Social attachments as conditions for the condition of the good life? A critique of Will Kymlicka's moral monism

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 401-428

  Van Leeuwen, Bart ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

Axel Honneth; identity; instrumentalism; intrinsic value of culture; moral justification; multiculturalism; recognition; value pluralism; Will Kymlicka

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247651774     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706063215     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. This article is a substantially revised version of Bart van Leeuwen, ‘Bindingen als voorwaarden voor de voorwaarde van het goede leven? Een kritiek op Will Kymlicka's morele monisme’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Rechtsfilosofie en Rechtstheorie 31(3) (2002): 235–50.
2. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
3. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–73.
4. When concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘social attachment’ or ‘sense of belonging’ are being used in this study, they should be interpreted in a non-essentialist manner. That implies first a rejection of the idea that cultural diversity should be understood as a ‘mosaic’: a collection of internally homogeneous and hard-edged pieces, which are neatly positioned against one another. Instead, cultures are internally mixed, often overlapping, while cultural and sub-cultural boundaries are by their nature more often blurred than clear. See Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Secondly, cultural belonging or social attachments do not imply that people are dominated unilaterally by a homogeneous sphere of meanings that is supposed to exist independently from daily meaning-generating practices. Culture is neither a static ‘structure’ nor a collection of cerebral ‘ideas of the good’, but it should be understood as a relatively coherent set of practices and institutions, which embody particular norms and values of a social group. ‘Embodiment’ means that these norms and values exist in the changing and plural cultural expression itself. Moreover, social groups do not simply execute cultural practices; they also reflect on and in consequence shape these practices.
5. See Bart van Leeuwen, Erkenning, identiteit en verschil: multiculturalisme en leven met culturele diversiteit (Leuven: Acco, 2003), §6.2 and ch. 7.
6. Joseph Raz formulates the theoretical challenge of multiculturalism in a similar way: ‘One of the theoretical — rather than merely political — challenges multiculturalism gives rise to is how to combine the truth of universalism with the truth in particularism.’ See Joseph Raz, ‘Multiculturalism’, Ratio Juris 11(3) (1998): 193–205 (194).
7. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), ch. 2;
8. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), §5.2.
9. Denise Réaume is one example: ‘On this [Kymlicka's] account, planning one's own life is not valuable merely because it promotes some further valuable end, but rather is good in itself. It does not derive its value from its contribution to some other end, but rather itself accounts for the value of a particular life. In other words, the self-directioned life is intrinsically good.’ Denise Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights: Intrinsic Value and the Protection of Difference’, in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (eds) Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 245–72 (246). Réaume ignores in her article the fact that self-direction, or personal autonomy, according to Kymlicka, is not so much an end in itself but rather a necessary condition to liberalism's supreme value: living the good life. Kymlicka is quite explicit about this: ‘Liberals aren't saying that we should have the freedom to select our projects for its own sake, because freedom is the most valuable thing in the world. Rather, it is our projects and tasks that are the most important things in our lives, and it is because they are so important that we should be free to revise and reject them…. Freedom of choice, then, isn't pursued for its own sake, but as a precondition for pursuing those projects and practices that are valued for their own sake.’
10. See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 48. I shall come back to Réaume's article later on.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 76–7.
12. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2000), ch. 1, ‘Moral Monism’.
13. For the interpretation of rights in terms of ‘claims’, see Joel Feinberg, ‘The Nature and Value of Rights’, Journal of Value Inquiry 4 (1969): 243–57. It is furthermore important for our argument to recognize that a concept of rights implies, implicitly or more explicitly, a concept of individual well-being.
14. Joseph Raz defends this view in a number of his works; for instance, in ‘Rights and Individual Well-Being’, in Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 29–44.
15. Thomas Hill, ‘The Importance of Autonomy’, in Thomas Hill, Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 43–51.
16. For this crucial argument in Kymlicka's theory of minority rights, see Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, pp. 162–72;
17. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, §5.3, ‘Societal Cultures as Context of Choice’
18. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 209–10.
19. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, pp. 38ff., 186ff, 166ff.
20. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 76ff.
21. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, §2.1.
22. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, ‘Citizenship in Culturally Diverse Societies: Issues, Contexts, Concepts’, in Kymlicka and Norman (eds) Citizenship in Diverse Societies, pp. 1–41, 18ff.
23. Will Kymlicka, ‘Do We Need a Liberal Theory of Minority Rights?’, Constellations 4(1) (1997): 72–87 (73–4).
24. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 30–3, 96ff.;
25. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, p. 51.
26. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 27ff.
27. Michael Kenny, The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 26ff.;
28. Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Dilemmas of a Multicultural Theory of Citizenship’, Constellations 4(1) (1997): 54–62;
29. Brian Walker, ‘Plural Cultures, Contested Territories: a Critique of Kymlicka’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 30(2) (1997): 211–34;
30. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.) The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 93–119;
31. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 308ff.;
32. Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 65ff.
33. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 103;
34. Iris Marion Young, ‘A Multicultural Continuum: a Critique of Will Kymlicka's Ethnic-Nation Dichotomy’, Constellations 4(1) (1997): 48–53;
35. Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 26.
36. Barry, Culture and Equality. Others have made the same point, though in more general terms.
37. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Multicultural Misunderstanding’, The New York Review of Books 44(15) (1997): 30–6;
38. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
39. For a systematic attempt to overcome this dilemma (or rather, false opposition) see Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).
40. Albert Musschenga, ‘Intrinsic Value as a Reason for the Preservation of Minority Cultures’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1(2) (1998): 201–25;
41. Neil Levy, ‘The Intrinsic Value of Cultures’, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 9(2) (2002): 49–57;
42. Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights’;
43. Denise Réaume, ‘Beyond Personality: the Territorial and Personal Principles of Language Policy Reconsidered’, in Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten (eds) Language Rights and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 271–95;
44. Charles Taylor, ‘Can Liberalism be Communitarian?’, Critical Review 8(2) (1994): 257–62;
45. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’;
46. James Nickel, ‘The Value of Cultural Belonging: Expanding Kymlicka's Theory’, Dialogue 33(4) (1994): 635–42;
47. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture’, Social Research 61(3) (1994): 491–510.
48. Cf. Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture’, p. 505.
49. Taylor, ‘Can Liberalism be Communitarian?’
50. Kymlicka, ‘Do We Need a Liberal Theory of Minority Rights?’, p. 83; emphasis added. Because Kymlicka is unable or unwilling to recognize value pluralism, his work is full of examples of instrumental reductionism: ‘Justice is an intrinsic value, and the most basic obligation of the State. Civic virtue, by contrast, is only an instrumental value. Indeed, the main reason to be concerned about the erosion of civic virtue is that it may over time diminish the ability of the State to secure justice.’ Kymlicka goes on to say that it would be a profound mistake to privilege the promotion of civic virtue over the remedying of injustice. But to me it seems an equally profound mistake to understand civic virtue only as a means for ‘the State to secure justice’.
51. Will Kymlicka, ‘Comments on Shachar and Spinner-Halev: an Update from the Multiculturalism Wars’, in Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (eds) Multicultural Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 112–29 (126).
52. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 87, 88.
53. Cf. Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights’, pp. 255–6.
54. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 84ff.
55. Neil Levy uses the idea of an assimilation machine in a similar manner; however, he remains trapped within the opposition between the intrinsic value and the instrumental value of culture (or language). See Levy, ‘The Intrinsic Value of Cultures’. For reasons that I shall explain later this opposition is extremely misleading.
56. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 6.
57. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 50.
58. See §2. Therefore it is not sufficient to defend Kymlicka against my critique by lifting his theory to a political level that is subsequently detached from anthropological or social-philosophical concerns. Kymlicka's political philosophy rightly takes as its point of departure certain anthropological assumptions on the formal conditions of the good life. Politics ought to be evaluated accordingly. Therefore some of the discussions that Kymlicka is engaged in, as with Michael Sandel, take place on this level (cf. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, ch. 4). Incidentally, what is at stake in my discussion with Kymlicka is very different from what is at stake in his discussion with Sandel. My thesis is not that some goals constitute the subject unilaterally and are in that sense beyond the reach of individual reevaluation, as Sandel appears to suggest. Although a social attachment to a cultural or religious group is always to some degree beyond direct personal understanding or control, it is never unavoidable like a fate. People are always capable of reconsidering collective goals and their ties to a social group, however important this belonging has been for the identity of the persons in question. My point is, however, that Kymlicka's moral justification of minority rights implies an untenable social-philosophical presupposition, namely that autonomy is the only structural condition of the good life and that social attachments are important to people only insofar as they make individual freedom of choice possible. However, the fact that people are capable of reconsidering their social attachments does not imply that these attachments have only an instrumental meaning for them.
59. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 70;
60. cf. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, p. 44.
61. Cf. Avishai Margalit, ‘The Crooked Timber of Nationalism’, in Mark Lilla et al. (eds) The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), pp. 147–59.
62. For this aspect of social attachments, see also the description of ‘encompassing groups’ — especially characterization number 5 — in Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 139–40.
63. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1993).
64. That the human mind is structured dialogically means, in Taylor's vocabulary, that it is in need of external confirmation, in terms not only of expression but also of recognition from others. This notion is closely related to the concept of ‘embodiment’ that is so central to Taylor's interpretation of Hegel's work. See Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 1.
65. See also Charles Taylor, ‘The Dialogical Self’, in David Hiley et al. (eds) The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 304–14.
66. Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung.
67. This seems to be the position Honneth hints at in one of his later publications. In Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, he argues that the overwhelming majority of claims for recognition by social minorities is ‘essentially determined by the recognition principle of legal equality’ (p. 169). Within Honneth's tripartite division, this seems to imply that, just like social and political rights in his theory, cultural rights are safeguarding the conditions for personal autonomy. It must, however, be said that Honneth is very unclear about this, for he does not explain in what way culture should be incorporated in the sphere of equal respect for autonomy. He argues only that most of the claims of minority groups ‘can usually be understood as an innovative application of the equality principal’ (p. 169). Yet, it remains unclear how he himself sees this ‘innovation’.
68. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 127.
69. Gail Presbey, ‘The Struggle for Recognition in the Philosophy of Axel Honneth, Applied to the Current South African Situation and its Call for an African Renaissance’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 29(5) (2003): 537–61.
70. Cf. Lawrence Blum (1998), ‘Recognition, Value, and Equality: a Critique of Charles Taylor's and Nancy Fraser's Accounts of Multiculturalism’, in Cynthia Willett (ed.) Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 73–99.
71. Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights’, p. 250, also pp. 251, 252, 258.
72. For such a critical interpretation of Réaume's point of view: Daniel Weinstock, ‘The Antinomy of Language Policy’, in Kymlicka and Patten (eds) Language Rights and Political Theory, pp. 250–70;
73. see also Idil Boran, ‘Global Linguistic Diversity, Public Goods, and the Principle of Fairness’, in Kymlicka and Patten (eds) Language Rights and Political Theory, pp. 189–209, especially pp. 207–9.
74. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, p. 41.
75. Andy Lamey, ‘Francophonia for Ever: the Contradiction in Charles Taylor's “Politics of Recognition”’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 July 1999, pp. 12–15 (14).
76. Honneth reduces, for example, the possibilities for the justification of difference-respect to these choices in his article on Isaiah Berlin: Axel Honneth, ‘Negative Freedom and Cultural Belonging; an Unhealthy Tension in the Political Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin’, Social Research 66(4) (1999): 1063–77.
77. Weinstock, ‘The Antinomy of Language Policy’, §2.
78. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, pp. 217–19 (344).
79. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, pp. 61ff.;
80. Arnold Burms, ‘Helping and Appreciating’, in Sander Griffioen (ed.) What Right Does Ethics Have? Public Philosophy in a Pluralistic Culture (Amsterdam: V.U.-Press, 1990), pp. 67–77.
81. As Veit Bader puts it sharply: ‘Practices of slavery, caste, bondage, or of an unequal civil and political status for ascriptive minorities, are incompatible with the most minimalist interpretation of modern freedom and equality. Practices like sati, domestic violence, stranger-rape, marital rape, sexual abuse, genital mutilation, honor killing, forced collective suicide are surely incompatible with the most minimalist interpretations of basic rights to life and bodily integrity. Group autonomy should not be allowed to shield these practices. Public opinion and liberal-democratic polities must try to convince minorities to change these practices, and jurisdictions must prosecute and punish perpetrators.’ Veit Bader, ‘Associative Democracy and Minorities Within Minorities’, in Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds) Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 319–39 (p. 328).
