cultural membership.” The Hegelian or ‘historicist’ structure of his argument follows its historically-found content, as he restricts his topic to late-modern liberalism, from Mill through Rawls, avoiding discussion of what he relativizes as the “seventeenth-century liberalism” of Locke and the other natural-rights liberals. ‘Nature’ and ‘natural right’ go without a single mention, alluded to only in terms of the epoch in which the modern understanding of nature and of natural right first came to sight.
The “political morality” of late-modern liberals “begins with some basic claims about our interests”: that “our essential interest is in leading a good life,” as distinguished from “leading the life we currently believe to be good”; because we may mistake our best interest, “we deliberate about important decisions in our lives,” not merely attempting to calculate the outcomes of those decisions but wondering if those decisions aim at purposes worth pursuing. Liberals hold that two conditions must be met for “leading a life that is good”: “that we lead our life from the inside,” that is, “in accordance with our beliefs about what gives value to life”; and that “we be free to question those beliefs, to examine them in light of whatever information and examples and arguments our culture can provide.” This suggests a historicist preclusion of examples and arguments outside our culture, whether they be the result of religious conversion or philosophic inquiry, an ‘ascent from the cave.’ Although liberals want individuals to be enabled to “live their lives in accordance with their beliefs about value, without being imprisoned or penalized for unorthodox religious or sexual practices etc.,” therefore putting emphasis on the importance of civil and personal liberties as well as education, for Kymlicka this means “exploring different aspects of our collective cultural heritage,” as there seems to be no getting away from that framework, only for the freedom to live within it.
In alluding to “the theory of justice” seen among contemporary liberals, Kymlicka thinks primarily of John Rawls and his book The Theory of Justice. Rawls rejects ‘ontological’ moral theories—theories grounded in ‘being,’ whether divine or human—in favor of a ‘deontological’ theory, in which he posits what he calls “the original position” of an individual stripped of all attributes. In this, he follows in the line of Kant and his ‘categorical imperative,’ a moral principle requiring no notions of divine presence or human nature. In Rawls’ vocabulary, deontological moral theories give “priority to the right over the good,” since goodness implies a being that can be judged to be a good specimen of its kind and moreover one which makes moral choices aiming at an ‘end’ or purpose consonant with that criterion. Rawls particularly targets utilitarianism, which he regards as just such an ontological and teleological moral theory. But he also rejects socialist, conservative, communitarian, and feminist theories that are structured similarly, albeit commending very different ends than those propounded by, for example, John Stuart Mill.
Kymlicka rejects Rawls’s analysis. “I don’t believe there is a real issue about which of the right and the good is prior.” Those who choose one over the other confuse two things: the definition of people’s essential interests; the principles of distribution “which follow from supposing that each person’s interests matter equally.” Rawls argues that in prioritizing the good over the right, utilitarianism subordinates the individual’s good to the greatest good for the greatest number, which leads “some to be endlessly sacrificed to the good over the right.” Rawls insists on putting limits to such sacrifices, claiming that this can only be done in principle by reserving certain rights of individuals that may not be sacrificed for the sake of the good.
To this, Kymlicka replies that “the most natural and compelling form of utilitarianism is not teleological, and doesn’t involve any anti-individualistic generalization from the individual to society.” Utilitarianism also applies to individuals, who pursue their own goods; moreover, utilitarians typically “give each person’s interests equal weight,” as “each person’s life matters equally.” Like Rawls, Kymlicka disagrees with the utilitarians, saying that their theory doesn’t account for the “the content of the preferences or the material welfare of the person.” It makes no moral sense to say that a tyrant’s interests should be treated equally with those of a charity worker. (Mill himself recognizes this, writing “Socrates satisfied is better than a pig satisfied,” but on this point Mill is less egalitarian than most of his utilitarian brethren.) This problem notwithstanding, however, utilitarianism “is as ‘deontological’ as any other” theory, fully recognizing “that individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims.”
It is true, Kymlicka goes on to remark, that some forms of utilitarianism do seem to prioritize the good over the right, holding that “we count individuals equally only because that maximizes value,” conducing to a good “state of affairs” in society. But this, Kymlicka says, simply means that these forms of utilitarianism aren’t really moral theories at all. With Nietzsche, but without his panache, and assuredly not with his aristocratic conception of the good, such utilitarians go ‘beyond good and evil,’ as “giving equal consideration to people…is a possible by-product of maximizing the good, but it is not the fundamental goal.” “To define the right as the maximization of the good, and to view people simply as a means to the promotion of that good, is not to present an unusual interpretation of the moral point of view. It is to abandon the moral point of view entirely, to take up a non-moral idea instead.”
