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No Means No

A Separate Peace
Ideological Rifts in the Anti-War Movement
by Katie Monticchio

Taking It to the Streets
An International Day of Protest
by Lizz Thrall

In the "Right" Place
The Dangers of Multiculturalism
by Patrick Taylor Smith

Introspective
An American in Cape Town
by Liz Thornberry

Salmagundi

The Back Page
The Real State of the Union
by Jason Abaluck

Liberalism is fundamentally about rights. Human rights, civil rights, and even property rights determine the restrictions that are placed on actions performed by the state. Apologists for repressive regimes and institutions throughout the world--from genital mutilation in the Islamic world to slavery in sub-Saharan Africa--often dismiss these rights as "merely Western"”or "imperialist."” The fact that such oppressions are "our culture"” or “"our religion"” is used as a defense or a justification for massive rights violations. In fact, many such defenders would even grant that women's rights, in particular, are being violated, but deny that such a fact has any real significance. In other words, their particular cultural claims trump the universal claims of human rights. So, when faced with such massive and institutional rights violations, should a liberal confront and deny the force of these arguments or simply accept "cultural differences"?

PURE MULTICULTURALISM

To the pure multiculturalist, culture always trumps rights. Human rights are purely an instrument of Western hegemony, a way to morally justify the social, economic, and political domination of the third world by the first. The concept of "human rights" is simply a convention of the western cultural tradition, and it does not apply to other cultures. From their standpoint, while it may be regrettable that women, for example, are being oppressed, they aren't confident enough about their beliefs to force them on other cultures. Western nations, or "just"”nations (these critics may even acknowledge that the US or Europe may be just by their own standards) should not do anything about a whole host of culturally mandated injustices. In fact, it seems that often these injustices should be encouraged as expressions of the unique conception of the good that is adopted by the brutal autocracies that govern much of the world's population. Michael Walzer, a foremost communitarian multiculturalist, says that just nations should not intervene except to prevent genocide.

It is not clear that this is a coherent position. It seems that some genocides, the Holocaust for example, are the result of certain cultural forces within societies. A particularly self-aware Nazi could argue that the Holocaust was "our culture"” as cogently as an Arab imam could argue that female genital mutilation was "his culture."” To acknowledge that one has the right not to be a victim of genocidal ethnic or religious cleansing and not to acknowledge that there may be some other rights seems rather arbitrary. So the pure multiculturalist cannot condemn, nor does she wish to condemn, the mutilator, torturer, or the genocidal demagogue.

The pure multiculturalist is skeptical and even scornful of universal human rights. However, for the liberal, there are several important reasons why one should reject this postmodernist revision of rights discourse. The first reason is simply definitional. John Rawls, in his classic liberal statement A Theory of Justice, predicates liberalism on “"each person [possessing] an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of a society as a whole cannot override. Therefore, in a just society the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or the calculus of social interests."” John Stuart Mill, the seminal thinker of liberalism, discusses rights as being essential in both Utilitarianism and On Liberty. So to be a liberal is to be, by definition, primarily concerned with rights. To give up this concern is to give up being a liberal.

Further, it seems that rights are a very useful concept. The economic, scientific, and military powerhouses of this planet are, to a great extent, committed to universal human rights. China can compete, but that is only through the aggregate of its very great population; its per capita productivity is still much lower than Western nations. Mill makes a similar argument in his essay The Subjection of Women when he argues (among other things) that oppressing women deprives society of half its innate scientific, philosophical, and entrepreneurial talent.

But these arguments should, for obvious reasons, leave a bitter taste in one's mouth. It seems to be a fairly weak foundation for such strong rights claims. The first one tries to magic rights into existence through definitions, and the other does not capture the particular nature of rights claims: namely, that they do not rely on utility or the "calculus of social interests."”

A more powerful argument could be called the intuitive argument. Rights get at our intuitions about the value of human beings. Without this kind of discourse, the liberal lacks the resources to condemn and make normative claims about all kinds of atrocities. We have already established that a pure multiculturalist cannot make normative claims about massive rights violations and oppressions, genocides, and the like, but she also cannot criticize George W. Bush about a war of conquest in Iraq. For is not manifest destiny a tradition in America? Is it not part of American culture to violently take what we want when it comes to land and resources? We see something valuable and inviolable about human beings and that is why we condemn Bush's wars, his short-sighted environmental policy, and the genocides committed and those that will be committed around the globe. Skepticism about rights weakens our empathy and our obligations towards other human beings. To many, this is too high a price to pay for mere "intellectual"” skepticism about human rights. The value of human beings, we intuitively feel, is more important than postmodernist rhetoric about the“"hegemonic" nature of rights discourse. The conception of the person as a rights-bearing individual is of central importance to us, and defines us as much as, or even more than, our particular cultural identity.

