Autonomy, Toleration, and Group Rights: A Response to Will Kymlicka
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Kymlicka’s main purpose is to establish a necessary connection between toleration of individuals and the possibility and value of autonomy. This principal thesis is preceded by an interesting historical observation drawn from the political arrangements in the Ottoman Empire, which leads Kymlicka to offer a distinction between group pluralism and individual freedom. In the Ottoman Empire and its millet system, religious freedom was granted to groups rather than individuals. Members of the Greek Orthodox community, Jews, and Armenians were autonomous in all matters of religious life and were thus tolerated by their Muslim rulers. However, these three communities did not tolerate individual dissent within themselves, and each minority group had the legal right to impose on its members its own particular way of life. Hence, according to Kymlicka, Rawls is wrong in claiming that religious toleration and pluralism began in the wake of Protestantism; in the form of group toleration, in fact, religious pluralism was practiced long before Protestantism and the religious wars of Europe. This argument, though, is not merely historical. Kymlicka claims that Rawls was mistaken not only concerning the history of toleration. According to Kymlicka, Rawls’s mistake is rooted in a philosophical error that equates pluralism with individual freedom of conscience. The Ottoman experience, he contends, teaches us that religious toleration of groups is possible without practicing individual freedom of conscience. This observation leads Kymlicka to the second and central point of his argument. He argues that the move from group pluralism, such as that found in the Ottoman millet system, to individual freedom must be supported by the value of individual autonomy. According to Kymlicka, Rawls’s reluctance (in his later work) to base pluralism on the possibility and value of individual autonomy limits the application of pluralism to groups alone. On this point, Kymlicka and Rawls radically differ. According to Kymlicka, the principle of “autonomy” is necessary for the defense of individual freedom, whereas according to Rawls, the support of toleration based exclusively on autonomy ties pluralism to an excessively narrow conception of the “good life” and is therefore an obstacle to his attempt to provide a maximally broad consensus for toleration within a political structure. This essay focuses on the problem of whether autonomy is a necessary condition for individual freedom. I contend that toleration can be more successfully defended without appeal to the possibility of autonomy or to its value. I also attempt to defend an even more cogent argument that basing individual freedom on the notion of autonomy could lead to imposing a particular conception of the good life on individuals who do not perceive autonomy as valuable. This second argument also reveals differences between Kymlicka’s view and my own regarding the scope and nature of group rights within a framework of individual freedom. Before entering the problem of the relationship between individual freedom and autonomy and its implications for group rights, I will address Kymlicka’s historical argument and clarify Rawls’s conception of pluralism. The millet system was not an attempt to build a consensus among believers of radically different religious worldviews concerning the nature of a pluralistic society. In the Ottoman experience, the dominant power, that is, the Muslims, granted weaker minorities self-rule in religious matters. Rawls would not consider such an arrangement to be a genuine case of religious toleration, not only because it does not involve individual freedoms but because it was done in a framework of extreme asymmetry of power. Rawls is searching for a case in which radically different communities are involved in shaping a shared political structure. In such a case, according to Rawls, the fact of pluralism would force all the groups to liberal neutrality, because they would avoid giving priority to a particular conception of the good life in shaping the basic structure of society and its norms. It seems that such a scenario is very far from the millet system and indeed is unprecedented before the Reformation. The asymmetry of power in the millet system is itself a violation of pluralism in its most basic form. In the Ottoman Empire, unequal distribution of power was also based on religious affiliation. Minorities were discriminated against regarding equal access to political power, merely because they belonged to other faith communities.
Source Publication
Toleration: An Elusive Virtue
Source Editors/Authors
David Heyd
Publication Date
1996
Recommended Citation
Halbertal, Moshe, "Autonomy, Toleration, and Group Rights: A Response to Will Kymlicka" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 752.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/752
