ABSTRACT
Protecting women’s rights is not intrinsically antithetical to protecting the rights of minorities. Yet these two causes seem to conflict in some situations. Some of these cases involve minority communities that dwell within geographical territories governed by liberal states that seem to protect women’s rights better than the minority groups in question. Political theorists and philosophers disagree over the question of how to resolve the apparent conflict of rights in those cases. Some theorists, most notably Susan Moller Okin, have called for the protection of women’s rights in cases of apparent conflict with minority group traditions or practices (Okin 1999; Nussbaum 1999, 2000; Shachar 2001; Benhabib 2002). By contrast, other theorists have argued that minority cultural groups should be allowed to retain cultural traditions even when these traditions violate the minority women’s rights. For example, Chandran Kukathas argues that illiberal minority traditions should be tolerated because toleration is central to the liberal tradition. He also suggests that, in any case, the state is not a trustworthy agent of cultural reform; the state might change minority traditions in ways that serve merely the interests of the state (Kukathas 2001: 163-165; 2003: 83-98).