What, then, is the proper definition of the good, as distinct from the fair distribution of it? Rawls contrasts teleological or “perfectionist” theories with “his own non-perfectionist” theory of the good. Perfectionists begin by identifying “what dispositions and attributes define human perfection,” then regarding “the development of these as our essential interest”; they further “demand that resources should be distributed so as to encourage such development.” Political life makes authoritative choices regarding what a good life is, rewarding and punishing individuals accordingly; “the state has the responsibility to teach its citizens about a virtuous life.” Rawls shrinks from this, contending rather that “our essential interests are harmed by attempts to enforce a particular view of the good life on people” because “he believes that the capacity to examine and revise our plans and projects is important in pursuing our essential interest in leading a good life.” Liberty is a primary good: hence ‘liberalism.’ In Kymlicka’s phrase, “lives have to be led from the inside”; imposing a concept of the good ‘from the outside,’ from the authoritative rulers and ruling offices of the regime, impedes rather than assists the individual in deliberating about the good and especially in acting in the pursuit of it.
Kymlicka does concur with Rawls on the moral status of liberty—he, too, is a liberal—but demurs when it comes to Rawls’s understanding of his own theory. “Rawls doesn’t favor the distribution of primary goods out of a concern for the right rather than the good. He just has a different account of what our good is,” disagreeing with perfectionists “over how best to define and promote the people’s good.” Therefore, “being an anti-perfectionist does not commit you to accepting ‘deontological’ constraints on the promotion of social welfare.” In holding that “each person’s good should be given equal weight” and that “people’s legitimate entitlements shouldn’t be tied to any particular conception of the good life,” Rawls is on the right track for the wrong reason, as “neither issue concerns the priority of the right or the good.” For Kymlicka, the issue isn’t about the priority of the right or the good but an issue of “responsibility.” Whereas Marxists, in their ‘dialectical’ materialist teleology, reject the claim that human beings are morally responsible for their actions or even their thoughts, which are determined by the interests of their economic class, Rawlsian liberals insist that “people are capable of adjusting their aims, and so are responsible for the formation of their aims and ambitions.” In so doing, some people act to impose unequal costs on others in order to serve their self-(mis)perceived interests. “This fairness argument supposes that I am capable of adjusting my ambitions to the rightful claims of others, and responsible in that sense.” Both Marxists and Rawlsians demand “equal consideration for reach person’s good,” however. The equality principle isn’t the locus of their disagreement.
Having thus liberated liberalism of its Rawlsian baggage without recurring to, and indeed rejecting, the “perfectionist” standard seen in some forms of natural right theory, Kymlicka takes up the communitarians and their critique of liberalism, as seen especially in the theories of Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. Communitarians charge that “the liberal view of the self,” the thing liberals would liberate, will not do. Kymlicka identifies five arguments communitarians make. According to them, “the liberal view of the self (1) is empty; (2) violates our self-perceptions; (3) ignores our embeddedness in communal practices; (4) ignores the necessity for social confirmation of our individual judgments; and (5) pretends to have an impossible universality or objectivity.”
Taylor maintains that the liberal self is “empty” because liberalism’s obsession with liberty or freedom denudes the self of any content or aim; “complete freedom,” Taylor writes, is “characterless,” devoid of any “defined purpose, however much this is hidden by such seemingly positive terms as ‘rationality’ or ‘creativity.'” True freedom must be situated within society, as otherwise absolute self-determination can arrive at no determination, unable to “specify any content to our action outside of a situation which sets goals for us, which thus imparts a shape to rationality and provides an inspiration for creativity.” To this, Kymlicka objects that liberals don’t say that freedom is for its own sake, that it is “the most valuable thing in the world,” but that “our projects and tasks…are the most important things in our lives, and it is because they are so important that we should be free to revise and reject them should we come to believe that they are not fulfilling or worthwhile.” Freedom of choice is “a precondition for pursuing those projects and practices that are valued for their own sake.”
Here Kymlicka revises or qualifies his earlier suggestion that our ends, our proposed goods, remain within the horizon of the societies in which we live. Liberals do “insist that we have an ability to detach ourselves from any particular communal practice,” wanting “no particular task [to be] set for us by society” because “no particular cultural practice has authority that is beyond individua judgment and possible rejection.” The “matrix of understandings and alternatives passed down to us by previous generations” offers us “possibilities we can either affirm or reject.” This sounds rather like a sort of Socratism for the people, and more than a bit like Mill. Readers will need to keep the proverbial eye on this claim, which seems to contradict his valorization of ‘culture.’ He clearly doesn’t think any such contradiction exists, and eventually will produce an argument for thinking so.
Kymlicka bundles together the communitarians’ second and third arguments. Michael Sandel denies the liberal claim that “the self is, in an important sense, prior to its ends” because it can revise even its “most deeply held convictions about the nature of the good life.” No so, Sandel argues, because there is no distinction between the self and the ends it forms; our ends in large measure constitute our selves, which we “discover by virtue of our being embedded in some shared social context.” He argues first from an account of human self-perception and then from an account of human social embeddedness. If human beings really possessed a self prior to its ends, they “should, when introspecting, be able to see through our particular ends to an unencumbered self.” But such a Cartesian effort leaves us with little or nothing, as indeed it left Descartes himself. To this, Kymlicka replies as he has done before: “What is central to the liberal view is not that we can perceive a self prior to its ends, but that we understand our selves to be prior to our ends, in the sense that no end or goal is exempt from possible re-examination.” (Oddly, although this sounds much like Karl Popper’s well-known view, Kymlicka never mentions him.) In making ethical choices, we “compar[e] one ‘encumbered'”—socially endowed—self with “another ‘encumbered’ potential self.” It “doesn’t follow” from this “that any particular ends must always be taken as given with the self.”
