The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights: A Reply to Attas, Bardon, and Gans

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I’m delighted to have this opportunity to discuss my book with colleagues and to reply to their questions and challenges. My interlocutors raise many critical points, and it would strain the reader’s patience if I were to try to engage with every one of them. The criticisms range over some big issues in the book but mostly focus on the book’s core normative argument. I’ve tried to organize the criticisms thematically and to focus attention on questions that are likely to have some broader interest beyond the defense of particular claims in the book. Equal Recognition sets out to reconsider the moral foundations of minority rights. The minority rights that I am mainly interested in are those that are contested in debates about multiculturalism and nationalism. Majorities and minorities often make competing claims on the resources and attention of the state. While majorities want their own values, traditions, norms, and identity to be expressed in meaningful ways in public institutions and policies, minorities often call for greater recognition and accommodation by the state of their distinct cultures and identities. Decisions about language policy are one arena in which these competing claims are voiced, as are decisions about the design and boundaries of democratic institutions. Majorities often want their own language to serve as the state’s main public language, and they are comfortable with state-wide democratic institutions serving as the principal locus of collective decision-making. Cultural minorities, by contrast, want their own languages to be used by public institutions, and they want institutional and/or territorial spaces to be carved out in which they can enjoy a measure of autonomy and democratic self-government. Liberal political theory does not speak with one voice about the competing claims of majority nationalism and minority rights. Multicultural liberals insist that, as a matter of justice, the state ought to recognize and accommodate the cultures of minorities by establishing institutional and territorial spaces in