ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the rights of cultural minorities in liberal democratic societies and the problems that arise when a democratic majority takes its dominant culture and language to be obligatory and adopts assimilationist or integrationist policies that deny rights of cultural self-expression and development to such minority ethnic groups. It also briefly considers the somewhat different question of the rights of oppressed groups within a larger polity, where such groups are identified by discriminatory, exclusionary, or exploitative treatment. The chapter suggests that the social ontology itself is already in a way normative, e.g., that the very characterization of individuals as agents or persons with cultural identities supports an argument for certain rights as valid claims of such individuals. Hopefully, the study of group rights and their relation to individual rights will contribute to a rational framework for such policy deliberations.