This begins to answer the question about Kymlicka’s historicism. It turns out that the self-revisions he identifies do take place within and not (Socratically) above ‘the cave,’ within the matrix of opinions put forward and reinforced by the regime or, as Kymlicka would have it, the ‘culture.’
Having disposed of Sandel’s self-perception argument, Kymlicka turns to his “embedded-self” argument. Sandel needs this argument in order to meet Kymlicka’s refutation of the self-perception argument; he needs to show “that we can’t perceive our self without some specific end or motivation.” When we reflect upon our self, we discover ends already given it by the society in which we are embedded. Yes, Kymlicka again argues, but “no matter how deeply implicated we find ourselves in social practice or tradition, we feel capable of questioning whether the practice is a valuable one.”
In this connection, Kymlicka makes a telling criticism of communitarians who “say that they wish to replace Kantian Moralitat with Hegelian Sittlichkeit.” That is, they would replace Kant’s ‘deontological’ argument, which bases morality on his ‘categorical imperative’—itself a replacement of such ‘ontological’ moral arguments seen in the Bible and in the ‘ancient’ philosophers—with Hegel’s historicist ontology, which replaces Kant’s deontology without returning to the natural-rights ‘perfectionism’ of (some of) the ‘ancients,’ particularly Aristotle. Kant, one recalls, posits the criterion of ‘universalizability’ as the standard for morality; if a principle cannot be universalized it cannot really be moral. For example, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a true moral command not because the God of the Bible says so but because a society in which everyone adhered to it would not survive, whereas a society that commanded the opposite, ‘Thou shalt steal,’ would self-destruct. Hegel points out that, on the contrary, such a principle could indeed be universalized. True, the society would likely destroy itself, but what, on the Kantian grounds of the categorical imperative, is wrong with that? Kant has smuggled in a prior principle, ‘Thou shalt not self-destruct,” which is similarly arbitrary, inasmuch as its opposite, its contradiction, could equally be universalized.
Kymlicka doesn’t dispute any of that but instead points out that Hegel’s dialectical historicism determines itself “in accordance with universal and rational laws”; societies unfold like syllogisms. “Hegel’s concern wasn’t to replace Moralitat with Sittlichkeit, but rather to give Moralitat some content, which he thought”—rightly—was “lacking in Kant’s formulation of it.” It isn’t at all clear, however, that Sandel and other communitarians subscribe to Hegel’s dialectic. They are indeed replacing Kantianism with something else, but it’s not real Hegelianism.
This leaves such communitarians with a sort of conventionalism. Kymlicka is eager to observe that they “share a more fundamental identity” with Rawlsian liberals: “both accept that the person is prior to her ends.” Although this point “is one for the philosophy of mind, with no direct relevance to political philosophy,” it will enable him to blend the two doctrines into his own ‘cultural’ form of liberalism.
Before doing so, he addresses the two remaining communitarian arguments—that liberals downplay the importance of social confirmation of our judgments and that they claim an objectivity that is impossible to achieve. With respect to social confirmation, communitarians worry that liberals’ “vaunting of ‘free individuality’ will result not in the confident affirmation and pursuit of worthy courses of action but rather in existential uncertainty and anomie.” Try as we may to resist it, “we can’t believe in our judgments unless someone else confirms them for us.” Kymlicka admits that “the spread of individual self-determination has generated more doubt about the value of our projects than before.” He immediately adds, however, that “the liberal view operates through people’s rationality,” generating “confidence in the value of one’s projects by removing any impediments or distortions in the reasoning process involved in making judgments of values.” Communitarians would generate confidence in our projects “via a process which people can’t acknowledge as the grounds of their confidence,” namely, conventions uncritically accepted, ‘givens’ that get shaky as soon as we see them as given by nothing more than prior practice and belief. Why does this assuage existential angst instead of exacerbating it? My peers may confirm my judgments, but why should I take their confirmation, however comforting, as authoritative? They, and I, could be dead wrong, and I know it.
Finally, Richard Rorty denies that liberals can claim objectivity in their judgments. There are “no such things” as what he calls “philosophical metanarratives.” On the contrary, “there are no reasons which aren’t reasons internal to a historical tradition or interpretative community.” Kant and Hegel and Mill and Rawls are all equally wrong, for that reason. What we call rational behavior is, in Rorty’s words, nothing more than “adaptive behavior of a sort which roughly parallels the behavior, in similar circumstances, of the other members of some relevant community.” Rorty takes up Hegel’s historical relativism but denies the dialectical ontology which frames it.
