Epistemic Liberalism: A Defence by Adam James Tebble

Author:Adam James Tebble [Tebble, Adam James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781317310327
Google: 1ZteCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28638708
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

5 Complex adaptation and the culture of welfare

Liberal multiculturalism

In the previous chapter we saw that, along with multiculturalism and conservative nationalism, liberal nationalism misunderstands society’s cultural knowledge problem. More specifically in its defence of national identity as a means of securing social justice and of the deliberative democratic negotiation of national identity’s content, liberal nationalism is open to the charge that it assumes that the cultural knowledge problem has already been resolved. Instead, we have argued that rather than place the negotiation of national identity or the quest for social justice at the heart of politics, politics should be concerned with securing the equal individual cultural liberty that allows for the continual complex adaptation of society’s diverse identities and the more specific norms, values, conventions and practices that constitute them, including the relative standing of those norms that ground the commitment to securing a social minimum for the less well-off. Having rejected liberal nationalism on the grounds that it misunderstands the cultural knowledge problem, however, it does not follow that we have dispensed altogether with social justice. In this chapter I wish to examine the egalitarian liberal response to diversity that, similarly to liberal nationalism, seeks to defend social justice. In doing so we will see that egalitarian liberalism is characterised by a significant fissure with respect to the question of identity and justice, for it is with respect to our proper reaction to cultural diversity that one of the principal theorists to be considered in this chapter, Brian Barry, calls into question the liberal credentials of one of its other important contemporary defenders, Will Kymlicka. Interesting as these ruptures may be, however, my concern in this chapter will not be primarily with what divides egalitarian liberals on this issue but rather with what unites them.

Choice, circumstance and group-differentiated rights

In common with other defenders of egalitarian liberal justice, foundational to Kymlicka’s view is the value of individual autonomy. Here individuals are conceived to be authentically self-directing insofar as they formulate, pursue and revise their conceptions of the good without having their choices externally determined by the contingencies either of convention or of economic and social standing.1 This commitment to autonomy, of course, raises the question of how we may make autonomous choices and it is at this point where the notion of a societal culture becomes relevant to Kymlicka’s argument. Similarly to Hayek, who we have seen views our cultural membership and tradition as providing the necessary forestructure to our choices, central to Kymlicka’s account is the notion that societal cultures are indispensable ‘contexts of choice’ for individuals to lead autonomous lives.2 Societal cultures are vital, that is, because they provide the background value systems that make the formulation and revision of a conception of the good possible. Indeed, so vital are they for the exercise of autonomous choice that Kymlicka argues, following Rawls, that a viable societal culture should be considered a primary good, in addition to those that Rawls himself specifies, such as income and wealth and the bases of self-respect.

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