Culture: Choice or Circumstance? (original) (raw)

In this paper, I would like to discuss two recent attempts to incorporate groupdifferentiated rights and entitlements into a broadly liberal conception of distributive justice. The first is John Roemer's "pragmatic theory of responsibility," and the second is Will Kymlicka's defense of minority rights in "multinational" states. 1 Both arguments try to show that egalitarianism, far from requiring a "color-blind" system of institutions and laws that is insensitive to ethnic, linguistic or subcultural differences, may in fact mandate special types of rights, entitlements, or compensatory arrangements for members of minority groups. These proposals are attractive because they attempt to ground these special rights without reference to controversial philosophical doctrines, but merely through appeal to the widely accepted political norm of equality. Furthermore, if either of these arguments were to succeed, it would allow liberals to avoid many of the difficulties that have often led proponents of "the politics of difference" or the "politics of recognition" to adopt an oppositional stance toward more traditional forms of liberalism. 2 Both Roemer and Kymlicka take as their point of departure Ronald Dworkin's resource egalitarianism (which does not recognize group-differentiated entitlements). 3 They both attempt to extend Dworkin's mechanism for compensating those disadvantaged through circumstances beyond their control, in such a way as to license special transfers and entitlements for minority cultures. They disagree, however, on how this should be done. Roemer argues that the preference pattern induced through membership in a minority culture may prove disadvantageous, and so form the basis of a legitimate claim for compensation. Kymlicka takes a slightly narrower view. He claims that agents should be held responsible for their own preference pattern, but they cannot be held responsible for how many others share the same pattern. In cases where having a certain culturally induced preference pattern results in disadvantage by virtue of the fact that it is not widely shared, agents have a legitimate claim to compensation. Both of these proposals have problems-cases where they appear to conflict with our intuitions about justice and desert. I would like to show, using some examples of this type, that when these systems of group-differentiated entitlements appear plausible, it is because we have some respect for the value system underlying the problematic preference pattern. This suggests that the attempt to avoid directly evaluating the preferences that leave members of minority cultures systematically disadvantaged in the larger society is unlikely to succeed. I will