Kymlicka begins his answer to this by observing that even such philosophers as Plato and Kant, the ones “most commonly viewed as endorsing the mountain-top view of philosophy,” begin their philosophizing “on the ground,” in the marketplace (for Plato’s Socrates) or (for Kant) in the university. “Starting from the ground, we are led to philosophy” by thinking, often in dialogue with others. Even Rawls sees that “we start with the shared moral beliefs” of our time and place,” only then “describ[ing] an original position in accordance with those shared beliefs, in order to work out their fuller implications.” If anything (and as one suspects when reading Kymlicka’s initial preview of his argument), Rawlsian liberals are more ‘conventionalist’ than Plato or Kant. Further, Rorty unwarrantedly “claim[s] to know” the limits of practical reasoning and to know them “in advance of the arguments.” But this is only a “dogmatic objection,” not a philosophic one, one arrived at by reasoning.
Having replied to the five main arguments communitarians advance against liberalism, Kymlicka next considers the philosophic systems propounded by two of the most prominent communitarians, Charles Taylor and Karl Marx. Their critiques of liberalism “center not on the liberal idea of the self and its interests, but on the ‘individualistic’ way that liberals seek to promote those interests politically,” allegedly by neglecting “the social preconditions for the effective fulfillment of those interests.”
Taylor claims that even if liberals are “right about our capacity for choice, they ignore the fact that that capacity can only develop in society, in and through relations and interactions with others.” Kymlicka concurs, adding that the academic discipline of sociology “arose as a response to the overemphasis on rational individual choice by liberals.” But how does this effect moral judgment in a political society?
Liberals understand the common good as “the result of a process of combining preferences, all of which are counted equally (if consistent with the principles of justice).” The state should remain neutral with respect to these preferences and their combinations, except when those principles are violated. Otherwise, “in a liberal society the common good is adjusted to fit the pattern of preferences and conceptions of the good held by individuals.” Communitarians, on the contrary, want a society in which “the common good is conceived of as a substantive conception of the good which defines the community’s ‘way of life.'” (This, incidentally, brings them closer to the full articulation of what a regime is, as defined by Aristotle.) In a communitarian society, the common good “provides a standard by which [individuals’] preferences are evaluated”; “the weight given to an individual’s preferences depends on how much she conforms or contributes to that common good,” and the state is not “constrained by the requirement of neutral concern” regarding the promotion of some putative goods and the denigration or even prohibition of others. “Individuals are no longer able to veto the pursuit of these shared ends whenever it violates neutral concern,” although there are some exceptions to this allowed by some communitarians.
Communitarians sometimes suspect that liberals, too, have a fairly strong notion of the common good, often unconfessed. When they “admit that the capacity for individual choice can only be developed and exercised in a certain sort of society,” and further admit that such a society ought to be “promot[ed] and protect[ed], then they have already accepted a politics of the common good” and, further, that the common good “must be prior to the rights of individuals within that society.” Kymlicka replies that if communitarians define the “politics of the common good” so broadly as this, then state neutrality has been encompassed within the politics of the common good and is not necessarily incompatible with it. Communitarians and liberals turn out both to have a concept of the common good; as he’d argued before, they only differ in the way—one might even say the way of life—to achieve it.
Somewhat more carefully than many communitarians, Taylor argues that liberal neutrality must violate its own neutrality in order to sustain itself. It must discourage “some options about the good life” and encourage other “in order for the political culture to accept the demands of liberal justice.” For example, it must provide some sort of civic education to its citizens, and education that not only lays down such abstract principles as Rawls propounds but also fosters “some recognition and acceptance of principles of the good life.” Rawls and other liberals in his line “would say that a person can and should b free to choose any conception of the good life as long as she doesn’t actively violate the principle of justice, no matter how little that conception itself values freedom or equality.”
Why does Taylor reject this form of liberalism? For one thing, he is concerned that no political society can maintain itself without the civic participation that liberal politics fails adequately to encourage and to sustain. He ascribes this decline in political activity to the centralization and bureaucratization of the modern state. Kymlicka objects: “I see no empirical or theoretical warrant for claiming that liberalism requires centralization of bureaucratization.” Political participation yes, but political participation need not entail “the communitarian conception of political participation, or of justice.” Kymlicka suspects that Taylor entertains “a romanticized view of earlier communities in which legitimacy was freely given and earned, based on the effective pursuit of shared ends.” But such romanticism withers once one sees that such communities were highly exclusive, rigorously ‘marginalizing’ some if not most groups within them. Nor does liberalism necessarily preclude socialism, as some communitarians assume. Mill “was prepared to call himself a socialist,” and “the two traditions have borrowed from each other throughout their history.” Socialists, and often feminists as well, “correctly point out failures in traditional liberal institutions, but they are often wrong in supposing that these failures express or reflect problems inherent in the liberal conception of the person, or of social justice.” It is rather the case that “these institutions are failing because they don’t express or reflect these liberal ideals.”
Karl Marx, however, utterly despises liberal ideals and indeed idealism generally. He is a determinist and a materialist. However, neither is he a genuine communitarian, Kymlicka argues. According to Marx, at the end of the historical dialectic we will live not under a monarchic and bureaucratic world state but in communities in which we have no set social roles at all, but rather paint or hunt or engage in literary criticism as we please, without confining ourselves to any of those activities in order to sustain ourselves. We won’t derive our sense of ourselves from social ‘givens’ at all. Human beings will freely exercise their “capacity to enjoy the all-sided production of the whole earth” as Marx and Engels aver in their Manifesto. Whereas “communitarians would free people by reinterpreting and strengthening the communal nature of [their] identity-defining roles,” Marx “would free people by eliminating identity-defining roles” altogether.
