ABSTRACT
A society’s political and legal arrangements can claim to respect cultural differences only if they enable the society’s members to live according to their different cultural allegiances. That need not be an especially demanding requirement. A liberal democratic society will accord its citizens the right to live according to their different beliefs and preferences, provided their beliefs and preferences do not require them to infringe the rights of others. Some of these beliefs and preferences may be identifiable as ‘cultural’, while others may not. But even if we can make that distinction, we may regard it as properly of no consequence for a liberal democratic society. As long as the society’s citizens enjoy equal freedoms and fair opportunities to live whatever way of life they wish, cultural differences will receive their due. There is no reason to single them out for special or privileged treatment. Nor should we withhold the description ‘multicultural’ from a society just because its political and legal arrangements fail to privilege or to make special provision for cultural differences. After all, the society seeks neither to advantage nor to disadvantage any particular culture and is content that its citizens should conform to any culture or none, provided only that they do so within the limits set by its liberal-democratic rules. The view that I have just described might claim to respect cultural diversity, and yet, in the political philosophy literature, it would not generally be deemed ‘multicultural’. It has become normal to confine the description ‘multicultural’ to positions that would have us take specific account of cultural difference, rather than subsume it under more general sorts of difference, such as differences of belief, conviction, interest or preference. It has also become normal to describe political and legal arrangements as ‘multicultural’ only if they make some form of special provision for cultural difference. The proponents of that special provision do not usually understand themselves to be arguing for ‘privilege’ or any other sort of inequality. Rather, their claim is that providing adequately and fairly for cultural differences requires us to recognize the significance of their being cultural differences, and also to be responsive to, rather than heedless of, differences amongst cultures; it requires us to be difference-sensitive rather than difference-blind. One well-known concept that has been developed to express that conviction is the notion of group-differentiated rights, an idea whose most celebrated
analyst and proponent is Will Kymlicka (1989, 1995, 2001). For Kymlicka, the holders of group-differentiated rights are cultural groups or their members, and the differentiated content of those rights is justified by the need to secure genuinely just arrangements in societies that are culturally diverse. Different cultural groups are differently circumstanced and differently vulnerable, and the rights they enjoy need to be differentiated to cope with that fact. Kymlicka has used other phrases to describe these rights, including ‘special rights’ and ‘groupspecific rights’, but throughout this chapter I shall use his term ‘groupdifferentiated rights’. Taken at face value, the proposition that rights should be ‘groupdifferentiated’ is entirely unexceptional. That people’s rights should differ according to their different group memberships is the norm rather than the exception. People have different rights according to their membership of different sports clubs, or trade unions, or businesses, or universities, or churches, or states, or regional bodies. Perhaps the only rights that are not group-differentiated are human rights, and even they become group-differentiated if we extend rights to non-human animals. However, in Kymlicka’s usage ‘group-differentiated’ signifies more than this commonplace phenomenon. He uses the notion of group-differentiated rights only in relation to citizenship. Indeed, he often uses the phrase ‘groupdifferentiated citizenship’ to express the same idea (see, for example, Kymlicka 1995: 9, 26, 124, 174, 182; Kymlicka and Norman 2000).1 The basic idea is that people who share a common status as the citizens of a society may nevertheless have different rights as citizens according to the different cultural groups to which they belong.2 One feature of citizenship that is significant for group-differentiated rights is that the status of citizen, and the rights that go with it, are not for most people matters of mere volition. People commonly have a degree of choice over whether they belong to a university or a church or a business firm, and, if they choose to be members of any of these, over which particular university, church or business they join. People do not similarly have a choice over whether they are citizens of states, and they have only a highly constrained choice over the particular state of which they are a citizen. The same applies to their membership of cultural groups. Cultural differences are generally conceived as ‘ascriptive’ rather than self-chosen. However, the involuntary nature of the memberships associated with group-differentiated rights is perhaps less a defining feature of those rights than a factor that helps to justify their being group-differentiated.
