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Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Respect for Cultural MinoritiesAuthor(s): John TomasiSource: Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 3 (Apr., 1995), pp. 580-603Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2382143 .Accessed: 21/02/2015 00:46

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ARTICLE

Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Respect for Cultural Minorities*

John Tomasi

Do liberalism's foundational principles call for the recognition of group rights to protect minority cultures? According to Will Kymlicka, those principles do. Kymlicka has developed a novel and sophisticated argument to show that, in conditions of cultural pluralism, the liberal principle of equal respect for persons sometimes requires the recognition of collective rights for the protection of cultural groupings.' Be- cause Kymlicka's argument for cultural rights appeals to widely held liberal principles, his argument has strong intuitive appeal for liberals and is already gaining influence among them.2 However, it is not clear that Kymlicka's argument can bear close examination.

This article begins with an evaluation of Kymlicka's argument for cultural rights. In Sections I and II, I shall argue that Kymlicka's argument, while highly instructive about liberalism's foundational commitments, cannot provide a justification for the cultural rights he wants. By uncovering the motivational roots of Kymlicka's argument, however, we will discover a different and more powerful justification for a liberal recognition of special rights. Indeed, as we will see, much of the intuitive appeal of Kymlicka's argument may come from his own unrecognized reliance on this (different) pattern of justification. This is surprising: for this stronger pattern ofjustification, the pattern

* For comments on earlier versions, I thank Bernard Williams, Jerry Cohen, Brian Barry, Sam Freeman, Amy Gutmann, Tony Laden, George Rainbolt, Susan Okin, the members of my Political Philosophy 171 class at Stanford (especially Mac Beal and Stanley Kim), and the editors and readers at Ethics.

1. Kymlicka's most complete presentation of this argument is in Liberalism, Commu- nity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). All page references are to that work, unless otherwise indicated.

2. Allen Buchanan, for example, relies explicitly on Kymlicka's argument for some of his most interesting and important arguments for a liberal recognition of secession rights. See Secession (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 39, 53-54, 79. I say more about Buchanan's argument below at n. 31.

Ethics 105 (April 1995): 580-603 ? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/95/0503-0006$01.00

580


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 581 on which I say Kymlicka actually relies, does not itself rely on liberalism's foundational principles. In Section III, I'll say what this nonliberal pattern is and show why liberals should adopt it.

I. CULTURAL MEMBERSHIP AS A PRIMARY GOOD Kymlicka says that in many modern nation-states there is an important discontinuity between the scope of two different sorts of community: political community and cultural community. The political community is the grouping "within which individuals exercise the rights and re- sponsibilities entailed by the framework of liberal justice." The cultural community, by contrast, is the grouping "within which individuals form and revise their aims and ambitions" (p. 135). People within the same cultural community share a culture, a language and history; these define their cultural membership. But in many modern nation- states these two types of community are not coextensive. For example, in the United States, Canada, and Australia there are aboriginal groupings that are distinct from the main cultural groupings; similar situations obtain in Western European states with culturally distinct subgroupings, such as those in Belgium and Switzerland.

Kymlicka says the lack of coextensivity between the political and cultural communities in many modern nation-states has an important implication: it suggests two different ways by which individuals may be incorporated into a liberal state. People may be incorporated universally, so that each person is taken to stand in the same direct relation to the state. Or, they might be incorporated consociationally, so that the nature of each person's rights varies with the particular cultural community to which he belongs. For example, in Canada some aboriginal leaders have been able to enact laws that prohibit the selling (or even the renting) of traditional aboriginal lands to outsiders: a Cana- dian citizen who is Inuit may buy (or rent) a piece of this land from another Inuit, bat a Canadian who is white may not. Similar measures have been adopted in Canada regarding language instruction in schools and, especially, regarding certain political rights. In northern Canada, for example, some aboriginal leaders have proposed imposing long residency requirements on white Canadians (of up to ten years) before they can vote on local matters. Kymlicka groups all such measures loosely under the heading "group rights" (pp. 138, 146-50).3 Significantly, as Kymlicka says, "the justification for these measures focuses on their role in allowing minority cultures to develop their

3. This heading is troublesome, as Kymlicka notes (p. 139). Buchanan suggests that such measures are not rights but legal authorizations to cancel certain immunities from interference (pp. 39-40). Like Buchanan, however, I shall follow Kymlicka's usage.


582 Ethics April 1995 distinct cultural life, an ability insufficiently protected by 'universal' modes of incorporation" (p. 137).

A warning may be in order. Many liberal countries from their very inception have recognized systems of exclusion, especially in political matters, by which individuals gain an especially important role in local matters. Under systems of democratic federalism, like that in the United States, each citizen is politically incorporated both universally and consociationally: all citizens have equal standing regarding constitutional and legislative matters on the national level; each citizen has special standing regarding constitutional and legislative matters con- cerning his own locality, whether township, county, or state. Like the restrictive measures Kymlicka means to justify, democratic federalist measures-on their consociational dimension-protect the autonomy of local groups by restricting the powers and privileges of (fellow national) outsiders.4 The project of showing the foundations of liberal democratic federalism is a difficult and, I believe, a timely one.5 But that project should not be confused with the project Kymlicka is under- taking here, which is to argue that liberalism itself sometimes calls for a very extreme set of consociational measures-such as those that would allow local legislatures to restrict property sales between citizens on the basis of race or cultural background. In the liberal context, the distinction between arguing for federalism and arguing for cultural rights is no little one. I shall return to it below.6

4. This partially explains why, for example, the traditional political culture of Vermont can be so unlike that of its neighbor New Hampshire. (Can one imagine New Hampshirites electing a Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives?)

5. What's more, the project of giving foundations to liberal federalism seems prior, both strategically and conceptually, to that of justifying the special cultural-protecting measures Kymlicka discusses. That project is strategically prior since until we know precisely what protection federalist measures can or cannot provide to cultural minorities, we have no clear reason to begin a search for specialized collectivist measures like those Kymlicka insists are needed (no reason unless it is the mistaken belief that some choice must be made between universal and consociational principles, simpliciter). The project of finding foundations for federalism would also appear to be conceptually prior since, for one thing, the principles of self-government that apply on the local level (which a theory of federalism would supply) are themselves formulizable as universal principles.

