Liberalism and the Limits of Multiculturalism

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Liberalism and the Limits of Multiculturalism

• Raphael Cohen-Almagor
• University of Haifa, ISRAEL

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Preliminaries

• How are group rights related to individual
  rights?
• What should we do if group rights come into
  conflict with individual rights?

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• Can a liberal democracy allow minority groups to
  restrict the individual rights of their members,
  or should it insist that all groups uphold
  liberal principles?

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Self- and Other-regarding Conduct

• Cases in which one is inflicting pain or death
  upon oneself vs. Cases in which one is inflicting
  damage upon others

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• Jainas practice in relation to the dying
• Scarring

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Two Kinds of Rights

• Internal restrictions - right of a group
  against its own members
• External protections - right of a group against
  the larger society

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Murder for Family Honour

• Some norms are considered by liberal standards to
  be intrinsically wrong
• Such are norms that result in physical harm to
  women and babies

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• External protections are defensible when groups
  seek to protect their identity by limiting their
  vulnerability to the decisions of the larger
  society

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• Reserving land for the exclusive use of a
  minority group

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• Guaranteeing representation for a minority
• Devolving power to local levels

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Unjust Claims for External Protections

• Apartheid

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• Whereas internal restrictions are almost
  inherently in conflict with liberal democratic
  norms, external protections are not as long as
  they promote equality between groups

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Pueblo Indians Communities

• Discriminate against members who have abandoned
  the traditional tribal religion in the
  distribution of housing
• Discriminate against women who have married
  outside the tribe

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Internalized Coercion Vs. Designated Coercion

• Unlike the internalized coercion, designated
  coercion is not concerned with a machinery aiming
  to convince the entire cultural group of an
  irrefutable truth

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Hofer Vs. Hofer

• People have a basic interest in their capacity to
  form and revise their conception of the good

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• The power of religious communities over their own
  members must be such that individuals can freely
  and effectively exercise that capacity

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Conclusions

• Relevant factors
• The severity of rights violations within the
  minority community
• The extent to which formalized dispute resolution
  mechanisms exist within the community

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• The extent to which these mechanisms are seen as
  legitimate by group members
• The ability of dissenting group members to leave
  the community if they so desire

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• The existence of historical agreements which base
  the national minoritys claim for some sort of
  autonomy

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• Developing a liberal theory of minority rights is
  of the utmost importance for the future of
  liberal democracies, particularly for newly
  democratizing countries.