Pub Date : 2005-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1743453X0500100104
Seyed Mohammad Ali Taghavi
Increasing cultural diversity in western societies has received a variety of responses in contemporary works of political philosophy. While some thinkers see political recognition of cultural diversity as leading towards the disintegration of society or being contrary to liberal principles of equal treatment and state neutrality, there is an increasing acknowledgement of the need for recognition of cultural differences. This article is an attempt to explore some of the philosophical reasons underpinning a concern with political recognition of cultures and cultural differences. The main question is whether cultures and cultural communities give rise to any moral obligation that needs to be dealt with politically, viz., through the workings of the state, and if so, what would be the implications of such obligations in a multicultural society. A critical survey of various points of view indicates that there are two arguments regarding the significance of culture, namely, that culture is a source of moral values for people, and that as a type of community (that is, cultural community) it gives rise to some moral demands. The second argument, however, has not been articulated sufficiently in the existing literature, perhaps because of the prevailing suspicion of collective rights among liberal thinkers. This paper begins with the two arguments about the significance of culture, and then explores the political implications of such significance. In so far as the significance of culture has political implications, it can be said that, in the context of culturally plural societies, the two arguments ground two principles of ‘moral sensitivity’ towards, and ‘equal’ treatment of cultures existing in these societies. However, these two principles, which can be traced as the basis for various multicultural measures suggested by several philosophers, have not been properly articulated in the existing literature. After discussing these principles, I examine the legitimate scope of tolerance and recognition of cultural differences. In this regard, issues such as basic human rights, right to exit, excommunication and freedom of expression are considered. Finally, the role of politics and demo-
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Pub Date : 2005-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1743453X0500100106
S. Wright
Violent ‘peace keeping’ is a contradiction in terms but not if we analyse the provision of coercive law enforcement as just another organising process in state bureaucracies. This paper argues that events surrounding 9/11 merely accelerated processes of coercive peace keeping, which were already re-orientating following the end of the Cold-war. Abstract : Violent ‘peace keeping’ is a contradiction in terms but not if we analyse the provision of coercive law enforcement as just another organising process in state bureaucracies. This paper argues that events surrounding 9/11 merely accelerated processes of coercive peace keeping, which were already re-orientating following the cold war. The technologies used for coercive peacekeeping operations are designed to mask the level of violence being used. These include new methods of tracking and punishing dissent as well as prison techniques and technologies for disabling resistance. Such tools to quash dissent are big business and the security apparatus is permeated by commercial interests aggressively marketing technical fixes. Future researchers and NGOs will need to deconstruct these masks, without themselves rising up the food chain of
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Pub Date : 2005-04-01DOI: 10.3366/PER.2005.1.1.108
J. Pauly
{"title":"John Lewis Gaddis ,The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)","authors":"J. Pauly","doi":"10.3366/PER.2005.1.1.108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/PER.2005.1.1.108","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":381236,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Ethics Review","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116054497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1743453X0500100103
M. Evans
1. Like many other countries, Britain has what one might call a ‘two-tier’ educational system, in which parents who are sufficiently wealthy to afford their fees can send their children to independent schools (which are idiosyncratically and misleadingly known as ‘public’ schools). These schools are widely thought to provide a superior-quality education on average to that available for free in state schools. The higher quality is said to be due to the facts that independentschool teachers are often better paid, better qualified and more highly motivated than many of their state-school peers, consequently teaching their pupils more effectively. The latter also benefit from what are usually superior facilities and supplementary educational and extra-curricular opportunities. Their class sizes are typically much smaller, which generally allows greater attention to be paid to the individual’s particular pedagogic needs. And the whole effect of these benefits, it is said, is to encourage a ‘high-achieving’ academic ethos which is sometimes diluted or even absent altogether in the state sector. This two-tier structure has long generated controversy in British politics. Partly, this has been so because, Britain’s class system being what it is, the very fact that one has attended a particular independent school – regardless of the quality of its education – often secures advantages for its beneficiaries in later life (this is sometimes known as the ‘old-school-tie’ phenomenon). But the central bone of contention is that the two-tier system instantiates ‘ability to pay’ as a decisive distributive principle in educational provision. If we accept the claim that there is a significant difference in quality of education on average between the two, we can see how this arrangement represents a flagrant violation of what John Rawls calls fair equality of opportunity (Rawls, 1971: 73), which would stipulate that each child receive the same standard of education regardless of the wealth of their parents.
{"title":"Egalitarianism and Merit in a Non-Ideal World: The Problem of Two-Tier Education","authors":"M. Evans","doi":"10.1177/1743453X0500100103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1743453X0500100103","url":null,"abstract":"1. Like many other countries, Britain has what one might call a ‘two-tier’ educational system, in which parents who are sufficiently wealthy to afford their fees can send their children to independent schools (which are idiosyncratically and misleadingly known as ‘public’ schools). These schools are widely thought to provide a superior-quality education on average to that available for free in state schools. The higher quality is said to be due to the facts that independentschool teachers are often better paid, better qualified and more highly motivated than many of their state-school peers, consequently teaching their pupils more effectively. The latter also benefit from what are usually superior facilities and supplementary educational and extra-curricular opportunities. Their class sizes are typically much smaller, which generally allows greater attention to be paid to the individual’s particular pedagogic needs. And the whole effect of these benefits, it is said, is to encourage a ‘high-achieving’ academic ethos which is sometimes diluted or even absent altogether in the state sector. This two-tier structure has long generated controversy in British politics. Partly, this has been so because, Britain’s class system being what it is, the very fact that one has attended a particular independent school – regardless of the quality of its education – often secures advantages for its beneficiaries in later life (this is sometimes known as the ‘old-school-tie’ phenomenon). But the central bone of contention is that the two-tier system instantiates ‘ability to pay’ as a decisive distributive principle in educational provision. If we accept the claim that there is a significant difference in quality of education on average between the two, we can see how this arrangement represents a flagrant violation of what John Rawls calls fair equality of opportunity (Rawls, 1971: 73), which would stipulate that each child receive the same standard of education regardless of the wealth of their parents.","PeriodicalId":381236,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Ethics Review","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123728236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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