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Article Excerpt
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson's theory of deliberative democracy has been widely influential and the focus of much attention among liberal democracy theorists in recent years. (1) This conception of democracy has been favorably viewed by many as a successful attempt to combine procedural and substantive aspects of democracy, while remaining quintessentially liberal. (2) Although their theory of deliberative democracy has been subject to intense scrutiny, (3) the theory's implications for multiculturalism have been largely ignored. In this paper, I attempt to fill this gap by carefully examining Gutmann's position on minority claims of culture, which is entailed by Gutmann and Thompson's theory of deliberative democracy. (4) Although Gutmann allows certain accommodations of cultural claims by immigrants, she is adamant in her rejection of cultural claims made by national minorities (5) whose cultures (6) are by and large nonliberal. (7) By showing that Gutmann's position does not do justice to legitimate claims of culture made by national minorities, I shall argue that Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy itself is inadequate for radically pluralistic societies that house nonliberal national minorities.
In what follows, I shall begin with an overview of Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy, which upholds substantive values of "equal freedom and civic equality," and then show how Gutmann's multicultural proposal follows from it. I shall elaborate on Gutmann's reasons for rejecting nonliberal minority cultural claims, and focus, in particular, on her assertion that the conception of minority culture as "comprehensive," on which cultural claims are predicated, necessarily entails oppression of vulnerable cultural members, such as women. I shall then consider a seemingly puzzling position of some minority women who defend cultural claims, despite their subjugated status in their cultures. While these women's position may seem unreasonable from the liberal perspective, I shall argue that their position can be rendered philosophically defensible, if reconstructed on conceptions of nonliberal culture and persons that are different from the prevailing liberal conceptions. In this reconstruction, I shall show that the cultural insider's perspective has primacy in judgments about culture. By adopting the insider's perspective on minority culture, I shall indicate the ways in which Gutmann's position on cultural claims and sexist minority practices/norms is untenable. I shall conclude that the failure of Gutmann's position concerning cultural claims indicates that Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy, on which the former is based, is too substantively liberal to serve as an ideal model of democracy in radically pluralistic societies into which some nonliberal minority cultures have been forcibly incorporated.
1. Are Cultural Claims Compatible with Deliberative Democracy?
One of the most significant characteristics of contemporary liberal societies emphasized by deliberative democrats is that people sharing the same political space disagree, sometimes fundamentally, about moral matters. According to Gutmann and Thompson, there are four major reasons for moral disagreements: scarce social resources, ungenerous human nature, the lack of perfect understanding, and incompatible values. These different sources of moral disagreements lead to the condition referred to by John Rawls as "reasonable pluralism." Even in favorable social circumstances that allow reasonable people to exercise practical reason freely, their distinct and incompatible "comprehensive doctrines," (8) which are particular all-encompassing outlooks on life, may lead to disagreements and conflicts. Gutmann and Thompson take persistent moral disagreements as an inescapable fact of life and as the starting point of their conception of deliberative democracy. (9)
With reasonable pluralism as the backdrop, the challenge is how to maintain a common political system that is inclusive of citizens with diverse comprehensive doctrines. Since even reasonable persons would be unable to form a consensus on matters of comprehensive doctrine, the most we can expect is that they would reach a narrower political agreement concerning their common social arrangements, which would constitute "the conditions of political discussion." According to Gutmann and Thompson, deliberative democracy is the only acceptable conception of politics under the circumstances of reasonable pluralism, because it consists of the political minimum that all reasonable persons, who disagree on comprehensive doctrines, can agree as "a basis on which those who morally disagree can cooperate." In deliberative democracy, citizens and public officials are "committed to making decisions that they can justify to everyone bound by them" by giving and deliberating on reasons that can be accepted by others. (10)
The deliberative democratic emphasis on public deliberations of reasons may seem to support a procedural conception of democracy. However, Gutmann and Thompson emphasize that democratic principles must be "both substantive and procedural." (11) Given the "fundamental aim of deliberative democracy" to make political decisions based on reasons that are acceptable to free and equal persons willing to cooperate, "[t]he idea of free and equal personhood itself provides substantive moral content" for deliberative democratic principles. Although certain political decisions may have been reached by following a legitimate deliberative procedure, decisions that go against the idea of free and equal personhood must be rejected in deliberative democracy. (12) Hence, in addition to the three principles of reciprocity, publicity, and accountability to regulate the democratic process of collective deliberation, deliberative democracy adheres to substantive liberal principles of basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity to regulate the deliberative process. (13) In this sense, Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy is quintessentially liberal, in that respect for free and equal individuals forms the core of the theory.