Kymlicka disagrees with Marx, too. To answer the question, why is such a free life good, Marx answers that it registers the difference human beings exhibit when compared to other animal species, namely, “freely chosen activity.” This is a variation of Aristotle’s argument that the good for any individual depends upon its nature, and species differ from one another. Human beings differ by nature from other species; therefore, the good for human beings must differ from the good for horses, amoebas, chimps. Kymlicka denies the argument because “asking what is best in a human life” is “a question in moral philosophy” not a matter of “biological classification.” “If other animals had exactly the same capacities that Marx discusses, it would do not do harm to his claim about our essential interests,” and “the absence of such animals” provides no “support for his claim.” Kymlicka’s counterargument only holds if Marx’s argument depends exclusively upon mere ‘difference.’ But what if it depends not upon difference but upon nature? Then, Kymlicka would be stuck with Hume’s complaint that no ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is,’ especially if the ‘is’ in question—nature—has no telos, consisting only of matter in morally meaningless motion. The obvious problem is that human nature evidently does enable individuals within our species to form purposes. The question then becomes, is a given purpose so formed good for a being with such a nature? Marx’s problem is that he shares the Machiavellian/Baconian project, the project of modern philosophy and the science it has designed, which aims at conquering chance nature—a task that assumes that there is something in us beyond nature. Marx’s ‘history’ is nothing other than a ‘dialectical’ struggle so to overcome nature, one ruled by historical laws that determine human choices. He replaces nature with ‘history’ in the hope that the course of events determined by class struggle will eventuate in the projected freedom he supposes he foresees under ‘communism.’
One sees this in Marx’s “self-realization” argument, to which Kymlicka now turns. Marx says that human labor overcomes ‘the given’; human labor is the engine of “real freedom.” But although “really free working” is self-realizing, “that self-realization is neither the aim nor the end of such work.” “But if this is the story that Marx wishes to stand by, then the idea of species-differentiation has dropped out entirely, and the story isn’t fundamentally different from the liberal story,” which is equally a story about freely pursuing ends we find value in themselves, ‘objectively.’ And, as with liberalism, Marx wants human beings to live in a condition in which they do indeed choose their ends freedom, leading their lives “from the inside,” as Kymlicka likes to say.
Why, then, does Marx’s theory of justice contradict liberals’ theories of justice? Because Marx, like some utilitarians and all Nietzscheans, doesn’t really have a theory of justice at all. For Marx, human beings will obtain “the social conditions of individual freedom” through the historical dialectic of matter in motion, not by claiming individual rights “within a theory of justice.” Marx charges that capitalism violates the principle of equality because its conception of equality is merely “juridical.” “Marx accepts the principle of moral equality, but denies that it can be spelt out in terms of a system of rights,” legal or moral. Both legal and moral rights are only excrescences of the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Marx ties this to his labor theory of value. Like Locke (the natural-rights “seventeenth-century” liberal Kymlicka pointedly ignores), Marx regards human labor as the activity which transforms a more or less worthless physical nature into things men can actually use for their own benefit. But “right,” Marx insists, “can exist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view).” Juridical justice fails to capture this because it treats all citizens as equal ‘under the law.’ And even this modest and distorted theory of justice overlooks the empirical fact that the judges are agents of the capitalist class, protective of an equal right to property which instantiates inequality of property. He therefore dismisses liberal justice, already untethered from natural right, as “obsolete verbal rubbish.” That goes for ‘deontologists’ like Kant and (in future) Rawls as well as for utilitarian ontologists like Mill. On the contrary, “the good society, communist society, will be beyond justice, not defined or governed by theories of fair shares or equal rights”; “for Marx, justice represents the failure to achieve truly virtuous social institutions, or a truly good community.” Indeed, justice is “epiphenomenal,” dispensable because equality will advance not by means of judges but “by the flow of historical events.”
Kymlicka objects to Marx because he doesn’t believe that history will eventuate in “a society of equals.” He has no faith in the supposed iron laws of historical dialectic, nor does he find any rational/scientific proof of them in Marx, Hegel, or anyone else. “It is up to us to build unity in the struggle for a society of equals,” and Marx “has given us no reason to believe that justice is more divisive than any other way of rallying people for progressive social change.” He concedes, however, that “Marx had a deeper objection to the very idea of a juridical community,” an objection “he shares with the communitarians.” Both Marx and the communitarians regard justice as remedial, a rebalancing of some defect or excess in the community; they point to a time in which those flaws will have been overcome and justice (so defined) will no longer be needed. They differ because Marx is a materialist while communitarians are ‘idealists.’ Marx anticipates a communist society in which conflicts have disappear because, even though people still pursue different ends, material abundance has achieved a level in which no one need fight over resources to achieve those ends. “Justice is superseded because of abundance.” Even the ‘battle of the sexes’ will cease. Communitarians anticipate communal societies in which human beings no longer entertain “conflicting conceptions of the good”; they expect human opinions to coalesce. For them, “if the community as a whole also had an identity of interests and affective ties, then justice wouldn’t be needed.”
