DIALOGUES-Second Critical Studies Conference-Philosophies of Justice

Abstract

Multiculturalism is one of the most hotly contested issues of social justice in liberal democracies. Minorities increasingly demand recognition and in some cases special rights, and these demands are demands of justice. Yet increasingly publics in many countries are hostile to such demands. The debate within liberal political theory is no less heated. Not only is multiculturalism challenged by traditional conservative critics, it is increasingly attacked by those committed to a liberal egalitarian conception of justice.

Given these tensions, it is extremely important and urgent to ask whether liberalism can indeed deal with multiculturalism. Can there be a distinctly liberal theory of minority rights? This paper argues that it is both possible and necessary. Not only does the rift over multiculturalism threaten to drive a wedge between people otherwise committed to social justice. The liberal failure to accommodate multiculturalism also ignores significant sources of inequality in liberal democracies, and threatens to marginalize minority groups.

The paper begins by briefly sketching Will Kymlicka’s attempt at developing a liberal theory of minority rights (section I). It is argued that it fails to be liberal, instead slipping into communitarianism, with all the problems related with that line of thought. Instead of stressing the value of autonomy, as Kymlicka does, the liberal approach to multiculturalism should start with a critique of the notion of state neutrality (section II). This critique, drawing largely on Iris Marion Young’s work, leads me to argue that the liberal approach to multiculturalism should not be based on autonomy, but on equality. In section III, I argue that the substantive conception of equality developed by John Rawls can be applied to the cultural sphere as well. This enables us to combine our commitment to liberalism with our commitment to multiculturalism. In conclusion, it is argued that such a liberal theory of multiculturalism is both more attractive and more viable than the ‘postmodern’ approach favoured by Young.

Bionote

Juha Rudanko is a postgraduate student at the University of York, UK. He specializes in contemporary liberal political philosophy, particularly the work of John Rawls and his followers and critics. He also has a significant research interest in the history of political thought. He is currently working on a paper which develops a historical approach to Rawls’s philosophy, bridging the gap between the two disciplines.

Abstract

The publication, in 1999, of John Rawls’ book The Law of Peoples resulted in an international twist of the academic debate on justice. In that book, indeed, Rawls moves from the idea of justice within a liberal society to the idea of justice in the international realm, following a tradition inaugurated by Kant in his well known treatise Towards perpetual peace (1795). Relying precisely on the distinction –rooted in the legal tradition since Cicero and reconsidered by Kant- between civil right (ius civitatis vel civile) reserved to the state level and peoples’ right (ius gentium) characteristic of the right of peoples at an international scale, Rawls attempts to reactivate the idea of a peoples’ right by establishing foundations that allow to normatively clarify the latest’ position. Now then, Rawls theory has turned out to be very controversial since it establishes an asymmetric theory of the right of peoples, where the peoples of the world are divided into three types: a) liberal peoples, b) non-liberal but decent peoples, c) non-liberal peoples belonging to burdened societies. While the principle of distributive justice (or difference principle) only applies within a liberal society, for the relations between liberal and non-liberal societies only positive duties of assistance and help from a) towards b) and c) apply, but nothing like a distributive justice at international scale. This has been exposed as a serious deficit by the supporters of cosmopolite justice, and particularly by Thomas Pogge, who has emphasized the need for a global distributive justice that compensates the damage that the rich countries have inflicted over the poor countries (Pogge, 2001, 2005). Pogge considers his principles as negative duties of the formers towards the later (you must not hurt someone), and not just like a positive duty of assistantship. Now, in Rawls’s theory as in Pogge’s the problem of international justice is considered in a normative sense, as something that the rich countries must do with regards to the poor countries, and not in a political sense, as the construction of a new space of global democracy where at the same time injustice can be limited and the participation of the peoples in taking care of their own wealth and destinies promoted, in a coherent way with the consideration of the wealth of the planet by everyone. In this sense Rawls’ theory as well as Pogge’s show a strong paternalism where all political action of the poor countries in order to achieve a bigger portion of power and participation in the common direction of the destiny of humanity is excluded. In this work we try to open up the political space of global justice, joining the tradition of cosmopolite democracy inaugurated by David Held (1995) and other supporters of the so called radical democracy.

Bionote

Francisco was a Maîtrise de Philosophie, Sorbonne-Paris I, 1984. he did his Master in Logic, Paris V, 1986 and won the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of California in Berkeley, 1990. He did his PHD, Philosophy, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1999. he has been on earlier occasions, Profesor in Universitat de Barcelona (1999), Université de Paris 8 (2004), Universidad de Santa Maria, Brasil (2007).
Last papers on which he has worked on includes “University and Globalization. The three Transformations of the modern University d the Abandonment of Enlightenment”, Tokyo, University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, vol. 10, 2007, pp. 17-24.“Revolution, discontinuity and progress in Kant. Copernican revolution and Asymptotic revolution in critical philosophy”, 10th Kant International Congress, Proceedings of the X th Kant International Congress, Berlín, Walter de Gruyter, Marzo de 2006.