But suppose we get a truly persistent postmodernist who is willing to bite the bullet and indeed say that there is no "fact of the matter" about the "rightness"”of the Holocaust or slavery in the Sudan. What can we liberals say to such a person? Well, first we can point him to the "usefulness argument" above and say that he should at least be a self-effacing postmodernist; in other words, his postmodernism commits him to no longer acting like a postmodernist. But if we want to be more confrontational, we could use what I like to call the "On Liberty argument" from John Stuart Mill's most famous essay. The argument essentially accepts a certain degree of skepticism about truth and absolute rights and wrongs. According to Mill, that commits you to a very healthy set of civil liberties. Since one can never be sure about the eternal truth of certain propositions, then one cannot be justified in silencing and oppressing others because they possess certain ideas or cultural identities. Conversely, you cannot justify oppressing people because you possess certain ideas of cultural identities. So you are committed to a free and open forum of clashing ideas and ruthless argument. This amounts to an inviolable sphere where people are free to pursue their own projects and their own truths, which is the liberal project (and the ideal of rights discourse in the first place) anyway. A healthy skepticism about truth, in this case, motivates the move towards human rights. So we find that the idea of human value and inviolability has a powerful intuitive hold on us, that such conceptions are central to who we are, and that even skepticism points to the formulation of basic human liberty. It seems that we have good reasons to reject this combination of rights and multiculturalism.

CONSTRAINED MULTICULTURALISM

As one might imagine, this position is similar to the pure multiculturalist except that it is constrained by a belief in basic human and civil liberties. Will Kymlicka, the premiere Canadian political philosopher and the preeminent advocate of constrained multiculturalism, expresses several categories of special multicultural considerations: special self-government and representation rights, language dispensations, and exemptions from certain laws. What is envisioned here is much like the province of Quebec, where the Quebecois have special dispensation to govern themselves and French is the official language. As one's cultural identity is crucial to one's conception of the good life, then (so the argument goes) the government should ensure that all cultural identities are treated fairly. However, governments cannot generally adopt a policy of benign neglect since even such things as choice of language for government and law can privilege certain cultures over others. Therefore, just as liberal governments should correct for inequalities in the economic marketplace, so should they correct for inequalities in the marketplace of ideas.

But such corrections have limits, and these limits are the basic human and civil liberties (assume arguendo that we can cogently spell these fundamental liberties out). Thus, a constrained or hybrid multi-culturalist would accept and even recommend the relatively small unfairness of Native American exemption from anti-peyote laws, for example, but would condemn the large-scale economic and social marginalization of women in Israel amongst Orthodox Jews. This seems to be an utterly reasonable position to hold. It captures our intuitions about human value and provides us with plenty of resources to condemn the massive rights violations around the world. But suppose that some cultures are more expensive in terms of opportunities and wealth when compared to others--is it fair that members of the more expensive culture get a disproportionate amount of goods and opportunities? It seems that one's cultural membership is simply a chance of birth, and that one's life chances can vary hugely depending on what culture one is born into. Why would one agree to such inequalities unless one already knew that one was going to become a member of the privileged class? It seems that the caste system of India did not violate anyone's basic human rights (whatever they might be), but it fails to properly respect them since it limits people's life chances unfairly. It seems that if we actually respect fair equality of opportunity (the principle that those with similar life talents should have similar life chances) then we must interfere with cultural institutions to some extent. Even universal education can interrupt cultural indoctrination (see the Amish refusal to educate their children). So it seems that constrained multiculturalism respects basic human rights to a greater and much more acceptable degree, but it fails to provide us the resources to fairly distribute resources and opportunities amongst citizens.

ANTI-MULTICULTURALISM

As one might imagine, the anti-multiculturalist does not think that cultural considerations weigh in at all once one's own personal and civil liberties have been considered. From this perspective, many laws that require exceptions due to multicultural concerns are simply bad laws. For example, a multiculturalist would argue that Native Americans must be exempted from legal restrictions on peyote. However, the reason we have the intuition that Indians should receive special treatment and be allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies does not grow out of multicultural concerns, but rather the fundamental injustice of certain legal restrictions on "controlled" substances. It is not that Native Americans are special; it is that everyone should be able to use peyote should they so desire. It does not seem like one's cultural identity is one of the categories that justifies preferential treatment or inequalities in income, rights, opportunities, etc. Imagine that peyote turned 10% of those who used it into homicidal madmen. Would we think there should be an exception for Native Americans then? Probably not, but nor would we think that such drugs should generally be legal. To put it in Rawlsian terms, one's cultural identity is not one of the pieces of information you have access to in the original position, so one cannot tailor the basic institutions of society to prefer one set of cultural identities over others. One would not risk "being on the short end of the stick"” when one reentered that society and discovered that one was not a member of the privileged culture.

So it is clear that the anti-multiculturalist would not condone the oppression of women in the Arab world, or any set of institutionalized and massive rights violations. The precise political, diplomatic, economic, and military policies to remove these injustices would depend on a complex matrix of factors such as effectiveness and harm caused to the oppressed peoples, but the ultimate goal of just nations is to remove injustices-to prevent, and perhaps avenge, the violations of basic human and civil rights.

Considering these positions, it is irrelevant whether one becomes a constrained multiculturalist or an anti-multiculturalist. Neither position will condone the massive and institutional rights violations that occur in much of the third world. However, the key difference is that anti-multiculturalism will detect unfairness that constrained multiculturalism misses: the unfair oppression of one's life chances. When women the world over often face such oppression, such an oversight is considerable.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu