A Varied Moral World
Bhikhu Parekh
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Copyright (c) 1999 Princeton University Press. This article is now available
in an anthology titled IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR WOMEN? edited by Joshua Cohen
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All liberals agree that minority communities should have a right to preserve
their cultures, but disagree about the basis and limits of that right. For
some such as Michael Oakeshott and John Gray, they should enjoy the right
so long as they meet the basic condition of civility and do not practice murder,
incite hatred against outsiders, live as free-riders, etc. Some others such
as Chandran Kukathas require that they should also allow their dissenting
members the right of exit. Yet others such as Will Kymlicka go further and
ask minority communities to internally organize themselves along liberal lines.
This involves respecting basic liberties, encouraging personal autonomy, practicing
equality between the sexes, and so on.
Although sympathetic to this last approach, Susan Okin thinks that it is
not enough. Many minority and even majority cultures are deeply sexist, and
perpetuate women's subordination through a variety of practices too subtle
for the law to catch, let alone disallow. They also condition their women
into taking a low view of themselves and rationalizing and accepting their
subordinate status, with the result that their well-being is damaged and they
grow up without a strong sense of self-respect and self-esteem. In Okin's
view, liberal societies should ensure that respect for culture does not become
a shield for sexism, and that self-proclaimed leaders of minority cultures,
almost always male, should not be allowed to be their sole spokesmen. She
also seems to think that deeply sexist cultures should not qualify for group
rights.
I don't think anyone would disagree with much of what she says in her excellent
and passionately argued paper. Polygamy, clitoridectomy, forced or child marriages,
callous treatment of rape victims, and suppression of women in general are
all evil not only on liberal but on any conceivable moral ground. Okin is
also right to insist that respect for culture can never be unconditional and
condone acts of inhumanity and oppression. My disagreements relate to the
issues she ignores and her conclusions.
Since Okin concentrates on extreme cases, she ignores the problems involved
in judging other cultures. It is easy to show that clitoridectomy on children
is unacceptable. In some societies adult and sane women (including academics)
freely undergo it after the birth of their last child as a way of regulating
their sexuality and reminding themselves that from now onwards they are primarily
mothers rather than wives. Should we disallow this? Again, polygamy, meaning
a man having multiple wives, is sexist and unacceptable for that reason alone
as well as several others, though it is worth remembering that J. S. Mill
allowed it to the Mormons on the ground that theirs was a voluntary religion
that women joined out of free will. But what about polygamy which allows both
sexes the same freedom? It violates no liberal principle, for it is based
on uncoerced choices of adults, causes no apparent harm, encourages experiments
in living, and relates to the realm of privacy with which the liberal state
should not interfere. Should it also be disallowed? The American Civil Liberties
Union is divided, and so are liberals. In short, once we move beyond the incontrovertible
cases of patent physical and psychological harm, intercultural moral judgments
become problematic.
As Okin herself admits, deep inequalities between the sexes are difficult
to discern and demonstrate. Beyond a certain point they are even difficult
to define. In some societies women are treated as inferior when young, but
are revered and enjoy superiority over men once they reach a certain age,
become grandmothers, lead virtuous lives, or display unusual qualities. That
is why these societies present the apparent paradox of being sexist and yet
accepting, even welcoming, of women leaders in all walks of life. It is not
easy to assess their extent and depth of gender inequality. Since women at
different stages of life or in different relationships are perceived differently
and endowed with different rights, the "woman" is an oversimplified abstraction
that blinds us to cultural complexities.
There is also the further question of how women themselves perceive their
situation. If some of them do not share the feminist view, should we say that
they are indoctrinated, victims of culturally generated false consciousness,
and in need of liberation? That is patronizing and denies them the very equality
we espouse. This is not to say that they might not be brainwashed, for they
often are, but rather that we need to find ways of negotiating our moral responses
between the two positivist extremes of uncritically accepting their self-understanding
and equally uncritically imposing ours on them. In Britain, several university-educated
white liberal women have in recent years converted to Islam because, among
other things, they found its view of women more satisfying. There is a lesson
here for both liberals and feminists.