Against these arguments, Kymlicka defends the much-maligned liberal conception of rights. “Rights are desirable because they express an important form of respect and concern for people.” That is, he defends rights not as morally significant principles naturally inherent in human beings but on the more or less Hegelian terms of mutual recognition, although without the master-slave dialectic Hegel grounds it with. If “the expectation of abundance” seen in Marx and the vast reconciliation of opinions hoped for by communitarians are implausible—as Kymlicka evidently (and quite sensibly) thinks they are—then modern states and the social conditions prevailing in them will only bear so much community, ties that bind only loosely. “Therefore, liberal justice seems, for all that communists and communitarians have said against it, a viable political morality for the governing of our political institutions and practices.” Liberal justice, understood in the way Kymlicka will now elaborate, can balance individuality and community in a way he judges superior to those propounded by previous liberals and their critics alike.
He begins by distinguishing two kinds of community: the political community, “within which individuals exercise the rights and responsibilities entailed by the framework of liberal justice’; and “the cultural community, within which individuals form and revise their aims and ambitions.” That is, Kymlicka replaces ‘civil society’ with ‘cultural community’ in order to capture the fact that “the vast majority” of modern states “contain two or more groups who have different cultures.” In North America, many Indian tribes and nations live on reservations—special “political jurisdictions over which Indian communities have certain guaranteed powers and within which non-Indian Americans have restricted mobility, property, and voting rights.” Individual members of these communities are citizens within the larger political community but are so “through membership in one or other of the cultural communities”; “the justification for these measures focuses on their role in allowing minority cultures develop their distinct cultural life, an ability insufficiently protected by ‘universal’ modes of incorporation”—that is, in the “direct relationship to the state” experienced by members of the majority culture.
This presents a dilemma to liberals, who identify individuals as rights-bearers and insist on equal rights for all. “There seems to be no room within the moral ontology of liberalism for the idea of collective rights,” as “the community has no moral existence or claims of its own.” “Individual and collective rights cannot compete for the same moral space, in liberal theory, since the value of the collective derives from its contribution to the value of individual lives.”
This is not true of liberalism if ‘liberalism’ includes the doctrine of natural rights as understood by the American Founders. Americans as a group were understood to have rights vis-à-vis other nations, most immediately Great Britain, because as individuals they had consented to form a republican regime. The ‘cultural’ and therefore only quasi-political liberalism of Kymlicka misses the point that a ‘culture’ is a civil society that has lost its sovereignty, whether by conquest or by immigration. Given the derivation of ‘culture’ from ‘cult,’ cultures very often originate in a religion, usually a civil religion; the older the culture, the more likely this is. A ‘culture’ is a way of life with the ‘rulership’ and ‘ruling institutions’ elements of the former regime subordinated to those of another regime. The question really is, then, what rights ought a member of such a cultural minority be afforded within the regime which now rules it? Should its former sovereignty be restored, on the grounds of the liberal conception of rights? Is it entitled to declare its independence from its conqueror? Or should it work out some other modus vivendi?
Kymlicka distinguishes the circumstances faced by American blacks with those faced by American Indians. In the United States, racial segregation “was perceived as a ‘badge of inferiority,'” in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. But in Canada, the segregation of Indians “has always been viewed as a defense of a highly valued cultural heritage”; it was any attempt at integration that the Indian tribes and nations regarded as a badge of inferiority, an attempt to overbear their ways of life. To survive in their cultural integrity, Indians need coercive restrictions on mobility, residence, and (remaining) political rights “of both Indians and non-Indians. For example, under the reservation system, an Indian may not sell reservation land to a non-Indian; to allow this would dilute and likely ruin the tribal community’s cultural integrity, over time. Similarly, non-Indians who marry Indians are not permitted to vote for representatives on tribal councils.
“Many liberals treat these measures as obviously unjust, and as simple disguises for the perpetuation of ethnic or racial inequality.” Kymlicka maintains that “there are two kinds of respect for individuals at stake here, both of which have intuitive force.” “If we respect Indians as Indians, that is to say, as members of a distinct cultural community, then we must recognize the importance to them of their cultural heritage, and we must recognize the legitimacy of claims made by them for the protection of that culture.” The notion of equal rights will play out differently in different situations. In the case of the English-Canadians, their right to buy and sell property to an Indian in no way threatens their dominant culture, whereas the opposite is true for Indian-Canadians. To insist on equality of property rights “ignores a potentially devastating problem faced by aboriginal people, but not by English-Canadians—the loss of cultural membership.” At the same time, “if we respect people as Canadians, that is to say as citizens of the common political community, then we must recognize the importance of being able to claim the rights of equal citizenship.” Thus “there is a genuine conflict of intuitions here,” as “people are owed respect as citizens and as members of cultural communities,” neither of which “seems reducible to the other.”
