ABSTRACT
To a significant extent, within the frame of contemporary political and moral philosophy, normative theorizing has been informed by two interrelated developments: the rise of a ‘groupist social ontology’, according to which ethnic groups are treated as ‘basic constituents of the social world’, ‘substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed’ (Brubaker 2004, 58, 2, 64–65); and the tendency to focus on cultural groups and/or assume that distinctive cultural traits are the defining features of all groups and the ultimate cause of their potential disadvantage, 2 a ‘“culturalization” of group identities’ (Barry 2001, 305) both reflected and fostered by the conventional use of ‘multiculturalism’ as an umbrella term. In the United States, in particular, this tendency has been reinforced by the nearly consensual celebration of ‘diversity’—a catch-all notion bringing together issues of recognition and discrimination and encouraging a conflation of race and culture (Hollinger 2006; Ford 2005)—and by the equally all-encompassing (yet less ubiquitous) category of ‘oppression’ promoted by some purportedly ‘radical’ theorists as a way of conceptualizing social injustice (Young 1990, 39–65; Cudd 2006). In contrast, this chapter is an attempt at disaggregating types of group-related differences that are all too easily collapsed, decoupling affirmative action from the debate on multiculturalism, and sketching a liberal-egalitarian and individual-focused moral defense of this seemingly paradoxical policy.