6. Kymlicka, of course, never suggests that his argument is meant to provide a foundation for liberal democratic federalism. (Indeed, in the index of Liberalism, Commu- nity and Culture the word "federalism" does not even appear.) But nor, I think unfortu- nately, does he make clear precisely how he sees his project as differing from that one. The consociational measures he calls "group rights" seem to differ from the consociational measures associated with traditional democratic federalism in two ways. First, the measures Kymlicka favors are to be applied to groups picked out by their distinctive cultures (as defined in the main text below). Second and most important: unlike the more familiar consociational measures, many of the group rights Kymlicka advocates do not leave intact "the structure of rights guaranteed elsewhere in the constitution" (p. 138). If he were advocating only consociational measures that were compatible with


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 583 Liberalism typically is understood to be hostile to the idea of

allowing groups to claim for themselves collective measures of the sort Kymlicka advocates.7 A liberalism that allowed groups to claim rights that conflict with basic individual rights would appear to treat "respect for groups" as more important than "respect for individuals." But Kymlicka says that this way of thinking, however firmly entrenched in liberal self-understanding, rests on a mistake. According to Kymlicka, liberal theory can accommodate two kinds of respect for persons: respect for a person as a member of the political community and respect for a person as a member of his particular cultural grouping (pp. 150-54). In conditions of cultural pluralism, according to Kymlicka, the liberal commitment to respect for persons results in a liberal need for the recognition of special consociational modes of incorporation, in particular, those associated with cultural rights.8

Kymlicka's argument is in two main steps. First, Kymlicka claims that cultural membership has a more important place in liberal theory than is explicitly recognized by liberalism's leading contemporary pro- ponents, such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Although these liberals have failed to recognize it, cultural membership is so important that it is a primary good (p. 162). Second, Kymlicka claims that com- pared to members of the dominant cultural groupings, members of minority cultures may be differentially disadvantaged with respect to the good of cultural membership. Minority rights are needed to prevent or rectify this disadvantage (p. 162). Let's look more closely at this argument.

Why, within the liberal framework, should cultural membership be recognized as an important good? Liberals place great importance

those other constitutional rights, then Kymlicka's argument might well be taken merely as being about federalism. (This because without a background account of federalism, it remains an open question whether or not the picking out of a group by its culture ipso factor disrupts the structure of constitutional rights.) So it is this second feature, the limiting of other individual rights, that makes the measures Kymlicka is advocating so difficult to justify within the liberal context (and thus makes Kymlicka's argument so interesting).

7. As Kymlicka says, "The accepted wisdom is that liberals must oppose any propos- als for self-government which would limit individual rights in the name of collective rights" (p. 138).

8. Although Kymlicka does not discuss this, notice that conventional federalist measures also would appear to rely on a distinction between these two kinds of respect. The issue is made complex by the question of where state and province boundaries should be drawn, and of how closely such lines should map onto lines separating cultural groups (here, using "culture" in Kymlicka's sense). But what distinguishes the special measures Kymlicka advocates from ordinary federalist measures is not that they uniquely seek to recognize that second form of respect. Rather, what makes Kymlicka's cultural rights distinct is that, unlike the more familiar consociational measures associated with democratic federalism, they seek to do so in a way that does not leave intact the structure of rights generated by the first form of respect.


584 Ethics April 1995 on the idea of individual autonomy, on the idea that every individual has an interest in effectively exercising his moral power of forming and revising a plan of life. A precondition to exercising that moral power, according to Rawls, is the idea of self-respect, "the sense that one's life-plan is worth carrying out."9 Liberty is important to liberals at least in part because liberty enables each individual actively to form and revise his own life plan: self-confirmation gives people self-respect.10 But, Kymlicka asks, what is the source of people's beliefs about value, the beliefs by which people confirm the value of their own choices? Kymlicka argues that these beliefs are rooted in the structure of the cultural communities in which people find themselves (p. 165). When a person sets out to select a life plan, he does not start de novo but instead selects from a range of options that is determined by his cultural heritage. Cultural narratives, stories of sorts of lives more or less worth living, are passed down through cultural literature-written, oral, and pictorial. The language and history of a person's cultural grouping are the media through which each individual becomes aware of the options available to him and of the relative values his group assigns to those options. Cultural membership is crucial to self-respect because it provides salience to the options from which a person selects in making the judgments about how he can best live his life.

According to Kymlicka, the relationship between cultural membership and self-respect is so strong that parties in Rawls's original position would have good reason to view cultural membership as a primary good, a good people value irrespective of what particular life plan each happens to choose. Kymlicka quotes Rawls, "the parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect" (p. 166; Rawls, p. 440). The loss of cultural membership would shrink the range of life options available to a person and strip the remaining options of their salience. This is a social condition Rawlsian parties strongly would wish to avoid. Kymlicka concludes, "Rawls's own argument for the importance of liberty as a primary good is also an argument for the importance of cultural membership as a primary good" (p. 166).

It is crucial to understanding Kymlicka's argument to see that by it the cultural structure, the cultural community, is being recognized as a context of choice (p. 166). Cultural membership "is a good in its capacity of providing meaningful options for us, and aiding our ability

9. Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 178.

10. This way of emphasizing the idea that liberty is important to liberals not only because of its direct role in allowing people to make their own choices but especially because it is a means to self-respect is one of Kymlicka's distinctive, and most important, contributions to the recent debate.


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 585 to judge for ourselves the value of our lifeplans" (p. 166). Kymlicka says that the idea of culture as a context of choice is importantly distinct from a different sense of culture, where that term is taken to refer to the character of a historical community. On this latter view, "changes in the norms, values, and their attendant institutions in one's community (e.g. membership in churches, political parties, etc.) would amount to loss of one's culture" (p. 166). But Kymlicka is using 'culture' to refer not to the character of any community but to the community as a context of choice, to the cultural structure itself. Taken this way, as a context of choice, "the cultural community continues to exist even when its members are free to modify the character of the culture, should they find its traditional ways of life no longer worth while" (p. 167).

For example, Kymlicka describes the radical transformation of French Canadian culture in the 1960s-the so-called Quiet Revolu- tion-which saw the rapid decline of key social and religious institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church. Even through this period of extremely rapid change, during which people "began to make very different choices than they traditionally had done," Kymlicka says "the existence of a French-Canadian cultural community itself was never in question, never threatened with unwanted extinction or assimilation as aboriginal communities are currently threatened." Despite the radical changes in the character of the cultural community, there was no danger to the cultural structure itself, "no danger to their ability to examine the options that their cultural structure had made meaningful to them" (p. 167). So what Kymlicka says is important is the cultural structure itself rather than the character of the cultural community: "It is the existence of a cultural community viewed as a context of choice that is a primary good, and a legitimate concern of liberals" (p. 169).

But even if cultural membership is an imporant good, why does liberalism sometimes require special rights to protect that good? Ac- cording to the Rawlsian and Dworkinian conceptions of liberalism within which Kymlicka situates his argument, the liberal view ofjustice is founded on the idea that the interests of each member of the political community matter, and matter equally (p. 182). Rawls and Dworkin share the view that "the interests of each citizen are given equal consid- eration in two social institutions or procedures: an economic market and a political process of majority government" (p. 183).11 But Kym- licka says with some groups, such as the aboriginal population of

11. Tony Laden has suggested to me that it is unclear whether Rawls is committed to the view that a planned economy conflicts with "political liberalism" or that democracy (which is central to political liberalism) is the same as "majority government." Strictly speaking, Laden may well be right (which, in my view, is all the worse for Rawls's claim to be a liberal). But Kymlicka's characterization is uncontroversial enough for the argument at hand.


