Abstract
In political contexts, equality is both a superlative value and a hotly contested one. Even as just a multicultural value, equality is ambiguous. It has two relevant meanings (cultural relativism and equity egalitarianism) that differ substantially from the classic liberal (economic and political opportunities) and socialist (economic outcomes) conceptions of equality. Brian Barry's well-known attack on multiculturalism in the name of modern liberal egalitarianism (his Rawlsian synthesis of equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes) is explained in order to clarify, by contrast, the distinctive meaning that equality has acquired in connection with multiculturalism. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the rival contemporary conceptions of equality may be rooted in different ways of understanding another superlative modern value, namely, freedom.
I’m for equality in all its forms. I fought all my life for that.
Jean Chrétien
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Notes
- 1.
As noted earlier, “the multiculture” is the term preferred by Ken Dryden over the more familiar but more controversial term “multiculturalism,” which, for some, suggests permanent cultural separateness and which has been associated in the popular mind with pandering to immigrant groups to gain their political support. “The multiculture” should suggest by contrast, Dryden suggests, the “big compelling story” of a Canada united by “becoming what we are.” See Dryden, Becoming Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 213–216. Phil Ryan, “Our Multiculturalism: Reflections in the Key of Rawls,” in The Multicultural Question: Debating Identity in 21st-Century Canada, ed. Jack Jedwab (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 95 and 102, notices the problem alluded to above. “A just multiculturalism” would require, he says, “a multi-level conception of culture” that would distinguish “an overarching political culture” from a more strictly cultural “way of life shaped by a comprehensive doctrine” (emphasis in the original). In the Notes at the end, Ryan notes that it is “an interesting question … whether multiculturalism might be a comprehensive doctrine,” adding that he “personally doubts this,” as indeed he must, to avoid some troublesome complications.
- 2.
Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Harvard University Press, 2001). Barry (1936–2009) was educated at Oxford (B.Phil and D.Phil) and taught briefly at the Universities of Birmingham, Keele, and Southampton, before returning to Oxford in 1965. In 1969, he secured a professorial appointment at Essex. In 1977 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he taught for five years, then moved to Cal Tech, where he stayed until 1986. In 1987 he returned to London and the LSE. In 1998 he began teaching at Columbia in New York. At the time of his death, he was Emeritus from both LSE and Columbia. In 2001 he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Political Science, by the Johan Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University. His major work is a two-volume “Treatise on Social Justice,” the second volume of which, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford University Press, 1995), provides a lengthy explanation of the rigorous reasoning about imaginary original positions that underlies his treatment of multiculturalism as a theoretical problem.
- 3.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971). Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice: A Critical Examination of the Principal Doctrines in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (Oxford University Press, 1973), provides a rigorous “technical” dissection of Rawls’s reasoning that claims to show that his theory “does not work” because “many of his individual arguments are unsound,” but that concludes nonetheless that it still deserves “profound and intensive study” by anyone striving for academic acceptance, that is, who “expects the academic community to take him seriously.”
- 4.
Cf. Barry, Culture and Equality, 13: “the egalitarian liberal [demands] that people should not have fewer resources and opportunities than others when this inequality has arisen out of circumstances that they had no responsibility for bringing about.” This astonishingly ambitious aspiration to overcome or compensate all natural inequalities, aiming to transform a parental wish for their children into a global bureaucratic obligation towards all mankind, sometimes called “luck egalitarianism,” introduces practical and theoretical complications that account for much of the academic controversy about the details of the utilitarian reconciliation of liberalism and socialism since it was first sketched out by John Rawls. See Barry, “Chance, Choice, and Justice,” in Liberty and Justice: Essays in Political Theory 2 (Oxford University Press, 1991), 142–158, for Barry’s thoughts on some of the difficulties. See Andrew Mason, Leveling the Playing Field: The Idea of Equal Opportunity and its Place in Egalitarian Thought (Oxford University Press, 2006), for what the author rightly says is “a partial critique of luck egalitarianism.”
- 5.
Barry , Culture and Equality, 11. Barry says “reinventing the wheel” but seems to mean “claiming to invent a wheel” (cultural rights) when actually defending something more primitive, “the sledge,” or lordly compulsion.
- 6.
Barry , Culture and Equality, 9. Multiculturalism, Barry says, is “defined by the demand that different people should be treated differently in accordance with their distinctive cultures.” (295) For a strong, even passionate Canadian endorsement of the view that “difference” requires different treatment for different groups, if all are to be treated equally, see Madame Justice Rosalie Abella, “The New ‘Isms’,” in “English Canada” Speaks Out, ed. J. L. Granatstein and Kenneth McNaught (Doubleday, 1991), 265–275. Elsewhere, Barry seems to be the dupe of multicultural rhetoric, equating multiculturalism with the active promotion of diversity as a value and failing to see behind the noisy official celebrations of diversity the quiet satisfaction with assimilation.