In France and the Netherlands several Muslim girls freely wore the hijab
(headscarf), partly to reassure their conservative parents that they would
not be corrupted by the public culture of the school, and partly to reshape
the latter by indicating to white boys how they wished to be treated. The
hijab in their case was a highly complex autonomous act intended to use the
resources of the tradition both to change and to preserve it. To see it merely
as a symbol of their subordination, as many French feminists did, is to miss
the subtle dialect of cultural negotiation.
Although Okin is ambiguous, she seems to think that minority communities
should not generally be allowed group rights unless they first put their cultural
houses in order along the lines she suggests. I find this impractical, dangerous,
and counterproductive. Since gender inequalities beyond a certain point cannot
be measured, we have no means of knowing whether a community satisfies our
standards of equality. And since inequality can be broadly or narrowly defined,
it opens the door to the worst kind of missionary zeal. It is also morally
impertinent to consider any community so degenerate and devoid of emancipatory
resources that it must be required to meet a catalogue of externally imposed
conditions before it can be trusted with certain rights. We should rightly
demand respect for certain basic rights, but go no further. No community can
for long avoid the fusion of ideas and influences brought about by its inescapable
interactions with the wider society. Once it throws up pressures for reform,
as it generally does, we may judiciously give them such assistance as they
need and ask for. If a community is constantly harried, ridiculed, or morally
blackmailed, it is likely to panic, close ranks, and lack the confidence and
the willingness to make the desired changes.
As Okin rightly points out, the way a culture treats women is of considerable
importance. However, a culture encompasses a lot of other things as well,
such as how one should live, relate to one's fellow humans and the natural
world, and find meaning in one's life. It also gives its members a sense of
rootedness, a ready access to an ongoing community, and intergenerational
continuity, and is a vital economic and political resource. It is therefore
a mistake to judge it solely or even primarily in terms of, and to make its
rights dependent on, its treatment of women.
Finally, Susan Okin rests her discussion of minority group rights on the
"fundamentals of liberalism." I find this all-too-familiar way of thinking
morally and philosophically troubling. It first turns a set of general and
necessarily open-ended liberal principles into a tightly-knit ideology called
liberalism, and then views the latter as a kind of secular religion, leading
to a theological debate about what its "fundamentals" are and who is a true
(fundamentalist?) liberal and who is an apostate. The liberal view of the
world has no fundamentals; rather it has several and, since they limit each
other, they are not fundamentals in the conventional sense. This is why it
qualitatively differs from other political doctrines and has been able to
adjust to different philosophical and cultural traditions. Liberals do, of
course, deeply cherish the individual. However the latter can be conceptualized
in several different ways such as the libertarian, the communal, and the religious,
each giving rise to different conceptions of freedom and human well-being.
If we are to persuade minorities to reform their practices, it is no use
appealing to liberal principles, both because they do not accept them and
because we need to show that the principles are worth accepting. It is not
enough to say that since they live in a liberal society, they should accept
liberal principles. The minorities are an integral part of the society, and
they are not liberal. And though some areas of the society are liberal, others
are not, and even so far as the former are concerned, liberal principles are
constantly contested. There is an increasing tendency among liberals to equate
"liberalism" and the good. This political equivalent of the naturalistic fallacy
prevents us from asking if liberal principles are good and, conversely, if
nonliberal principles might also be good. We should not allow the immensely
rich and varied moral world to be monopolized by a single political doctrine.
This is precisely the point and challenge of multiculturalism. Liberals want
to liberalize it, as Okin does so well in her moving paper. For their part
multiculturalists want to multiculturalize liberalism, stressing both that
it is internally plural and that it is but one valuable culture among many.
If we go along this road, as I think we should, we arrive at many different
forms of liberal and nonliberal feminism, each correcting and complementing
the other, and all collectively giving us a richer understanding of intergender
and intercultural relations.
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