586 Ethics April 1995 Northern Canada, the consequences of these two institutions may be dire: "the effect of market and political decisions made by the majority may well be that aboriginal groups are outbid or outvoted on matters crucial to their survival as a cultural community" (p. 183). By liberal principles, individuals are taken to be responsible for differences that arise because of their own choices. But differences that arise purely as a result of people's circumstances are taken to be arbitrary from a moral point of view. In deciding whether cultural groupings may claim special protective rights for themselves, Kymlicka says, the question the liberal must ask is whether the "request for special rights or resources is grounded in differential choices or in unequal circumstances" (p. 186).

Kymlicka argues that a comparison of the situations of individual white, English-speaking Canadians with those of individual aboriginals suggests that the differences between members of these two groups is more a result of unequal circumstances than of different choices. In bidding for resources with which to pursue their plans of life, white people "are bidding solely on the basis of what is useful in pursuing the goals that they have chosen to pursue, secure in the knowledge that their context of choice is protected." But, Kymlicka says, for aboriginals "it is necessary to outbid nonaboriginal people just to en- sure that their cultural structure survives, leaving them few resources to pursue the particular goals they've chosen from within that structure" (p. 189). This results in a situation of inequality wherein the whites "get for free what aboriginal people have to pay for: secure cultural membership" (p. 190).

Kymlicka says this inequality arises quite independently of the choices people make and indeed arises before people even make their choices. For example, Kymlicka says a two-year-old Inuit girl who as yet has no projects faces this inequality. "Without special political protection, like restrictions on the rights of transient workers, by the time she is eighteen the existence of the cultural community in which she grew up is likely to be undermined by the decisions of people outside the community" (p. 189). This will happen no matter what choices she makes, yet an English-Canadian boy will not face this problem. Kymlicka says, "The rectification of this inequality is the basis for a liberal defense of aboriginal rights, and of minority rights in general" (p. 189). Special rights, far from being prohibited by the liberal requirement that all citizens be treated equally, actually pro- mote liberal equality.

II. A CONCEPTUAL FORK The striking feature of Kymlicka's argument is that it employs an individualistic justification-respect for individuals as autonomous choosers-as a basis for a defense of the collective notion of a cultural


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 587 right. However, there is a fundamental problem with Kymlicka's at- tempt to use this strategy to argue for cultural rights in the liberal context.

A symptom of the problem, and a telling marker of its depth, is that Kymlicka is unclear about the nature of the primary good that is the centerpiece of his argument. As his argument unfolds his description of that good undergoes a subtle, but marked, transformation. Originally, the good associated with cultural membership is presented simply as the good of there being a cultural structure, a context of choice (pp. 162-66).- But later this concept is presented with an unan- nounced parenthetical modifier: the good is described as that of a "(stable) context of choice" (p. 167). Still later, the parentheses drop and the primary good is described as that of a "secure cultural context," or "a secure cultural context of choice" (pp. 169 and 170; emphases mine). By this stage, Kymlicka's crucial early distinction between the cultural structure itself and the character of the culture (pp. 166-67) is referred back to as a distinction between "the stability of a cultural community" and its character (p. 169; emphasis mine). So in some passages, especially ones later in Kymlicka's discussion, what is claimed to be of value is not merely the existence of one's cultural community as a context of choice but rather the stability of that community context.12 These are two different notions. In the end, it is unclear which Kym- licka means to be discussing.13 But on either interpretation Kymlicka's argument seems unlikely to produce the conclusion he wants.

Let's assume that the good of cultural membership should be taken as it is first described: what is centrally important is the existence of a cultural community understood as a context of choice. Of course, even on this existential interpretation it is not the existence of just any cultural context that is said to be an important good for the people in question. Rather, as Kymlicka says, because of the way each individual person's identity becomes bound up with the cultural community in which he finds himself, it is the good associated with each person's own particular cultural context that is at issue (pp. 173, 175). What else do we know about this good? Recall that Kymlicka made his crucial distinction between the character of a culture and the cultural

12. Prior to the parenthetical introduction of the word "stable" (on p. 167), I find only one instance where the primary good in question is referred to as being a "secure" structure, and this only in passing (p. 165). All other references to that good treat that good existentially. But after that parenthetical passage, it is the stability of that structure rather than its existence that seems to be Kymlicka's main concern.

13. It might be thought that there is an intermediate interpretation, whereby the structure only exists when it is stable. Although Kymlicka never says that is what he means, such an interpretation is at least compatible with what he says. But in any case such an interpretation would be a species of the stability interpretation, which I analyze below.


588 Ethics April 1995 structure as a context of choice by saying that in the character sense, changes in a cultural community's "norms, values, and their attendant institutions" would result in a loss of culture (p. 166). This means that the cultural structure as a context of choice (existential sense) is something that persists even when such fundamental changes occur. But if the culture's structure is to be distinguished from its character as something that even these very basic changes cannot affect, then this raises the question whether any change in a society-short of a terrible natural catastrophe or war, perhaps-could result in there being a loss of structure from the perspective of individual human lives.

At one point, Kymlicka describes the case of an Indonesian tribe where the sudden introduction of television led a large group of children to jump off a cliff to their deaths, tragically imitating what they had viewed (p. 170). But the more typical case seems to be that of the Inuit girl Kymlicka describes, who from age two to eighteen experi- enced the rapid and disorienting transition of her culture from Inuit to white ways. Because the character of her society was in transition, it is true that this girl was unable to make her life choices from within a (stable) Inuit cultural context. She grew up in a society that was, transitionally, bilingual and bicultural (and jarringly so). But it would be strange indeed to say that she, as an individual, therefore made her choices within no cultural structure. Of course she did: she made her choices not as an Inuit and not as a white but, precisely, as a member of an Inuit group in the midst of a disorienting transition to white society."4 The beliefs about value that come from that transition group-however unstable those beliefs may be as a set-are very much beliefs that come from a structure that was hers: it is in that transitional community that she was raised. About this Inuit girl, Kym- licka says "the existence of the cultural community in which she grew up is likely to be undermined" (p. 189; emphasis mine).15 But the cultural community in which she grew up is the cultural community in which she grew up; it is not the more purely Inuit cultural community in which she would have grown up had she (somehow) lived her life before she was two (or lived it all of a sudden when she was just two).16 For her, a cultural context existed and that context, however unstable, was a context that was hers.

14. The point is the same if one thinks of her group not as in transition but as caught between Inuit and white ways.

15. It is important to Kymlicka's argument, though not to the point I am making here, that her group is said to be undermined "by the decisions of people outside the community" (p. 189)-on which, see below.

16. The muddle arises, I believe, because Kymlicka employs a synchronic mode of evaluation where, given his individualistic perspective, a diachronic one is required. There


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 589 The bare existence of a cultural context that is one's own need

not necessarily be much help when it comes to the securing of self- respect: as with the Inuit girl perhaps, a person's own cultural context may be so unstable that it is inadequate to help her affirm for herself the worth of her choices. So it cannot be the mere existence of a cultural structure that is one's own that Kymlicka really has in mind when he speaks of cultural membership as a primary good. There is also a structural reason for rejecting this interpretation. For if the good of cultural membership as a context of choice is taken in this existential sense, Kymlicka's argument does not generate the special rights he wants. If it is the mere existence of "one's own" cultural structure that is the good, then each individual person (except perhaps the dead Indonesians) has that good, and each has it equally. 17 Taken existentially, cultural membership is a primary good only in the same uninteresting sense as is, say, oxygen: since (practically) no one is differentially advantaged with respect to that good, it generates no special rights.