- 7.
Barry, Culture and Equality, 258 and 267.
- 8.
Barry, Culture and Equality, 34–35.
- 9.
Barry, Culture and Equality, 128, 132.
- 10.
Barry, Culture and Equality, 3, 8, 11–12, 21, 206, 325, 326.
- 11.
Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 171. Okin’s rather dismissive treatment of gender differences, implicitly equating sexual dysphoria with unhappiness about the colour of one’s eyes or the length of one’s toes, could be challenged today in the name of transgender rights. If health insurance agencies dismissed the claims of those wishing to transition surgically because they had no more merit than the complaints of those unhappy with the colour of their eyes or the length of their toes and expecting publicly funded remediation or compensation, some would no doubt regard it as unjust.
- 12.
Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton University Press, 1999), with replies by Will Kymlicka and others.
- 13.
Cf. Abella, “The New ‘Isms’,” 273.
- 14.
For example, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation (Government of Quebec, 2008), 231: “It is always possible to pinpoint [racism, despite its strategy of concealing itself behind cultural considerations] by concentrating on the differential effects of various social practices linked to hiring, housing, the availability of public services, and so on…. [thus allowing one to speak] of an indirect proof, or, if you will, a proof by effect, i.e. exclusion and certain situations of inequality.” (Emphasis in the original.) Cf. Barry, Culture and Equality, 108: “The general theorem is that equality of opportunity plus cultural diversity is almost certain to bring about a different distribution of outcomes in different groups. Equal outcomes can be secured only by departing from equal opportunity so as to impose equal success rates for all groups…. Some ways of life and their associated values [may well] lead to a relatively low level of occupational achievement, as conventionally measured. A liberal will have to say that that is the unavoidable implication of cultural diversity. There is no reason for saying it is an unfair outcome, so long as the criteria for employment are defensible.”
- 15.
Cf. Barry, Culture and Equality, 102: “open season on white middle-class males who are straight, able-bodied, and neither young nor old.” See Martin Loney, The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (MdGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), for a detailed treatment of the history of equity egalitarianism in Canada, especially the role played by Justice Rosalie Abella and her Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, which was appointed in 1983 and reported in 1984. The source of the sharpest disagreements has been the resemblance of the discrimination involved in equity egalitarianism to the discrimination that has for generations been roundly condemned by progressive thinkers, socialist as well as liberal. The new systems of discrimination can be defended as reverse discrimination or positive discrimination by the public authorities rather than, so to speak, genuinely discriminatory discrimination by private individuals to serve their private interests. The new positive discrimination can claim to be overcoming the unjust inequalities created by the old negative discrimination. Still, the new progressive, remedial, non-discriminatory discrimination has an undeniable outward resemblance to the old noxious wrongful discrimination, since it discriminates on the basis of criteria that have long been condemned as unacceptable grounds for making any choices at all in education, employment, trade, or promotion.
- 16.
The desire to live and work with “one’s own kind” has often been seen as a serious problem in Canada and the United States, to be countered by rigorous anti-discrimination measures complemented by deliberate efforts to increase “contact,” but in an interview with Max and Monique Nemni in 1996, Pierre Trudeau apparently explained his idea of multiculturalism as follows: “It is about recognizing that it is perfectly normal for people to want to associate with others with whom they feel certain cultural affinities, including language.” Max and Monique Nemni, Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965, trans. George Tombs (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 73. This surprisingly naive remark may have been a slip of the tongue, or it may have been carefully tailored to the receptivity of Trudeau’s friendly biographers.
- 17.
Cf. Barry, Culture and Equality, 266: “Undoubtedly, the claim that all human beings are entitled to equal respect is an assertion of fundamental equality that lies at the heart of egalitarian liberalism.” The emphasis in the original is meant to draw attention to the difference between individual members of the species and groups of them, namely, “cultures,” and not to suggest that there might be any uncertainty about who exactly counts as human.
- 18.
See Barry, Culture and Equality, 12, 39, 65, 72, 89, 90, 103, 114–118, 234–235, 307–308, 321.
- 19.
The very suggestive quoted phrase is taken from Gérard Bouchard, L’interculturalisme: Un point de vue québécois (Boréal, 2012).
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Forbes, H.D. (2019). Culture and Equality. In: Multiculturalism in Canada. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19835-0_4
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