The Limits of Toleration: Applying Rawls’s Public Reason to Multicultural Rights

n the last few decades, the increasing pervasiveness of Western culture around the globe has tolled the death knell for cultural distinctiveness as we previously knew it. American economic interests, in particular, have done a remarkable job of spreading the symbols of American prosperity around the world. So well, for example, that the world’s busiest McDonald’s operates not in the United States, but in the tiny Pacific island nation of Samoa. Such incredible hegemonic power has lead many in recent years to call for the enactment of political measures in order to protect cultures that are now, in terms of power and incidence, in the minority.1 The debate concerning the protection of minority cultures, though, has also taken place within the political culture of individual states. Those concerned with the loss of the distinctiveness of minority cultures have often argued for the granting of multicultural rights. On this view, the individual rights of the minority group members are not sufficiently salient to protect the culture as a whole from the pressure of coexisting with more dominant cultures. What is needed, then, are special group rights that transcend the individuals’ rights and provide more adequate protection for the culture’s practices and traditions, or even for its mere existence. Such rights Aporia Vol. 14 number 1—2004