ABSTRACT
The question that I address is that of the rights of those (more or less) non-liberal minority communities or sub-groups who have become recognizably established as such within the boundaries of a liberal democratic society. Modern liberal democracies are, I take it, societies that profess as one of their central values a respect for the freedom of autonomous individuals to live their own lives in whatever way may seem best to them, provided only that their choice does not unavoidably infringe on the autonomous free choices of other individuals, all of whom are taken to be, in this sense at least, equal to each other in the validity of their claims to such respect. However, liberals also typically see themselves as committed to a maximum toleration of diversity so far as the existence and dissonant customs of social sub-groups are concerned, provided only, once again, that the exercise of these customs does not unavoidably infringe on the equally cherished rights and customs of other groups, whether minority or majority. So the question is: can these two potentially conflicting commitments be rendered compatible? In other words, or more fundamentally no doubt, can a consistent liberal really make proper sense of the very idea of respect for groups as such? Is liberalism in the end a genuinely self-consistent position?