82. See Joseph Raz, ‘Attachment and Uniqueness’, in Joseph Raz, Value, Respect and Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 10–40.
83. Trees Pels, ‘Voorschoolse en buitenschoolse opvoeding’, in Rinus Penninx et al. (eds) Etnische minderheden en de multiculturele samenleving (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1998), pp. 585–611, 604ff.
84. Trees Pels (ed.) Opvoeding en integratie (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000): ‘Parents … are rather being treated as an instrument to enhance the development of their children than to provide them with support in their role as educators’ (p. 222; my translation).
85. Pels, ‘Voorschoolse en buitenschoolse opvoeding’, pp. 597ff;
86. Trees Pels, Opvoeding in Marokkaanse gezinnen in Nederland (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1999), pp. 153ff. (167);
87. Cecile Nijsten, Opvoeding in Turkse gezinnen in Nederland (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1998), pp. 198, 207.
88. Government intervention on an involuntary basis has been proposed in the United States as in other countries (both in academic circles and by political parties) in order to prevent criminal behaviour by children from so-called high-risk families. This category of families is being determined on the basis of a combination of risk factors such as unemployment, young single parenthood, behavioural dysfunctions or low IQ of the children and belonging to certain minority groups. Ger Snik and Wouter van Haaften, ‘Liberale moraal en preventieve gezinsinterventie’, in Hans de Frankrijer et al. (eds) Gezin, morele opvoeding en antisociaal gedrag (Amsterdam: SWP, 2000), pp. 10–18 (10–12).
89. European colonists in Canada, who wanted to assimilate the natives, were also familiar with this technical possibility: ‘they have tried to culturally assimilate the youth in a deliberate and planned manner, especially by lodging them into boarding schools. There, they were forbidden to speak their own language and their culture was systematically devalued and run down.’ Eugeen Roosens, Eigen grond eerst? Primordiale autochtonie: dilemma van de multiculturele samenleving (Leuven: Acco, 1998), p. 77 (my translation).
90. See, for instance, Barry, Culture and Equality, pp. 201ff.
91. The pedagogical dialectic takes place against the background of certain non-negotiable norms that are given with the liberal democratic state, such as the equality between male and female. As I said, internal restrictions cannot be tolerated. It seems to me that the basic conceptual distinction between external protections and internal restrictions is one of the great achievements of Kymlicka's theory. In his reply to Susan Moller Okin's charge that ‘group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist’ (see her ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, in Joshua Cohen et al. (eds) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999], pp. 7–24 [12]), Kymlicka rightly refers to this distinction and questions Okin's antagonistic strategy of opposing feminism and multiculturalism, since these movements both are challenging the traditional liberal assumption that equality requires identical treatment
92. (Will Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Complacencies’, in Cohen et al. (eds) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, pp. 31–4).
93. However, Kymlicka does admit that the distinction itself needs to be further refined. For an excellent account of such an attempt, see Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
94. Pels, ‘Voorschoolse en buitenschoolse opvoeding’, pp. 607–8;
95. cf. Karen Phalet, ‘Minderheden en schoolsucces’, in C. H. M. Geuijen (ed.) Multiculturalisme (Utrecht: Lemma, 1998), pp. 97–114 (p. 113).
96. Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights’, p. 245.
97. However, as I said earlier, she often confuses intrinsic value of a language or culture ‘as such’ with the intrinsic value of a language or culture for the members of the minority group in question. Incidentally, I do agree with the parallel she draws between language and culture in these debates about intrinsic vs instrumental value: Réaume, ‘Official-Language Rights’, p. 246, 256, 264, 271.
98. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, ch. 2, p. 9, 33.
99. Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski (eds) Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
100. Paul Kelly, ‘Introduction: Between Culture and Equality’, in Paul Kelly (ed.) Multiculturalism Reconsidered: ‘Culture and Equality’ and its Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 1–17 (5).
101. Two recent publications are indicative of this new trend: Barry, Culture and Equality;
102. Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
103. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, p. 3;
104. cf. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, p. 332.