Are cultural claims made by cultural minorities in the liberal West compatible with this conception of deliberative democracy? As a believer in a multicultural democracy that is not culturally blind but "fair to all individuals, whatever their cultural heritage," Gutmann argues that some cultural claims are acceptable in deliberative democracy. However, there are strict limits. Given the central place that liberal values occupy in deliberative democracy, the only defensible cultural claims are those that can be supported "in the name of equal freedom, opportunity, and civic equality." Examples of defensible cultural claims are claims to be exempt from laws or policies that impose disproportionate burdens on their cultural identities, such as those made by Canadian Sikhs to be exempt from wearing the traditional hat of the Canadian Mounted Police, and claims for special aid to overcome unfair disadvantages faced by minority members, such as requests for public support of their language alongside the dominant one in government institutions and schools. (14) These are claims made by immigrants.
On the other hand, cultural claims that would involve maintaining cultural customs/practices and norms/rules that violate individual rights should be rejected by deliberative democracy and excluded from collective deliberation. Claims of sovereignty and claims of cultural survival by national minorities provide cases in point. These claims potentially infringe on individual freedom, Gutmann claims, because they are predicated on a "comprehensive" conception of culture. In this conception, culture involves "a common language, history, institutions of socialization, range of occupations, lifestyles, distinctive literary and artistic traditions, architectural styles, music, ... and customs that are shared by an intergenerational community that occupies a distinct territory." Such a comprehensive conception of culture, Gutmann continues, assumes that there is "a single culture [that] encompasses the identity of the individuals who are its members" and "shapes individual identity in a comprehensive way." This assumption, however, is implausible not only because a singularity of cultural identity does not exist, but also because it entails the morally repugnant idea that "individuals cannot think, act, or imagine beyond 'their culture'." This idea is also "dangerous" because it can justify unfairly limiting some people's equal freedom and civic equality. (15)
As a clear example of how dangerous claims of sovereignty are, Gutmann considers the case of Julia Martinez. Julia Martinez is a Pueblo woman, married to a non-Pueblo man, who appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to be granted the full rights of a Pueblo, which were denied her and her children by the Pueblo tribal authorities. Martinez lost her appeal for equal treatment because the majority of the Supreme Court concluded that "[t]o abrogate tribal decisions, particularly in the delicate area of membership, for whatever 'good' reasons, is to destroy cultural identity under guise of saving it." In other words, they agreed with the tribal leaders that sovereignty should be granted to tribal authorities even if it means "abrogating the equal freedom and civic equality of Pueblo women." (16)
Gutmann argues that the Supreme Court's decision is problematic because it is predicated on the rule that "[t]he more comprehensive the culture, the greater its political sovereignty should be." This rule is unacceptable, according to Gutmann, because it does not respect individuals: "The degree to which a cultural group is encompassing is not necessarily the degree to which it takes equal freedom and civic equality seriously." Since Gutmann believes that equal freedom and civic equality are main constituents of basic human rights, which the U.S. Bill of Rights is committed to uphold, she believes that this decision is also "illogical." To defer to the sovereignty of a group even when an individual's basic rights are violated is to make a "mockery of the meaning of a basic right." In deliberative democracy, where due consideration must be given to equal freedom and civic equality, "the sovereign authority of all groups--small and large nations alike--must be constrained in order to protect the civic equality and other basic rights of persons." (17)
Claims to cultural survival provide another example of cultural claims to be rejected by deliberative democracy. Gutmann defines it as a claim to "ensure the survival over time of certain central features of a cultural group ... most obviously its language." Gutmann asserts that there cannot be a "blanket assurance" to maintain cultural survival: if a culture goes extinct because the members are not interested in maintaining its survival, there is nothing problematic about its extinction. Yet when a culture is threatened as a result of "injustice committed against its members," as in the case of indigenous people, she concedes that "[d]emocratic states have an obligation to counteract the threat of cultural extinction." However, she asserts that the claim of cultural survival of this sort is "derivative" of human rights to equal freedom and civic equality; what is at issue is injustice against individual members and nothing more. "Cultural survival in...
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