ABSTRACT
Yet such responses would underestimate inequalities of power and conflicts over values in contemporary societies. Shachar insists that her aim is not to increase the chances of radical conflict between different groups, because many citizens experience affiliations to different identity-conferring groups (2001: 3). Rather, the exit-options that she proposes are intended to serve as catalysts for communities to modify informally the most problematic aspects of their traditions over time, in relation to, say, justice for women and children (Shachar 2001: 33). However, her account seems not to acknowledge the ambiguities that lie at the heart of such a proposal. The most serious conflicts are often not those between clearly superior liberal norms and non-liberal practices that are obviously in need of reform. The practices and norms of different cultures are often more complex than this, embodying what Narayan (2002) calls ‘mixed bundles of goods’, which is to say conflicts between different goods and between different ways of combining goods and bads (see Galston 2002: 123). Moreover, if it is correct to suppose that the right is always informed by the good (Gray 1995), then the controversies over gender justice and cultural diversity on which Shachar focuses may amount to conflicts between different assertions of what is right, each of which may entail different elements of wrong. As Mitnick (2003: 1658) observes, Shachar assumes that a single conception of justice would be accepted by all. Yet, as pluralists contend, value conflicts afflict considerations of justice as much as other values. Of course, the fact that the good informs the right (as where human rights are supported by a certain understanding of human well-being) does not logically conflict with the idea that the good and the right are different kinds of value (Jones 1996: 200). Yet the point remains that the aspiration to ground a plural society purely on a consensus concerning principles of right seems problematic. Furthermore, it appears unclear why, given their premises, Kymlicka and Shachar do not straightforwardly support direct intervention to compel minorities to become more liberal. Their reticence may be explained by the fact that they confront diversity with what Berlin calls ‘a sense of reality’, or a feeling for the real costs involved in political decisions (Berlin 1978: 111).6 Kymlicka, for his part, vacillates on the issue of what the state might do to encourage a culture to ‘liberalize’ without destroying it (Kymlicka 1995: 160; see also Chaplin 1993; McDonald 1993; Williams 1994), and in this context he distinguishes the justification of liberal principles from their enforcement (Kymlicka 1995: 166-7). However, this distinction does not entail his endorsement of value pluralism. He appears to believe strongly in the value of ‘liberalizing’ minority cultures, a process that he conceives in terms of promoting autonomy, and claims that this capacity must be secured to a minimal degree in all communities (Kymlicka 1989: 69). While Shachar’s account seems initially more attuned to the necessity of making hard political choices – e.g. feminism or multiculturalism; state or community – her point is to show that such conflicts can be resolved without irreparable loss. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that adhering to such theories would involve high costs for certain communities. Horton (1985), for instance, observes that allegedly universal bads are sometimes deemed good by
some. While such a view may lead to relativism which value pluralists would contest,7 Kymlicka and Shachar may at least be challenged for failing to recognize that goods often combine with bads in complex ways. Depending on the history of relations between groups in a given society, it will simply not always be clear that liberal values such as autonomy should be prioritized. The upshot of this analysis is that the most serious problem confronting liberal multiculturalists is not Shachar’s ‘paradox of multicultural vulnerability’. Rather, it is that their response to diversity in terms of autonomy renders them prone to criticisms by multiculturalists who argue for the unsettling of norms that claim universality, but which are in fact Western or liberal ones (Tully 1995; Parekh 2000). Let us call their position ‘value pluralist multiculturalism’, as it overlaps with Gray’s claim that a liberal order is not the uniquely legitimate form of life for all humanity (2000: 1). Gray criticizes Berlin’s refusal to ‘radicalize value pluralism so as to put negative liberty on all fours with other human goods’, and argues that there may be ‘worthwhile forms of life expressive of genuine human needs and embodying authentic varieties of human flourishing’ whose survival depends on suppressing liberty (Gray 1996: 152). He cites China as an example, on the grounds that this society ‘owes little or nothing to Occidental ideologies and promotes the well-being of its subjects’ (1995: 127). Of course, to sustain this claim Gray must address the fact that ‘substantial numbers of Chinese believe that their institutions should permit a significantly greater degree of individual freedom and democratic self-determination’ (Galston 2002: 93). Moreover, while value pluralism is not typically thought to amount to relativism, as noted above, one may worry that it leads governments to glamorize cultural diversity to a point of jeopardizing a commonsense commitment to basic justice (Sandall 2001, cited in Crowder 2007). In the next section I shall argue that, in spite of the risks, liberal multiculturalists do recognize the insights of value pluralists, and therefore find themselves in a paradoxical situation that is different from that articulated by Shachar. The paradox is that, on the one hand, they require a stable commitment to a principle of justice such as autonomy, a meta-good that stands prior to other values, to justify their commitment to protecting diversity. However, on the other hand, they recognize that dealing justly with cultural diversity often involves overriding this principle of justice in favour of other considerations. The principle of autonomy, they seem to claim, will not always suffice to determine just outcomes. Different issues – including a culture’s historical relations with the dominant society and the pains and pleasures that the culture offers its members – are relevant to ascertaining what justice requires. One could, of course, challenge my account at this early point by contending that there is no real paradox here. One may suggest that an affirmative action policy, say, is generally justified in the name of equality, even though other considerations, such as freedom, efficiency, or considerations of individual responsibility, might override the case for implementing the policy in particular cases. Yet, the following section seeks to show that there is a genuine paradox involved in assuming a stable account of justice through which to justify a general respect for diversity, but of having, at
the same time, generally to unsettle the stability of that commitment in order to understand what justice or the good entails.