As a result of this dilemma, many of those sympathetic to Indian claims of self-government defend those claims by criticizing liberalism. They may do so on grounds of moral and cultural relativism: “aboriginal peoples have a different value system” from that of English and French Canadians, “emphasizing group rights rather than individual rights.” Such arguments, however, “don’t explain why minority rights aren’t the first step on the road to apartheid, or what serves to prevent massive violations of individual rights in the name of the group.” After all some of the cultural practices of aboriginal communities in North American included cannibalism and slavery. Other arguments for group rights focus on property rights—the Indians took ownership of the land before British colonizers did—or political rights—at least some of the aboriginal nations never “officially relinquished their sovereignty.” The property rights claim, however, “does not justify permanent special political status” since property rights of one group might be said to give way to claims to “equality of resources for all the citizens of the country.” As for sovereignty, the Indian claims have not “heretofore been explicitly recognized in international law.”
These difficulties notwithstanding, Kymlicka argues that liberals can formulate a doctrine which can encompass respect for cultural minorities rights without become illiberal. To do so, “we need to show two things: (1) that cultural membership has a more important status in liberal thought than is explicitly recognized” and “(2) that the members of minority cultural communities may face particular kinds of disadvantages with respect to he good of cultural membership, disadvantages whose rectification requires and justifies the provision of minority rights.” “That is, we need to show that membership in a cultural community may be a relevant criterion for distributing the benefits and burdens which are the concern of a liberal theory of justice.”
In Rawlsian liberalism, such minority cultural rights violate the principle of equality by reserving rights to minorities not in order “to enlarge liberty overall, but to protect cultural membership.” Such overall liberty for all citizens of, say, Canada, enables Canadians “to intelligently decide for ourselves what is valuable in life”—to hold their current religious beliefs, for example, but also to question and to change them. Kymlicka replies that “the range of options” we entertain when so deciding “is determined by our cultural heritage.” If so, the moral claims of Rawlsian liberalism filter through a cultural matrix; they do not, cannot, really transcend it. That matrix, however, may not be the matrix of either a regime or of a ‘cult,’ the religion that has suffused the matrix. Rather, “the processes by which options and choices become significant for us are linguistic and historical processes.” “Our language and history are the media through which we come to an awareness of the options available to us, and their significance,” forming “a precondition of making intelligent judgments about how to lead our lives.” Therefore, “liberals should be concerned with the fate of cultural structures, not because they have some moral status of their own”—the status with which a regime, including a religious regime, would endow them—but “because it’s only through having such a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value.” Cultural structures or matrices provide “a context of choice.”
Kymlicka hastens to caution that “fundamentalists” of various sorts may be quite illiberal, demanding on restriction of “freedom of speech, press, religion, sexual practices, etc. of its own members” on the grounds that if these restrictions are not granted “their culture will disintegrate.” This is why Kymlicka insists on ‘interpreting’ culture to mean the much broader categories of language, which can enunciate heterodox opinions, and of history, which changes over time. Kymlickian culture has no real moral content; it is all ‘context,’ with minimal and readily changeable content. “So long as everyone has her fair share of resources and the freedom to live her life as she chooses within her cultural community, then the primary good of cultural membership is properly recognized”—properly, that is, in terms of Rawlsian liberalism.
What, then, gives culture as defined primarily by shared language and history any moral status as a thing to be respected? While it may be that “enforced assimilation” of a minority culture into a majority culture “can have tragic results” and lead to “miserable failures,” those are practical not theoretical difficulties. And if one evidently will need a language and inevitably have one’s group’s history to serve as a matrix for free choice, why does this mean that my own language and my own group’s history should be preserved? What if my language inadequately expresses the principle of non-contradiction, or if my group’s history is profoundly flawed, foreclosing choices instead of offering them? Why should minority cultures, or majority cultures for that matter, be treated as if ‘created equal’? And if ‘culture’ is treated as if a merely linguistic and historical thing, would members of any culture really seek to defend it? On what grounds, other than neo-Rawlsian liberalism, which might be taken as not so solid? And even to defend cultures so ‘liberally’ defined, the dilemma persists: “Since cultural membership is a primary good, special rights are needed to treat aboriginal people with the respect they are owed as members of a cultural community. But the effect of these special rights is to compromise the fairness of political and economic decision procedures.”
To begin to answer these questions, Kymlicka distinguishes between demands based on “differential choices” and demands based on “unequal circumstances.” For example, “someone who cultivates a taste for expensive wine has no legitimate claim to special public subsidy, since she is responsible for her choice”; her liberty of choice has in no way been infringed if her taste isn’t subsidized.” But “someone who needs expensive medicine due to a natural disability has a legitimate claim to special public subsidy, since she is not responsible for the costs of her disadvantageous circumstances”; she needs the medicine, it is not a mere option. (Notice, by the way, that this argument about liberty in fact depends upon a prior right to life and even to health, a right moreover that imposes a duty upon fellow-citizens to take up its defense. This is the difficulty with the Kantian categorical imperative, as noted above; it typically needs to smuggle in some right that looks rather suspiciously like a natural right in order to buttress its ‘deontological’ claims.)
