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scious prior to slaughter;5 and in the US, the Old Order Amish were exempted
from Wisconsin s compulsory school-attendance law on the grounds that
compliance with the law would, according to their beliefs, endanger their
salvation and that of their children.6
Multiculturalist theory and practice now treats a wide range of issues not all
of which are related to toleration, so it is important to be specific about the
questions to be addressed. The discussion here will address problems of tolera-
tion as they arise with respect to religious and cultural immigrant groups. Such
groups by no means exhaust the possible forms that religious and cultural groups
can take, and the problems of toleration they create are not the only problems
of justice with which multiculturalists concern themselves.7 However, most
people will have had some contact with members of such groups in going about
the daily business of their lives, and thus consideration of these groups provides
somewhat more vivid case studies than might otherwise be the case.8
Kymlicka defines immigrant groups as follows:  groups formed by the deci-
sions of individuals and families to leave their original homeland and emigrate
to another society . . . [giving rise over time to] ethnic communities with
varying degrees of internal cohesion and organisation , where members of such
groups are actual or prospective citizens.9 For example, Jamaicans who arrived
in the UK in the 1950s, or Italian-Americans. Crudely, immigrant groups want
integration into the main political, economic, and social institutions of liberal
society. Problems of toleration arise if such groups are required to relinquish
cherished cultural practices peculiar to them as a condition of such integration
(whether this requirement is encoded in law and enforced by the state, or
embodied in the informal mechanisms and social networks of the host society;
what we might refer to as its  culture ). In general terms, the structure of the
problems of toleration embodied in the claims of immigrant groups is as follows.
As we saw in chapter 1, toleration involves a principled refusal to interfere with
the practices etc. of individuals or groups despite significant opposition to these
practices, the power of interference, and a disposition to use that power. In that
case, intolerance involves a principled interference with the practices etc. of
groups in virtue of significant opposition to them through the exercise of power
over them. The liberal approach to toleration sets its limits by reference to indi-
vidual rights, the content of which is to be settled through debate in public
reason: on this view, interference with groups is justified only when their prac-
tices violate the liberal rights of members or non-members. This means that
genuine problems of toleration arise for liberals with respect to groups in two
sorts of cases that can be differentiated in terms of the direction from which the
opposition giving rise to the problem emanates.
1 The practices of the group violate the liberal rights of members or non-
members. Here, opposition emanates from the liberal state and is directed
towards the group.
CULTURE AND CITIZENSHIP 103
2 The requirements imposed on all its members by the liberal state are
objected to by members of cultural groups on the grounds that the imposi-
tion of these requirements violates their rights, and that these rights ought
to be recognised by the liberal state. Here, opposition emanates from the
cultural group and is directed towards the liberal state.
Sometimes group state relations create problems of toleration because both (1)
and (2) hold. One of the requirements imposed on all its members by the liberal
state is that rights be respected, and its interference with a group might be a
response to practices which violate this requirement. If the group in question
denies that its practices violate anyone s rights, or claims a legitimate exemp-
tion from this requirement, then opposition between the state and the group
runs both ways, with each party accusing its opponent of intolerance. However,
problems of toleration are not always symmetrical. The requirements referred to
in (2) might not relate to respect for rights  for example, they might relate to
conditions for citizenship such as competency in written and spoken English 
such that state interference with groups in order to secure compliance is not
accurately read as a response to state opposition to the practices of that group in
particular. Nevertheless, the group may still oppose this interference in the form
laid out in (2), in which case we have an (asymmetrical) problem of toleration.
Two cases of immigrant groups in dispute with the state in one or both of
these ways will be considered in this chapter. Before considering these cases,
however, we need more of an account of what it is about membership of such
groups that requires that we take their objections to interference with their
practices seriously as reports of intolerance.
Communities of meaning
If claims for exemptions from requirements and prohibitions, or claims for special
rights, for members of religious and cultural groups are to be at all plausible then
membership must realise, or further, a significant good for persons. Furthermore,
if these claims are to register given the liberal perspective laid out in chapters 5
and 6, then the good that membership furthers must be a good to which persons
have a distributive claim in the name of equal concern and respect. The place to
start is with the claim that cultural group membership is an intrinsic good; that
is, that it realises a good that is necessary for and integral to the good of indi-
vidual members, and that this good cannot be realised in any other way.10
This case can be made so as to resonate with liberal commitments by
connecting membership of a cultural group with the self-respect of members.
Kymlicka offers such an account:
cultural membership is not a means used in the pursuit of one s ends. It is
rather the context within which we choose our ends, and come to see their
value, and this is a precondition of self-respect, of the sense that one s ends
are worth pursuing.11
104 TOLERATION
A person s self-respect depends in part on being or striving to become the kind
of person she values; self-respect requires congruence between a person s norma-
tive self-conception and her self-expression, and it depends upon meeting
standards with which the person in some way identifies. Self-respect requires
that a person act in ways at least consistent with, and preferably supportive of,
her self-conception. In failing to act in these ways a person fails to be as she had
thought she was or hoped she could be.12 For Kymlicka, cultural groups provide
their members with a context which renders meaningful the ends, goals, and
associated standards relevant to the development of their self-respect: member-
ship of a cultural group sets the horizons of value for the self-respect-related
activities and judgements of members. To borrow Charles Taylor s phrase,
cultural groups can provide their members with a  vocabulary of worth neces-
sary for the successful exercise of practical reason in pursuit of self-respect.13
When a person deliberates about courses of action and how they will affect her
self-respect, she reflects  however inchoately  on her normative self-concep-
tion; she thinks about the kind of person she is and wants to be, and makes
decisions on the basis of these beliefs and desires. Kymlicka s view is that, for
members of cultural groups, their normative self-conceptions are couched in a
language informed by  cultural narratives .14
The account of the good of membership of cultural groups in terms of how [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]