Liberals are torn when it comes to the role of communities (E.g. Kymlicka 1989). On the one hand, an individualist commitment seems to leave relatively little room for communities in one’s normative political philosophy, and indeed only a derivative one. Furthermore, some communities are often arenas of internal oppression (of women, almost always, but not only of women). So a liberal suspicion towards communities is understandable. On the other hand, liberals are also committed to letting people be the authors of their life stories, and many of these authors write stories in which communities play a crucial role. Thus, the need to accommodate the importance of communities is not external to liberalism. Rather, liberalism itself requires accommodating the role of communities in many peoples’ lives. If it cannot do so, this makes liberalism unacceptable. Liberals must have something to say, then, about the role of communities.

Similar considerations apply to closely related considerations of identity. It seems clear – perhaps clearer in recent decades than could have been hoped for earlier – that most people need a thick identity in order to prosper, much thicker than the bare liberal identity of a rational person, or a human being, or a citizen in the Kingdom of Ends (Kant 2012 [1785]). National identity and religious identity have loomed large here, but they are not necessarily the only ones. A view that belittles such identity-attachments will fail to treat people as recognizably human, and will thus be both theoretically and politically inadequate. But questions remain. Are some of these identities best seen merely as a part of non-ideal theory (so that it would have been better had people not been so attached to their religious and national identities, but a political theory has, to an extent, to take people as it finds them), or would thinking of identity in this way already be a failure to take some of these identities sufficiently seriously (with regard to national identity, Tamir 1995; 2020)? What distinguishes legitimate identities form clearly illegitimate (e.g., racial) ones? And how can a liberal accommodate identity without either compromising their commitment to individual autonomy and rationality, or watering down the relevant notion of identity (to something being rationally chosen by individuals, or to something merely instrumental)? (Appiah 2018)

Multiculturalism poses a host of challenges to liberalism. The famous discussion, for instance, about whether multiculturalism is bad for women (Okin 1999) raises worries about illiberal communities and cultures. And more generally: How can we reconcile obvious truths in the vicinity of multiculturalism – say, that many social arrangements may seem necessary or even natural within a cultural context but are really contingent social artefacts, and that regardless of the metaethical issues, at the very least some epistemic modesty in the face of very different cultural practices and sensitivities is called for – with liberal fundamental commitments to individual autonomy, rationality, and universality? (Appiah 2018)

Here some of the needed work has already been done. Kymlicka (1989; 1995) has been developing (to an extent, following Raz (1986) and Margalait and Raz (1990)) a liberal multiculturalism. This kind of multiculturalism promises both to remain loyal to underlying liberal principles and values (thereby rejecting at least the stronger kinds of communitarianism), and to accommodate the main communitarian insights about the role of communities and social identities in our lives. Therefore, some of the discussion in this part will consist in evaluating this kind of liberal multiculturalism. (Song 2020) And because some of the work has already been done, the discussion of this topic within this project will be more focused and limited.

 

Still, much work remains to be done, especially in tying this topic to rekindling liberalism more generally. A central topic in this context, for instance, is the right attitude towards non-liberal communities, and in particular the conflict between the call to accommodate them and the need to protect oppressed internal minorities. The emphasis of some liberals on exit rights – so that as long as members of the oppressed minority can exit the relevant community, their staying should count as implicit consent to the community’s oppressive practices – is an example of how some liberals fail to take seriously enough objections to over-simplified views of consent. Given the realities, for many, of leaving their community, and the discussion (in part 1) of flawed consent, exit rights cannot be thought of as a magical solution to the problem of oppressed internal minorities. Another liberal solution is called for. This topic is closely related not just to the topic of flawed consent, but also to the right understanding of individual as well as community autonomy, and so to the prospects of a liberal political philosophy as a whole.