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Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism: Autonomy and Toleration

It makes sense to begin a survey of the political theory of multiculturalism with liberalism. Not only is it the dominant political theory of our times, but it is also central to two intellectual debates that guide and structure this book: one about how liberals ought to respond to cultural diversity; another about whether liberalism is the most appropriate theoretical framework to address the issues raised by multiculturalism. This chapter focuses on liberals themselves, whilst the next will consider liberalism's critics and the alternatives they have proposed.

Liberalism is a rich and multifaceted ideology, and the disagreements amongst liberal political theorists - both about multiculturalism and other topics - are far reaching (on the difficulties of defining liberalism, see Freeden 1996, 2005, and Bell 2014; for surveys of liberalism, see, amongst many others, Gray 1986; Manent 1996; Kelly 2005; Vincent 2010; Ryan 2012; Shorten 2014). This chapter treats liberalism as a body of connected arguments that, amongst other things, aim to provide principled guidance about how the political order should respond to diversity whilst protecting individual freedom. At least as I understand it, liberalism does not have a 'party line' about this but is better understood as a collection of values and principles that, when combined, form a repository of arguments. New additions to this repository sometimes extend earlier ones, but just as often they make the earlier arguments redundant, or call for them to be reconsidered. Thus, whilst some of the arguments constituting the liberal tradition complement one another, there are important tensions and disagreements within it too.

As we shall see, many of the normative arguments that continue to inspire contemporary liberals were first formulated at times and in places where religious differences amongst Christians were the most salient manifestation of diversity. Some political theorists believe that this classical liberal tradition requires only minor modifications to address today's politics of cultural diversity successfully. The work of an influential proponent of this view, Chandran Kukathas, will be examined at the end of this chapter. Meanwhile, other liberal multiculturalists have suggested that arguments developed by liberal political thinkers in previous centuries need to be substantially reconfigured for contemporary politics, especially to account for the moral significance of people's ties to their languages and culture. We look at the work of an important advocate of this approach, Will Kymlicka, later in this chapter.

To set the stage for these theories, the first half of the chapter describes some of the main arguments proposed by liberal thinkers concerning how the state ought to respond to religious and other differences, focusing especially on the contested concepts of freedom, toleration and equality. These central liberal values can be combined to provide powerful justifications for two familiar staples of liberal political morality: religious freedom and the separation of church and state. From the 1970s onwards, it became increasingly common for liberal thinkers to present the principle of state neutrality as a logical extension of this pair. A neutral state is one that neither hinders nor supports different religions, cultures or ways of life, but instead remains neutral amongst them. As we shall see, neutrality remains a controversial feature of liberal political theory, especially within the context of debates about multiculturalism, since it seems to rule out any positive recognition or support for minority cultures. Whilst some liberals, like Kukathas, embrace this implication, others, including Kymlicka, believe that neutrality needs to be complemented - or perhaps even replaced - by other, more difference-sensitive, principles.

Diversity and the Liberal Tradition

Freedom

Freedom is the most important value for many liberal thinkers. For example, the most prominent liberal theory of justice in the twentieth century, John Rawls's (1999) theory of justice as fairness, held that it is permissible to sacrifice one person's freedom only if doing so is necessary to secure the freedom of others. By this, Rawls meant that, although some values may permissibly be traded off against one another, as when a government deliberately limits economic growth for the sake of improving environmental protections, justice requires that freedom must always be maximized, subject only to the constraint that no one has a greater share of it than anyone else.

Although liberal political theorists agree about the special importance of freedom, they reach different conclusions about how to honour its value. Some of these disagreements can be illustrated by considering a famous American court case from 1972, Wisconsin v. Yoder. This involved three families, two from the Old Order Amish community and another from the Conservative Amish Mennonite Church, both of which are small Anabaptist sects whose members lead a simple rural life, living apart from mainstream society and without making use of cars, electricity and other modern conveniences. Three children from these families, aged 14 and 15, had completed their elementary schooling, after which their parents failed to enrol them for high school, as was required by law (at the time, the state of Wisconsin required compulsory education up until the age of 16). Upon being convicted and fined, the parents sued the state of Wisconsin for violating the religious freedom that was guaranteed to them under the American Constitution. Their objections to compulsory schooling were complex, but prominent amongst them was the complaint that the values emphasized in public schools, such as self-distinction, competitiveness and scientific accomplishment, were contrary to Amish values like communal solidarity and pacifism, and that exposing Amish children to the values of the public school system would limit the community's ability to transmit its traditional way of life to its adolescent members. Instead of the skills emphasized in public schooling, the parents planned to give their children a practical education, based on traditional domestic and agricultural crafts.

A commitment to maximizing freedom, depending on what we understand by it, might direct us to take opposing views about the parents' demand. On the one hand, some people say that in seeking to force the children to attend school, majority society was trying to impose its own standards upon a reluctant minority. If you believe that this was the case, then you might conclude that freedom requires the Amish to be left alone. For example, Chandran Kukathas (1992, 126) argues that the Amish 'have the right to live by their traditional ways', because they ought to be free to associate on whatever terms they find mutually acceptable. But, on the other hand, some people say that what the parents were seeking was to undermine the freedom of their children, and to prevent them from becoming adults who would be capable of being authors of their own lives. If you believe that this was the case, then you might conclude that freedom requires the children to complete their schooling. For example, according to Will Kymlicka's (1995, 162) description of the case, the Amish removed their children from school in order to limit their knowledge of the wider world, thereby reducing the likelihood of their leaving the community upon reaching maturity.

William Galston (1995, 521) has suggested that disagreements like these are indicative of a deeper division between 'two quite different strands of liberal thought'. The first strand, into which Kymlicka's argument falls, holds that the proper goal of the liberal state is to promote individual autonomy (autonomy in this context refers to a self-directed life). Galston associates this view of liberalism with the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century European intellectual movement, led by luminaries like Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert and Immanuel Kant, all of whom castigated ignorance and superstition as enemies of human freedom and progress. By Galston's account, some contemporary liberals have inherited from these earlier thinkers a view that individual freedom depends upon the capacity for autonomy, and especially the ability to reason and think clearly. Consequently, they tend to believe that removing children from school is unacceptable, because it compromises the development of a child's critical and reflective abilities, which are essential for their freedom, since autonomy depends upon being able to choose for oneself how to live.

The second strand, which is the one that both Kukathas and Galston favour, instead emphasizes toleration and diversity. Beginning from the observation that individuals and groups have extremely different ideas about human life and morality, it continues to say that the state ought to tolerate those different beliefs and their associated ways of life - for instance, by refraining from interfering in the affairs of minorities even when they reject liberal values. Thus, communities like the Amish - who place little value on individual choice and autonomy, and who instead believe that adherence to traditional religious or community values is much more important - should not be required to comply with majoritarian educational norms, since the education system itself is based on values and beliefs that are foreign to the Amish way of life, and might even be destructive of...