Mill and Multiculturalism
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Description
Accommodating cultural diversity is not quite the same as religious toleration, and neither of them is the same as recognizing a principle of individual liberty so far as ethics and lifestyle are concerned. But there are important commonalities between them and, just as it would not be surprising to find that someone who espoused a principle of liberty for lifestyles would also espouse a regime of religious toleration, so we should not be surprised to find a defender of individual liberty saying things that could be adduced in support of a principle of cultural diversity. This certainly seems to be the case with John Stuart Mill. There is a lot in common between the concerns about religious toleration that John Locke wrote about in the 1680s and the concerns about individuality that Mill wrote about almost two centuries later in On Liberty: both thinkers emphasize the importance of sincerity in the life-structuring choices that people make and both condemn the attempt to produce genuine faith or ethical conviction by coercion as counterproductive. Nor is it hard to see continuity between Mill's concerns in On Liberty and the concerns of those who argue in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for a diverse society with a citizenry of disparate ethnic and national origins, a society in which many cultures are embraced, in which people are respected for their cultural identity, in which both the state and the members of its ethnic and national majority (if there is one) go out of their way to tolerate and accommodate practices that are quite different from their own.
Source Publication
Mill's On Liberty: A Critical Guide
Source Editors/Authors
C. L. Ten
Publication Date
2009
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "Mill and Multiculturalism" (2009). Faculty Chapters. 1588.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1588
