Revisiting Cultural Rights

Revisiting Cultural Rights 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 can instead 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-making: cultures might provide ‘meaningful’ options, but they can as well suppress good preferences. While cultural rights over resources and policy may improve the wellbeing of native cultures, economic data shows such improvement may not be robust due to institutional limitations.

Revisiting Cultural Rights argues that these ends are better served by improving cross-cultural interaction and exchange, secular formal-education, ‘capability’ formation, and policies of ‘inductive’ civic identity formation. This book will be of interest to scholars of liberal thought, public policy, multiculturalism and social justice, and specialists of minority and multicultural rights.