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The Value of Cultural Belonging: Expanding Kymlicka's Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

James W. Nickel
Affiliation:
University of Colorado

Extract

In his recent book, Liberalism, Community and Culture, Will Kymlicka defends collective rights for some minority groups—and particularly for indigenous peoples in North America—by trying to show that (1) secure cultural belonging is of great value, and (2) rights to protection and autonomy for minorities, including some collective rights, are justified by the special disadvantages some minorities face in enjoying secure cultural membership. Kymlicka defends these claims from within a liberal perspective that draws heavily on Rawls and Dworkin and that denies that groups are independent sources of moral claims. In this paper I am mainly concerned with how to defend the first of these claims, which I shall call the “Value Thesis.” One reason for being interested in the justification of the Value Thesis is that some version of it is a key part of most arguments for minority and collective rights. Another reason is that the Value Thesis is important to communitarians who frequently base their claims about the importance of community on the value of belonging.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).Google Scholar

2 For an argument that Kymlicka is more of a communitarian and less of a liberal than he realizes, see Lenihan, Don, “Liberalism and the Problem of Cultural Membership: A Critical Study of Kymlikca,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 4 (July 1991): 401–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 166.

4 Ibid., p. 165.

5 Ibid., p. 175.

6 Ibid., p. 176. After this was written I discovered Jeremy Waldron's similar but harsher criticisms of Kymlicka, in “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 25 (1992): 751–93Google Scholar; see p. 762.

7 I believe that Kymlicka is led astray here by his heavy reliance on Charles Taylor's questionable “social thesis.” See Taylor, Charles, “Atomism,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 187210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an extended criticism of the social thesis, see my essay, Does Basing Rights on Autonomy Imply Obligations of Political Allegiance?,” Dialogue 28, 4 (1989): 531–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Another problem with Kymlicka's attempt to find the value of belonging in connection with avoiding a shortage of options for choice is that it leads him to give what I believe to be an incorrect diagnosis of the problems faced by children from indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. Kymlicka traces the problems of Inuit adolescents to the absence of a culturally endorsed set of options for choice and the absence of role-models instantiating those options (p. 165). This misconceives the problem since Inuit young people face not so much absence of traditional choices and role-models (those are still there to a considerable degree), but rather changed circumstances that make some of the old options less attractive and the presence of another cultural framework with its set of options and models (e.g., television, new foods provided in school lunches, motorized vehicles and alternative career choices). The hard problem of choice for these children is how to combine or integrate these options from the two different cultural frameworks now present into a meaningful life that fits contemporary circumstances but does not totally abandon their original heritage.

9 Hardimon, Michael O. (“The Project of Reconciliation: Hegel's Social Philosophy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 [1992]: 165–95)Google Scholar endorses Hegel's view that being at home in (connected to, not alienated from) one's social world is a vital human need (p. 188). I am uncertain about the plausibility of this claim, but if it were true then one could defend preservation of a group's culture on the grounds that they are much more likely to be at home in it than in the culture of a neighbouring group.

10 See James W. Nickel, “Ethnocide and Indigenous Peoples,” Journal of Social Philosophy (1994): 84–98.

11 Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 188.