On these grounds, if an aboriginal people “have chosen an expensive life-style by, say, choosing a way of life that requires a large section of land, valued by many groups in society, to be set apart and left undeveloped, even though the benefits of this only accrue to themselves,” that people “should have to outbid those who plan to use the land more efficiently.” This is a variation on Locke’s argument against the rights of peoples to control lands that could be better used by others—his justification for empire and colonization. Kymlicka probably would not go so far, preferring to deploy the argument as a restriction on aboriginal rights asserted after imperial conquest has happened. That is because “we can defend aboriginal rights as a response, not to shared choices, but to unequal circumstances,” circumstances which have rendered their communities “vulnerable to the decisions of the non-aboriginal majority around them.” Further, when members of the majority community seek to purchase lands owned by aboriginal peoples, they act from choice, not necessity, whereas in demanding the restriction of their right to sell that land, the aborigines respond to what Kymlicka claims is a moral if not a physical need, a right, “to ensure that their cultural structure survives.” This inequality “has nothing to do with the choices of aboriginal people”; it is the circumstance into which they have been thrown. “Special political rights…can correct this inequality by ensuring that aboriginal communities are as secure as non-aboriginal ones.”
Why would aborigines worry about the security of their communities if those community cultures are defined in terms only of language and of history? Kymlicka asserts that “when we take cultural identity seriously, we’ll understand that asking someone to trade off her cultural identity for some amount of money is like expecting someone to trade off her self-respect for some amount of money,” getting money in exchange for “giving up the context within which” the ends which money otherwise helps us to pursue. “It is irrational to expect people to accept that trade-off.” But money doesn’t buy language or history, does it? It buys land and other physical property, and it buys labor. Only if one claims that a group’s historical possession of a piece of land must prove indispensable to the continuation of culture so defined would the argument hold. Thus, Kymlicka remarks that some American Indian groups (he gives the example of the Pueblo) “are essentially theocracies, with an official religion.” While liberalism guards the right to free exercise of religion, that free exercise doesn’t extend to a religious establishment. According to Kymlicka, Pueblo religion would in no way be threatened were Protestant converts from it allowed to remain on the Pueblo reservation. “Meaningful individual choice” must be maintained. More generally, “each person should be able to use and interpret her cultural experiences in her own chosen way. That ability requires that the cultural structure be secured from the disintegrating effects of the choices of people outside the culture, but also requires that each person within the community be free to choose what they see to be the most valuable from the options provided.” But where does Protestantism come from, if not from outside the Pueblo community?
Kymlicka sees the problem. “What if the Pueblo community really would disintegrate without restricting religious liberty? Would that justify restricting religious liberty? If so, are there any limits on what can be done in the name of protecting cultural membership?” Here, he anticipates compromises based upon the concrete circumstances in the variety of cases. “These are complex issues in which our intuitions are pulled in different directions, and I don’t see how any simple formula could cover all the relevant cases.” He has restated the problem of the relation between theory and practice, and of the relation between laws, which generalize, and cases, which don’t always fit easily into legal categories.
Kymlicka knows that pre-Rawlsian liberals did in fact take account of “cultural context”— specifically, nationality. “Mill emphasized the importance of ‘the feeling of nationality,’ a feeling which is generated by many causes, of which ‘the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents: the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.'” Later, the League of Nations “managed to secure special political status for minority cultural groups in the multinational countries of Europe.” Today’s liberalism, by contrast, focuses on human rights “to be ensured for every individual qua individual, regardless of her cultural membership,” resulting in the sense that to be treated differently according to one’s “ethnicity or race or group membership” amounts to “a betrayal of the liberal idea.” Kymlicka attributes this shift to the misapplication of the principles applied to the problem of racial segregation in the United States to the problem of minority cultures.
This shows that when Kymlicka defines culture as a shared language and a shared history, he has slid politics back in, with an elegant sleight of hand. But if politics, and therefore regimes, do count as part of one’s cultural heritage, this reintroduces the problem of states within states that he had only apparently disposed of.
What, then, will prevent Kymlicka’s ‘cultural’ liberalism from resulting in political disunity? Given the fact that, according to his estimate, only ten percent of the countries in the world are nation-states in the strict sense of the world, would it not result in a rash of secessionist movements, even civil wars? Not so, he claims. “The result of this conception of individual responsibility”—the individual’s use of the freedom to deliberate upon and choose a way of life within the options offered by his cultural context—is “not to set people against each other, but to tie all citizens in bonds of mutual respect.” Cultural liberalism “will enable various groups of people to freely pursue and advance their shared communal and cultural ends, without penalizing or marginalizing those groups who have different and perhaps conflicting goals.”
Kymlicka does not say why citizens pursuing conflicting goals will respect one another. If they don’t, why would they remain united? And if they do not remain united, why will the result not be war—civil, if secession is resisted, international if secession succeeds? In other words, why would Hegel’s ‘master-slave dialectic,’ a struggle to the death for recognition, not prevail over the polite, ‘Canadian’ multiculturalism Kymlicka propounds? It begins to seem that liberal multiculturalism is politically incoherent.
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