Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness

Abstract

Contributes to contemporary debates about justice, multiculturalism, citizenship, and democratic theory. The book argues that the conventional liberal understanding of justice as neutrality needs to be supplemented by a conception of justice as evenhandedness. It also argues that theorists ought to pay attention to the moral wisdom that is sometimes embedded in practice. Claims about the moral relevance of culture and identity appear in many different forms in politics. There is no master principle that enables us to determine when we should respect such claims and when we should challenge them, but the idea of evenhanded justice often points us in the right direction. The book demonstrates this through a comparative and contextual analysis that pays close attention to the actual claims about culture and identity advanced by immigrants, national minorities, aboriginals, and other groups in a number of different societies. While the main focus is on a range of familiar and unfamiliar cases, the book includes an extended critical analysis of the work of Michael Walzer and Will Kymlicka. Finally, the book also contends that the conventional conception of citizenship is an intellectual and moral prison from which we can be liberated by adopting an understanding of citizenship that is more open to multiplicity and that grows out of practices that we judge, upon reflection, to be just and beneficial.