So we must take seriously the arrival of the modifier "stable" within Kymlicka's argument: the primary good in question is not merely an existing cultural choosing context but a stable cultural context (such as the Inuit girl in her transitional society presumably lacked). What does it mean for a cultural choosing context to be stable? Kymlicka never directly tells us, but we can work it out. A cultural community as a context of choice has two aspects: it sets out options of life choices, and it assigns values to those options relative to one another. Let's say that such a context is unstable in periods when new options suddenly and unpredictably appear among the life-choice possibilities while important old options disappear. Simultaneously, and possibly as a result, the traditional rankings of the various options become unsettled-this is because those rankings become a matter of disagreement, or real uncertainty, within the community. Further, the character of these new options and the disordering of the rankings are profound and pervasive enough to reach to the very foundations of the cultural community: they threaten not merely the cultural community's values, norms, and attendant institutions (the "character" of the culture)

may be a time-slice perspective from which the character of the cultural context may be said to have changed to something completely different. But from the perspective of individual human lives in progress (which is -the relevant perspective here), the existence of the structure is untouched.

17. Kymlicka says Rawls and Dworkin do not discuss cultural membership as a primary good because they falsely assume cultural homogeneity, that the political and cultural communities will be coextensive (pp. 137, 166, and esp. 177-78). But on the existential interpretation, Kymlicka's argument cannot show the significance of this omission.


590 Ethics April 1995 but the history, language, and culture of the group (the "cultural structure" itself). On this second interpretation of Kymlicka's argument-the stability interpretation-the primary good in question is a situation where cultural instability of this sort is avoided. Kymlicka's position is that special group rights are justified when people find themselves in disadvantaged circumstances with respect to this good, so described.

Two preliminary points about the stability interpretation. First, if the promotion of self-respect is the basic issue then there are some other factors regarding self-respect that should be put on the balance when considering whether special rights are justified. Recall that what is at base important about cultural membership is that it supplies beliefs about value by which individual members of the political community can reaffirm for themselves the worth of the life plans they choose. Now, members of transitional societies, especially contemporary aboriginal ones such as those in North America, usually are aware-and acutely-that they are members of transitional societies.18 That realization is often woven prominently into the cultural self- understanding the members of such communities share."9 This has an important consequence: in a difficult cultural-transition choosing context a community's criteria determining what counts as a respect- able choice of a life plan may be much more flexible than they would be in a community that is highly stable. Since individuals living through such difficult times can be aware of this difference, they can as individuals respect the worth of their own choices in part because they recognize the special difficulty of their choices. This is not to say that individual members of unstable cultural communities (Inuits or Quebecois, perhaps) face no particular threats to their sense of their self-worth. They do. But self-respect is an extremely complex psychological phenomenon and Kymlicka's argument underestimates the myriad ways the psychological state associated with that phenomenon can be got to and secured.20 In fact, Kymlicka's argument does this not only by failing to consider important ways individual members of transitional groups are able to secure self-respect for themselves but also by failing to recogize the cost in terms of self-respect levied by the very remedies he proposes. If an individual makes an important life choice-say, to

18. I am not suggesting that all aboriginal groups in transitional states have achieved this sort of self-awareness. But if those who have not tend to suffer worse, the factors I discuss below may help explain why.

19. This is especially apparent in the self-descriptive literature of North American Indians. To take just one example, see Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

20. As Chandran Kukathas has suggested to me, the problem of how people actually acquire self-respect is made even more complex by the fact that subgroups within communities may react differently to conditions of dislocation. For example, children may be more able than adults to find order and meaning in a transitional state.


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 591 sell his land to a (wealthy) white person and raise his family in a city near a major university-but is told that he is forbidden to do so by law, then that person's self-respect, the respect he has for the value of the choices he makes about how he wants to lead his life (and the personal hopes he has for his children's lives), may receive a direct and heavy blow. In many cases, the imposition of group rights does not come without a price; part of that price looks likely to demand payment in terms of self-respect.21

A second preliminary point also concerns a doubt one might have about the importance of a stable cultural choosing context, and this is a doubt that one might especially expect to find among the very people to whom Kymlicka addresses his discussion: liberals. For liberalism, a doctrine that historically defined itself against the conservativ- ism of the ancien regime, has a deep motivational connection with another important notion: a belief in the possibility of social progress, especially as a result of personal experimentation.22 In many contexts, a certain degree of cultural instability-including an instability that affects the deep sources of people's beliefs about value-not only goes along with but is a precondition of social progress of that sort. This belief in the possibility of progress achieved through individual experimentation, an idea prominent in the work John Stuart Mill, may be as entwined with liberalism as is the ideal of self-respect. If Kymlicka's argument is meant for liberals, we might hope it to advance both these liberal concerns instead ofjust one at the direct expense of the other.23 But this leads to our main point about the stability interpretation of Kymlicka's argument.

Recall that Kymlicka introduced the primary good associated with cultural membership as being the existence of a cultural structure as a context of choice. But if we are to interpret the primary good of cultural membership as referring to the stability of the cultural structure as a context of choice, then the distinction that must be examined is that between the stability of the cultural community as a choosing context and the character of that cultural community. To maintain this (different) distinction, Kymlicka must show that changes in the latter are not ipso facto changes in the former. And he must show

21. I do not say that these factors alone defeat Kymlicka's conclusion about the desirability of cultural rights. But they militate against such rights, and they do so in the name of self-respect.

22. The liberal belief in the possibility of progress should not be confused with deterministic, historicist (nonliberal) variants. For a lucid discussion of this distinction in the context of J. S. Mill's work, see Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 47, 196-99.

23. It is true that Kymlicka is concerned with social progress in a broader sense, since he speaks of the importance of "liberalizing" nonliberal communities (p. 170). But that concern is different from the Millian one I am discussing in the immediate text.


592 Ethics April 1995 this with respect to people's respect-securing beliefs about value, beliefs which appear to be bound up with both sides of the distinction. What tools are available to Kymlicka for making this distinction?

The structure of the cultural community refers to the culture itself, a concept Kymlicka defines in terms of a "language, history and culture."24 So threats to the structure of a culture must be threats to the group's language, history, and culture. (If changes in these characteristics are not acknowledged as changes in the structure, then the notion of the structure is being used in the existential sense we rejected above.) But Kymlicka also wants to say that in some cases, such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the structure of a community can be unchanged even when the character of the community is changed. Changes in the character of the community, on Kymlicka's account, are changes in the community's "norms, values, and attendant institutions." Thus to maintain his distinction between the primary good of structure (stability sense) and the mere character of the community, Kymlicka must say that changes in a group's beliefs, values, and institutions need not be changes-with respect to people's beliefs about value-in the group's history, language, and culture.

