Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights
Alan Patten
Language: English
Pages: 344
ISBN: 0691173559
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Conflicting claims about culture are a familiar refrain of political life in the contemporary world. On one side, majorities seek to fashion the state in their own image, while on the other, cultural minorities press for greater recognition and accommodation. Theories of liberal democracy are at odds about the merits of these competing claims. Multicultural liberals hold that particular minority rights are a requirement of justice conceived of in a broadly liberal fashion. Critics, in turn, have questioned the motivations, coherence, and normative validity of such defenses of multiculturalism. In Equal Recognition, Alan Patten reasserts the case in favor of liberal multiculturalism by developing a new ethical defense of minority rights.
Patten seeks to restate the case for liberal multiculturalism in a form that is responsive to the major concerns of critics. He describes a new, nonessentialist account of culture, and he rehabilitates and reconceptualizes the idea of liberal neutrality and uses this idea to develop a distinctive normative argument for minority rights. The book elaborates and applies its core theoretical framework by exploring several important contexts in which minority rights have been considered, including debates about language rights, secession, and immigrant integration.
Demonstrating that traditional, nonmulticultural versions of liberalism are unsatisfactory, Equal Recognition will engage readers interested in connections among liberal democracy, nationalism, and current multicultural issues.
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for a single format instead. Denying recognition to minority cultures may backfire and lead to a less integrated national framework rather than a more integrated one. In some cases, equal recognition may even outperform uniformity as a means of promoting national integration. The best way to promote a common identity may sometimes be to allow difference to flourish and to let the recognition of difference be a feature of the political community that attracts popular allegiance.21 In these kinds
institutions and practices that work to socialize outsiders. They are controlled, that is, by a group of people different from those who control the socialization of outsiders. And the members of the controlling group may themselves have been socialized by a distinctive set of practices and institutions, which were, in turn, controlled by people who were socialized under distinctive conditions, and so on.30 As noted at the outset, the acceptability of any proposed conception of culture depends on
Among any set of people, there will predictably be too great a diversity of formative influences to allow the identification of groups of persons who share a common formative experience. But this objection is overstated. The objection would obviously be correct if the account assumed that members of a culture were subjected to an identical set of formative influences. But, as we have seen, this is not the assumption. It is sufficient for the account that there be some significant set of
sketched earlier are immediately recognizable as important processes in societies around the world. Despite their familiarity, however, it would be a mistake to assume that those mechanisms are salient to every case in which the members of some minority culture face the loss of their culture or seek rights or institutions that help to protect them against such loss. Some cases of impending cultural loss are characterized by fairly low levels of prejudice and animosity between minority and
opportunities, popular culture, and general status and prestige are such that large numbers of members of the minority are continuously turning to majority-culture options, even as other members of the minority are excluded from those options by discrimination or incapacity. The related point is that some minority cultures are too small, too dispersed, and too economically disadvantaged and marginalized to be in a position to develop their options to the point where those who forgo, or are