Dispositional neutrality and minority rights

Abstract

Alan Patten defends a novel principle of neutrality according to which the state must accommodate all conceptions of the good equally. This principle rests on the claim that the state must be equally responsive to the interests of all citizens. I introduce a competing principle – neutrality of disposition – according to which the state must be disposed to treat citizens with different conceptions of the good alike in relevantly similar situations. The requirement of the equal responsiveness of the state is neutral between these two conceptions of neutrality. Moreover, neutrality of disposition, unlike neutrality of treatment, is compatible with a plausible luck egalitarian view of cultural justice according to which justice requires the state to be more accommodating of some conceptions of the good than of others in situations where not being so will result in members of minority cultures being worse off than others through no responsibility of their own.

Keywords:

• liberalism
• luck egalitarianism
• minority rights
• multiculturalism
• neutrality
• Alan Patten

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Andreas Albertsen, Melina Duarte, Rasmus Sommer Hansen, Tomasz Jarymowicz, Kristian Jensen, Kari Hoftun Johnsen, Søren Flinch Midtgaard, Tore Vincent Olsen, Denise Réaume, Helder de Schutter, Nenad Stojanovic, Jens Damgaard Thaysen, Annamari Vittikainen, and, in particular, Alan Patten for useful comments.

Notes

1. References below without an author’s name are to this book.

2. Patten’s statement of neutrality of treatment includes a tricky bit: ‘relative to an appropriate baseline’. If that baseline is the degree of accommodation compatible with neutrality of treatment, the two views become coextensive. Clearly, however, this is not the sort of baseline Patten has in mind.

3. Dispositional neutrality gives a sufficient condition for violation of neutrality. Hence, it is consistent with pairs of scenarios that are not relevantly similar involving violation of neutrality.

4. One reason for being skeptical about premise 1 comes out in my Uganda example below. However, I shall understand ‘equally responsive’ in such a manner that premise 1 is not defeated by that example.

5. One reason is that some of his expensive tastes are snobbish. For a discussion of snobbish preferences, see Lippert-Rasmussen (2015, pp. 93–98).