This is implausible. The changes wrought in French Canada during the Quiet Revolution were changes-important changes-in the history of the Quebecois cultural community. What's more, those changes-for example, the sudden decline of Catholicism-had their historic importance as changes in Quebecois culture. So perhaps Kym- licka means to rest his entire distinction between changes in character and changes in structure on the stability of the community's language. If so, this criterion would face a variety of difficulties,25 perhaps the most serious of which are functional. Recall that what the cultural structure as a context of choice is meant to do is transmit to people a set of life-choice options and some beliefs about value related to those options. But even when, as a taxonomical matter, a language does not itself change, the set of options it transmits-along with the substan- tive evaluations it provides of those options-can change, can change easily, and can change in profound ways: even in Inuit people can discuss leaving the tribal system and setting off on a very new course of life.26 As Kymlicka describes them, changes in a culture's character

24. This definition is muddy, but we must do our best with it. Kymlicka says, "Language and history ... are the media through which a person becomes aware of the options and of the relative values of these options" (p. 165). Since "culture" is defined in terms of a group's language, history, and culture (p. 135), the beliefs about value -in coming from the "structure itself" -come from the culture itself.

25. Language is a notoriously difficult concept to use for demarcating cultural groups. For a helpful discussion, see Buchanan, p. 49.

26. It is true that this sometimes might require adding some non-Inuit words to their language-for example, "university degree" or "satellite dish."


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 593 are changes in its structure as a context of choice. Because both describe cultural features associated with the generation of respect-securing beliefs about value, the criteria picking out the one overlap with the criteria picking out the other. On the stability interpretation, Kym- licka's discussion allows no principled distinction between changes in a cultural community's character and changes in that culture's structure as a context of choice.27

Why was this distinction so crucial? The distinction was crucial because the role of the primary good associated with cultural membership was to show that people who find themselves unequally situated with respect to that good merit special rights. But the distinction between changes in character and changes in structure (stability sense) cannot help us identify which changes impermissibly damage people's self-respect and which do not. To make that identification we must go to the underlying value on which self-respect more immediately relies. That is, Kymlicka's argument tells us to avoid differential degrees of instability in the range of life options and the beliefs about the relative values of those options that arise in different communities. To avoid differential instabilities of that kind, one would need to allow cultural groups (or their political majorities, dominant factions, or their leadership) to invoke whatever measures are required to prevent transition periods in those communities, including transitions in what Kymlicka calls the "character" of the community. On the stability interpretation, Kymlicka's argument has the unwanted, conservative result that valid claims to group rights spring up whenever the character of a community is threatened with change.28

In places, Kymlicka hints that he is employing an additional criterion for picking out cultural changes that are objectionable: they are unwanted by the group (pp. 145, 167). Kymlicka never makes clear what formal role, if any, he wants this concern to play in his primary goods argument.29 Thus, for example, he never tells us how, from his individualist perspective, "changes the group wants" are to be distinguished from "changes the group does not want." There are a

27. At one place, Kymlicka suggests a different dimension on which the structure/ character distinction might be maintained: one is "the context of people's choices," the other "the product of people's choices" (p. 178). But since the context of choice is itself a product of choice (made within a context), this is unhelpful.

28. This result is unwanted because it would deny individuals any genuine chance to reaffirm for themselves the worth of their own -choices, which is what motivated the discussion in the first place.

29. Perhaps he could admit that, on the stability interpretation, his distinction between character and structure collapses but then contend that his argument only generates special rights when changes in the character of the culture are "unwanted by the group." A conjunctive criterion of this sort-which Kymlicka does not propose-would face a variety of difficulties.


594 Ethics April 1995 variety of ways one might propose to make that distinction, but each has different argumentative consequences. Since Kymlicka does not tell us which he has in mind, we can neither evaluate the objectionableness of such changes from the perspective of individual self-respect nor, more basically, can we evaluate whether that objectionableness requires the particular form of consociational redress Kymlicka wants: group rights.30 Still, the concern that certain groups face cultural changes that are (in some sense) unwanted seems to have great importance to Kymlicka's project. That importance, I suspect, is not formal but motivational. We shall return to this in Section III.

Kymlicka is unclear about the nature of the primary good associated with cultural membership. If we take that good as it is first described, in its existential sense, then at the end of his argument consid- eration of it yields nothing: no individual member of any cultural community is disadvantaged with respect to that good, so no justice- based intervention is justified by the liberal commitment to treat citizens with equal respect. If we take that good as it is later described, in its "stability" sense, then a crucial early distinction collapses and the argument generates a plethora of conservative rights. Either the good is so abstract and distant that no one is differentially disadvantaged with respect to it, or it is so closely tied to the character of the community that multicultural societies are pervaded by inequalities with respect to it. And because the deepest guiding concern throughout Kym- licka's discussion is the access of individual people to respect-securing beliefs about value, the strategic hope on which Kymlicka's argument relies-to fix on some supposedly intermediate concept-is one that is in principle misplaced. Kymlicka has not shown that liberalism's fundamental principles require a recognition of cultural rights.

There is no obvious way to restructure Kymlicka's argument so as to surmount this conceptual problem. The only possibility in sight would be to try to work out some further distinction within what is for Kymlicka a bedrock notion-the notion of people's beliefs about value-with an eye to showing that some kinds of beliefs about value are more tied up with people's self-respect than are others (and thus, by the self-respect test, that some cultural changes could be allowed

30. There are other ways to empower groups against unwanted cultural changes: for example, various democratic federalist measures-which are compatible with the traditional universalist mode of incorporation-might be worked out in a way that would give groups greater self-determination while limiting individual liberty less than would group rights. However, for certain groups-in particular, for some groups of aboriginals- Kymlicka thinks stronger (more collectivist) measures are appropriate. Why? That question, I suspect, raises a deeper one: Is Kymlicka's concern to protect cultural groups always really derivative from a concern to provide individual members of such groups with the conditions of liberal self-respect? The answer is not obviously "yes" (see Sec. III).


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 595 while others were forbidden). But this would be delicate work at very best: I doubt whether any such further distinction could be worked out in the appropriate way, at least not within a framework that is recognizably liberal.3"

III. BEYOND LIBERAL RESPECT If the majority (or leadership) of a cultural group wishes to be allowed to adopt special collective measures that would conflict with the liberal rights of both member and nonmember citizens, those measures cannot be justified by liberalism's foundational principles in the way Kym- licka had hoped. But to repeat a warning made earlier, Kymlicka's project regarding cultural rights must be marked off from a different, much broader project that also concerns liberalism's resources for protecting cultural and regional subgroupings of citizens: the project of justifying (and plumbing the consociational limits of) liberal democratic federalism. Consociational measures that do leave intact the structure of individual rights -measures like those granting a substan- tial degree of sovereignty to state legislatures in the United States-are justified by liberal democratic federalism itself. The limit on that degree of sovereignty is set by the content of those individual rights (typically, as specified by the national constitution).32 Even if an adequate account of how systems of federalism relate to liberalism's foundational principles has yet to be given, we have no reason to fear that the notion of liberal federalism itself stands or falls with an argument about the very specialized consociational measures Kymlicka calls cultural rights.33

31. The flagship argument of Allen Buchanan's Secession is that liberalism's foundational principles sometimes require the recognition of a group right of political secession on grounds of cultural preservation. But Buchanan's main argument for that claim relies directly and explicitly on Kymlicka's group-rights argument (n. 2 above). So if my analysis of Kymlicka's argument is correct, Buchanan's most interesting secession argument would appear to go down with it. (It is true that Buchanan supplements Kymlicka's account with the claim that, for most people at least, participation in community is not only a precondition but also a part of the good life [thus the good of cultural membership has more than structural value for people]. But this is an odd justificatory supplement to an individualistic strategy such as Kymlicka's: Buchanan never makes clear how [or why] he thinks an observation about what counts as part of the good life for most people could translate directly into an argument about liberal justice -and an individual-liberty-limiting one at that.) For a very different way of thinking about culture-based secession within the scope of liberal theory, see my "Secession, Group Rights and the Grounds of Political Obligation," Humane Studies Review 8 (1992): 3-18.

