OVER THE past two centuries, social and political hierarchies in this country have met with repeated challenge from movements inspired by ideas of human equality. Abolitionists insisted that slaves are human beings, not to be held as property. Working-class movements of the 1920s and 1930s argued that a decent life for human beings should not depend on market success. The civil rights struggle of the 1960s said that skin color must be irrelevant to human fate, and condemned the practice of racial apartheid. More recently, movements for gay and lesbian rights have rejected the idea that people should be subjected to public humiliation for their choice of sexual partner.
Similarly with the modern women’s movement and the feminist theory associated with it. That movement condemned settled practice—stunning levels of violence against women, ceaseless efforts to turn women’s sexuality into a special burden, and persistent disparities of economic opportunity—in the name of the radical idea that women are human beings, too; that they are the moral equals of men, owed equal respect and concern, and that women’s lives are not to be discounted nor women to be treated as a subordinate caste.
Over the past decade, a variety of movements, theories, and proposals have emerged under the banner of “multiculturalism.” Though some embrace a romantic politics of group identity, others make a straightforward egalitarian claim. Multiculturalism, according to one especially compelling formulation, is the radical idea that people in other cultures, foreign and domestic, are human beings, too—moral equals, entitled to equal respect and concern, not to be discounted or treated as a subordinate caste. Thus understood, multiculturalism condemns intolerance of other ways of life, finds the human in what might seem Other, and encourages cultural diversity.
But on closer inspection, multiculturalism resists easy reconciliation with egalitarian convictions. After all, some cultures do not accept, even as theory, the principle that people are owed equal respect and concern (of course, no culture fully practices the principle). Moreover, tensions with decent treatment for women seem especially acute. In some contemporary cultures we see practices—including differential nutrition and health care, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence, and the denial of educational opportunities—that appear to fly in the face of the idea that women are entitled to be treated as equals. Such tensions become especially clear when we consider a controversial proposal endorsed by some multiculturalists: to provide cultural minorities with “group rights” as a way to preserve those minorities from undue pressure on their ways of life. But how can we endorse special rights for groups that treat female members as subordinate no-counts?
Susan Okin, a leading political theorist, forcefully puts that question to us in the lead essay in this volume. Okin’s essay, originally published in Boston Review, observes that regnant cultural ideas—including religious ideas—sometimes provide rationales for controlling women’s bodies and ruling their lives. When the dominant ideas and practices in a group offend so deeply against the idea that men and women are moral equals, Okin argues, we ought to be less solicitous of the group and more attentive to the costs visited on female members.
The responses to Okin’s essay—many of which appeared in an earlier form in Boston Review—range widely. Some emphasize more than Okin does the plasticity of cultures and religions, and conclude (with Okin) that they can fairly be expected to adapt to minimal demands of political morality—for example, that women are to be treated as equals. Some broadly agree with Okin, but suggest that her focus on women’s status is arbitrary: Shouldn’t we condemn group rights whenever a culture is unduly constraining of its members? Others think it intolerant to require that cultures and religious outlooks endorse, in theory or practice, the egalitarian principle, and to condition special rights on such endorsement. A final group thinks that Okin’s juxtaposition of feminism and multiculturalism is blind to cultural differences—a failing rooted ultimately in her confusion (characteristic of moral universalists) of the generically human with its familiar, local visage.
The exploration of these disagreements sharply clarifies the central question in this debate: How should we understand a commitment to equality in a world of multiple human differences, grim hierarchies of power, and cruel divisions of life circumstance? And at its best moments, the debate pushes beyond such clarification, forcing us to rethink our understanding of feminism and multiculturalism, and to reflect on the practical prospects for reconciling these different aspects of the radical idea of human equality—to consider how we might achieve, in Susan Okin’s words, “a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other’s moral equals.”