Revisiting Cultural Rights

This book reevaluates the ‘consensus’ liberal view on minority cultural rights from a new, empirically informed perspective to argue that its justificatory machinery is not very persuasive, and that the normative goals of the view caninstead be efficaciously reached from within the classic liberal framework of equal, universal rights. The consensus view commonly justifies the special rights of cultural minorities by three arguments: personal autonomy, wellbeing and shared civic identity. The problem with the first is that it sees autonomy as a function purely of ‘options’,overlooking the role ‘preferences’ play in choice-makin cultures might provide ‘meaningful’ options, but they can as well suppress good preferences. Also, while cultural rights over resources and policy might, and often do, improvethe wellbeing of Native cultures, economic data show such improvement may not be robust due to institutional limitations. Again, social data convincingly show that cultural rights do not entail shared civic identities; indeed, theymight result in isolated communities. This book argues that these ends are better served by improving cross-cultural interaction and exchange, secular formal education, ‘capability’ formation and policies of ‘inductive’ civic identityformation. This book is aimed at a broad audience from within and without the academe. Anyone with basic familiarity with liberal thought and interest in public policy issues of multiculturalism and social justice should benefit from it.