32. The limit on that degree of sovereignty is itself set by the content of those individual rights (typically, as specified by the national constitution).

33. Let me emphasize: my analysis leaves untouched the question of whether a self-respect-based argument like Kymlicka's could be developed in a way that might justify, and elucidate, the principles of liberal democratic federalism. I believe there are some intriguing possibilities in that direction.


596 Ethics April 1995 But what about cultural rights? Even if, as I have argued, Kym-

licka has not identified a convincing liberal theory of minority rights that does not mean that liberal societies cannot justifiably permit certain minority cultures to claim, special protective measures for themselves even when those measures would conflict with the liberal individual rights of both member and nonmember citizens. I believe we are now in position to make out at least the beginnings of a different, more plausible form of justification for a liberal recognition of what- Kymlicka calls "cultural rights." Indeed, a strong strand of this different form ofjustification-ajustification which does not appeal directly to liberalism's fundamental principles-appears to run unrecognized through Kymlicka's own account.

Kymlicka often suggests that his argument about the liberal commitment to group rights for cultural minorities is meant to apply to a great variety of cultural groups throughout the liberal world (pp. 3, 135, 170, 178, 257-58).34 The three features he offers for picking out such groups-a distinctive culture, language, and history-might also lead one to think the pro-group-rights argument could apply widely. It is striking, therefore, that when discussing particular cases where his argument applies Kymlicka returns again and again to one particular type of cultural community: aboriginal peoples (particularly Inuit and North American Indians).

About Canadian Indians, Kymlicka says that they strongly prefer to keep their culture separate from that of the non-Indian community. Despite the Indians' preferences, Kymlicka tells us, the preservation of Indian culture could not be "the natural result of the interplay of preferences in the market." He says, "On the contrary, the viability of Indian communities depends on coercively restricting the mobility, residence, and political rights of both Indians and non-Indians" (p. 146). He says, "Historically, the evidence is that when the land on which aboriginal communities are based became desirable for white settlement and development, the only thing which prevented the unde- sired disintegration of the community was legally entrenched non- alienability of land" (p. 147). But if Indians genuinely do not wish to trade their property for access to white culture, why do such ex- changes occur?

Kymlicka does not give the answer one might expect. That is, he does not describe the Indians as facing a public goods problem regarding their culture: they all would wish the traditional culture to be preserved, but each of them would have reason to act in ways that, when generalized, would result in the culture's being lost. Instead,

34. See also Kymlicka, "The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas," Political Theory 20 (1992): 140-46, pp. 140, 145.


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 597 Kymlicka says these sales occurred "partly because [1] Indians were financially deprived (and hence in need of money to meet the basic needs of the family), and also because [2] they were culturally ill- equipped to understand the consequences of having (or selling) title to land" (pp. 147-48; emphasis and bracketed numbers mine).

If the Indians' preference to preserve their separate culture could be preserved by the market (as framed by traditional liberal institutions and within the structures of democratic federalism), then there would be no need for special rights for them. So we can discover the motivational roots of Kymlicka's discussion by learning precisely why he thinks these existing arrangements fail. Feature (1), the lack of resources to meet basic needs of the family, is surely important to understanding the conditions of Indians but nonetheless is unhelpful in this regard: such conditions require redress by universalist principles of liberal justice (at least on the modern welfare liberalism Kymlicka espouses).35 So the weight of the explanation of why Kymlicka thinks consociational measures are needed must fall more on feature (2).

Notice, however, that there is also a perspective within universalist liberalism from which the problem at feature (2) merits -edress.36 What does it mean for aboriginals to be "culturally ill-equipped" regarding the selling or keeping of their land? Presumably, it means the aboriginals did not fully appreciate what they were doing when they signed agreements that alienated their holdings in unwanted ways. Perhaps this happened because they lacked basic reading or analytical skills (to weigh long-run costs and benefits), or a grasp of the legal authority of contract, or even an awareness that their citizenship en- sures them standing before courts of law if aggrieved. On this interpretation of feature (2), "culturally ill-equipped" means "educationally ill-equipped." But the liberal framework within which Kymlicka oper- ates also sees the provision of basic education as a matter of individual right. That liberalism requires that children of citizens are provided with analytical and verbal training. More, each of those children is to be trained to think of herself as a full member of liberal society (and is even to be encouraged to learn the particular set of political virtues attendant with liberal membership).37 So there is a liberal perspec-

35. There are also standing liberal principles which might justify claims for compensatory justice for many groups of Native Americans-such recompense, if secured, would also address the problem at feature (1).

36. "Universalist liberalism," as I understand that term, is characterized not by a refusal to recognize consociational modes of incorporation but, rather, by the insistence that all legitimate consociational measures be limited by a distinctive core set of individual rights retained by every citizen, regardless of cultural or geographic community.

37. As Rawls says, political liberalism "will ask that children's education include such things as knowledge of their constitutional and civic rights." Moreover, he says the education of children in liberal society "should also encourage the political virtues


598 Ethics April 1995 tive-call it the "universalist perspective"-from which what is called for in the case of the aboriginals is the proper instantiation of existing principles, rather than the construction of specialized consociational alternatives.38 On Kymlicka's own description of the plight of aboriginals, universalist principles would justify measures aimed at remedy- ing both features (1) and (2), and those remedies are justified by a concern to provide individuals with liberal self-respect.39 Kymlicka must realize this. So what is it about his concern for the aboriginals that causes him to abandon this universalist perspective in their case?

Throughout his discussion, Kymlicka speaks as though his concern to protect culture is wholly derivative from a concern to protect self-respect-in particular, the sort of self-respect a person might gain through his autonomous selection of his own life plan. However, regarding the preservation of aboriginal cultures, there is a different way to understand his concern. Consider a different interpretation of feature (2). Perhaps feature (2) suggests, what is unsurprising, that individual members of at least some traditional aboriginal societies tend not to think of themselves (and do not care to think of themselves) as holders of the same set of individual rights that figure prominently in liberal societies.40 Members of such societies may think of themselves as holders of certain basic rights: for example, a right not to be enslaved or bodily harmed, or a right not to have one's personal property forcibly taken by others.4' Yet while recognizing those basic rights,

so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the rest of society" (Rawls, "The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good," Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 [1988]: 251-76, 267). These are weighty requirements and they set a limit to how completely any subgroup in a liberal society can insulate itself from the requirements of liberal citizenship. Two excellent studies on this are Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and William Galston, Liberal Purposes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). I suggest a different approach in "Individual Rights and Community Virtues," Ethics 101 (1991): 521-36, and in my review of Macedo in Ethics 102 (1992): 397-99.

38. If the concern is to secure their self-respect, from this perspective, the remedy is to secure their rights to welfare and education -perhaps supplemented by democratic federalist measures compatible with their individual rights.

39. I am indebted to Amy Gutmann for discussion of these educational issues. 40. In the passage I quoted, Kymlicka suggests only that certain aboriginal cultures

ill-equip their members to understand themselves as holding rights to property in land. I am generalizing from his account when I suggest that members of such societies may not think of themselves as holders of other liberal rights, such as that to equal liberty of conscience.

41. In North America, many aboriginal groups developed their own forms of social control and evaluation which-while quite unlike the more formal Anglo-Saxon concepts of procedure-had the effect of recognizing basic rights such as these. A study that brings this out nicely in the Inuit context is Harold Finkler, Inuit and the Administration of Criminal Justice in the Northwest Territories: The Case of Forbisher Bay (Ottawa: Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1976). Of course, I am not suggesting that all aboriginal groups always respected basic human rights, or that the historical


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 599 their society might be organized in ways that would lead members to reject certain distinctively liberal freedoms, such as an expansive right to free speech or a right to equal liberty of conscience in religious matters (or even the right to sell property to people outside one's racial or cultural group).

The legal history of Indian groups in the United States suggests just this sort of distinction. Vine Deloria, Jr., argues that beginning with the seminal 1883 case of Ex Parte Crow Dog (109 U.S. 556) the trend of U.S. federal policy has been to force Indian tribes to treat their members as holders of an ever greater range of distinctively liberal rights, even when doing so would contradict-and erode-the Indians' own traditions. This trend reached its culmination upon the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1968, which made Indian customs almost completely subservient to the Bill of Rights. Among the new liberal freedoms that Deloria picks out as most destructive to the traditional Indian lifestyle was the right to religious freedom.42

As Rawls has emphasized in his recent work, when a society recognizes basic human rights and when its rejection of the further distinctively liberal freedoms is met by the widespread approval of members of that group, then that society, while not itself liberal, may well merit the respect of liberal societies.43 So perhaps, from the liberal perspective, certain liberal freedoms that are alien to aboriginal cultures are best thought of not as lacking from those cultures but as irrelevant to them. On this interpretation of feature (2), "culturally ill-equipped" is not strictly reducible to "educationally ill-equipped" (especially since, as we have seen, liberal principles require that children be educated to think of themselves as holders of liberal rights-a self-understandig that may be in considerable tension with that propagaged by the nonliberal traditions of the group).44 Perhaps Kymlicka advocates special

record of aboriginal peoples is cleaner in this regard than that of the European settlers. For one fascinating counterexample, see Michael Roethler, "Negro Slavery among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964).

42. See Vine Deloria, Jr., ed., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 85-125.

43. Rawls argues that while any society that is worthy of respect must honor basic human rights such a society is not ipso facto a liberal society; see his "The Law of Peoples" (Harvard University, Department of Philosophy, 1992). Further, Rawls says, "Just as a citizen in a liberal society is to respect other persons' comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines provided they are pursued in accordance with a reasonable political conception of justice, so a liberal society is to respect other societies organized by comprehensive doctrines, provided their political and social institutions meet certain conditions that lead the society to adhere to a reasonable law of peoples" ("The Law of Peoples," p. 2).

44. If it is true that some aboriginal groupings are culturally ill-equipped (in this sense) to understand the authority and responsibility of having liberal rights, the cultures of such groupings seem distinct indeed from the liberal individualist culture as Kymlicka describes it: "Liberal individualism is ... an insistence on respect for each individual's


600 Ethics April 1995 cultural rights not because he thinks measures to redress inequalities regarding features (1) and (2) are notjustified by universalist principles of liberalism (they plainly are). Rather, perhaps Kymlicka recognizes the inappropriateness of exposing aboriginal groups to the measures that would be required if we were to insist on treating them as full citizens of liberal society. These measures would be inappropriate because they would themselves result in the liberalization of those groups against their own wishes. Imposing such measures, on this view, would be an act of hubris: it would be a failure to recognize that some cultures that are importantly unlike ours may yet be worthy of our respect.

Whether this is really what motivates Kymlicka is not the important issue. But we must consider whether we might now have before us the germ of an idea that could generate an alternative pattern of justification for cultural rights for aboriginal societies: some aboriginal communities, accidents of geography to the contrary, are importantly outside of liberalism.45 I would hope that no one would be surprised to find that the social and political understandings that emerged in certain tribal, subsistence-hunting, animist societies in North America might be dramatically unlike the understandings pro- moted by liberalism-a doctrine that emerged in the context of Chris- tian religious battles between European nation-states. But to demon- strate that this suggestion could provide a justification for a liberal recognition of special protective measures for aboriginal groups today would require taking on a whole list of difficult questions. Let me just make a beginning by sketching answers to three questions that would arise immediately.

First, what does it mean for aboriginals to be "outside of liberalism" and why might we think that they are? The answer is tied up with the problem of deciding what to make of a cultural group that would repeatedly and insistently demand that they be allowed to invoke protective measures that would conflict with basic liberal rights of both member and nonmember citizens. Kymlicka rightly emphasizes the measures such as these would serve to protect aboriginal groups from liberal society. But they do more than protect them. These measures or, more precisely, the very demand for them also helps define these groups in terms of their relation to liberal society. A call for special rights defines a cultural group, first, by revealing what view that group takes of fellow national outsiders. For example, a group like the aboriginal one in northern Canada that would require newly arrived fellow

capacity to understand and evaluate her own actions, to make judgements about the value of the communal and cultural circumstances she finds herself in" (p. 254).

45. I use "accident" in the conceptual (not historical) sense.


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 601 citizens to meet a residency requirement of up to ten years before being accorded (limited) voting privileges in local affairs would thereby reveal itself to view people in the wider Canadian society more as aliens than as as fellow citizens. Further, and this is the crucial point, the call for collective measures defines the group in terms of what authority it thinks the majority or leadership of the group has to evaluate and reject even the most basic elements of the life plans chosen by its own individual members. Liberal societies (in their theoretical commitments, at least) are distinctive in the great degree of freedom they accord to individual members regarding their life choices and in the great restaint it imposes on groups in society that would claim for themselves evaluative powers over the choices of individual members. A group in which a strong majority insists on the appropri- ateness for them of these sorts of liberty-limiting measures (such as that forbidding a married couple from selling their ancestral land to a white person in order to begin a new life for their family in a city) seems thereby to be insisting on being recognized as a nonliberal group.

If an account of certain aboriginal groups being outside of liberalism could be worked out along these lines, there would arise a second question: If aboriginal groups are outside of liberalism, what does that say about what measures are appropriate for their treatment? We can distinguish two broad senses in which an aboriginal group can be outside of liberalism-one strong, one weak-and a different pattern of treatment is suggested by each. One might view certain aboriginal groups as being outside of liberalism in the strong sense, whereby while the traditions of that group recognize basic human rights, they nonetheless comprehensively reject other distinctively liberal rights;46 further, and perhaps as a consequence, that group expresses a desire to separate itself utterly from the wider liberal society.47 On this view, one might think societies such as Canada or the United States should allow aboriginal groups actually to secede.48 If a right to secession

46. On this strong reading, feature (2) is taken to suggest that the relation of the scope of the aboriginal cultural community and that of the liberal political community is not merely that one is a subset of the other; rather, the sets share no members at all.

47. Aboriginal groups have sometimes spoken this way. Leaders of American Indi- ans who made the Longest Walk summarized a long list of grievances with the question, "How do we convince the U.S. government to simply leave us alone to live according to our ways of life?" Congressional Record, July 27, 1978, H7458.

48. Secession, unlike migration, involves a claim to territory. Because many aboriginal groups were forced off land that was theirs and compelled to resettle on less desirable land, the question of what territory aboriginals should (or could) be allowed to claim on this approach would be extremely difficult. For discussion of theoretical issues, see Buchanan, pp. 67-70-though he does not consider the justificatory pattern I am suggesting here. A contemporary secession movement among Inuit in the Northwest


602 Ethics April 1995 were recognized for such groups and if any group chose to assert it, liberal societies might then treat aboriginal groups according to the same principles by which liberal societies are bound to treat other nonliberal (but rights-respecting) societies-though in ways sensitive to the history of the treatment of aboriginals so far.49

Less radically, one might view aboriginal groups-especially contemporary ones-as being outside of liberalism in a weaker sense. However nonliberal the Native American groups were when European settlers first arrived, centuries of contact and (in some respects, at least) of treatment as fellow citizens may well have had a liberalizing effect on the groups as they now exist. If the self-conceptions of individual members of aboriginal groups have been liberalized in that they have come to recognize themselves as holders of at least some-but not all-of the rights recognized in fully liberal societies, then we might think of them as being outside liberalism in the weak sense. Liberal societies mightjustify permitting them to enact special protective measures for themselves out of recognition of their having that special status, even when those measures would limit rights individual members of the group would have if they were considered as full citizens of the liberal society. By this pattern of argument, we might conclude that a set of measures very much like those Kymlicka advocated should in fact be recognized by liberal societies for the protection of certain aboriginal groups but for a completely different set of reasons. This brings us to the third question: By what concepts, in the liberal context, could such measures be justified? And, in particular, could they be justified by some notion of respect for individual persons without falling into the difficulties that beset Kymlicka's approach?

Kymlicka distinguishes two kinds of respect liberals can have for individuals: respect for an individual as an autonomous chooser simpliciter, and respect for an individual as an autonomous chooser who is a member of some particular cultural group (p. 150). But the vocabu- lary of "liberal respect"-with its special admiration for choice mak- ers-is not exhaustive of all that can be found respectworthy, even by liberals, in a people or a culture. There are nonliberal forms of

Territories is discussed in Veryan Haysom and Jeff Richstone, "Customizing Law in the Territories: Proposal for a Task Force on Customary Law in Nunavut," Etudes Inuit Studies 11 (1987): 91-105.

49. Rawls outlines one liberal conception of such principles, principles governing relations between liberal and what he calls "traditional" or "hierarchical" societies, in his manuscript "The Law of Peoples." Rawls's schema is meant to supply principles for governing relations between sovereign nations. Questions about the relations between actual liberal societies and seceding aboriginal subgroupings would be greatly compli- cated by their entangled histories, including issues of compensatory justice. For a stimu- lating discussion about reparations to aboriginal peoples, see Jeremy Waldron, "Super- seding Historic Injustice," Ethics 103 (1992): 4-28.


Tomasi Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Cultural Minorities 603 respect for individuals that even liberals might use as justification for their actions and policies. For example, there is respect for individuals in virtue of the importance to each of the attachments he has to his own cultural community, even when that community is in important respects outside the liberal settlement and does not wish fully to enter that settlement (or perhaps wants no part of that settlement at all). If it is true that the cultural foundations of some aboriginal groups put those groups outside of liberalism, we may still admire those groups in a variety of different ways, including ways that might convince us that special measures should be enacted to protect them. If feature (2) suggests it would be disastrous to many aboriginal groups if we were to respect the individual members of those groups as autonomous holders of liberal rights, we can recognize that the traditions of those groups define them as being outside of liberalism. We best respect the group members by not insisting on respecting them as individual holders of the full set of liberal rights.

If certain aboriginal groups are outside of liberalism, then a discussion aimed at discovering whether special collective measures are appropriate for them is not exactly a discussion about what the foundational liberal commitment to respect for the autonomy of persons requires as a response to cultural plurality. Rather, the question Native Americans raise may be an important, different one: How should large liberal polities deal with the fragile pockets of aboriginal and traditionally nonliberal groupings still existing within their borders? Even if the answer cannot be founded on a peculiarly liberal notion of respect for persons, still it can be founded on a notion of respect that might properly be recognized by persons, and political orders, that are liberal.


Article Contentsp. 580p. 581p. 582p. 583p. 584p. 585p. 586p. 587p. 588p. 589p. 590p. 591p. 592p. 593p. 594p. 595p. 596p. 597p. 598p. 599p. 600p. 601p. 602p. 603

Issue Table of ContentsEthics, Vol. 105, No. 3 (Apr., 1995), pp. i-vi+465-705Volume Information [pp. v - vi]Front Matter [pp. i - iv]Symposium on Citizenship, Democracy, and EducationIntroduction [pp. 465 - 467]Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God v. John Rawls? [pp. 468 - 496]Citizenship, Individualism, and Democratic Politics [pp. 497 - 515]Two Concepts of Liberalism [pp. 516 - 534]Mothers, Citizenship, and Independence: A Critique of Pure Family Values [pp. 535 - 556]Civic Education and Social Diversity [pp. 557 - 579]

Kymlicka, Liberalism, and Respect for Cultural Minorities [pp. 580 - 603]DiscussionTerms of Agreement [pp. 604 - 612]

Review EssaysSoul Doctors [pp. 613 - 625]Is Liberal Nationalism an Oxymoron? An Essay for Judith Shklar [pp. 626 - 645]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 646 - 648]untitled [pp. 649 - 650]untitled [pp. 651 - 653]untitled [pp. 653 - 655]untitled [pp. 655 - 657]untitled [pp. 657 - 659]untitled [pp. 659 - 662]untitled [pp. 662 - 663]untitled [pp. 663 - 665]untitled [pp. 665 - 667]untitled [pp. 667 - 670]untitled [pp. 670 - 672]untitled [pp. 672 - 674]untitled [pp. 674 - 676]untitled [pp. 676 - 678]

Book Notes [pp. 679 - 702]Back Matter [pp. 703 - 705]

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