The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics

Gutmann, Amy. (1993). Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (3), 171-204.

Gutmann examines political controversies over social justice in multicultural contexts. She begins her argument by defining multiculturalism as "the state of a society or the world containing many cultures that interact in some significant way with each other" whereas a culture id defined as a human community associated with a set of social standards of seeing, doing and thinking.

Her aim in this essay:
(1) understanding the essential challenge of multiculturalism to social justice
(2) assessing three responses: cultural relativism, political relativism, and comprehensive universalism
(3) proposing deliberative universalism as a more defensible response

The response of Cultural Relativism
Gutmann notes that social justice, according to cultural relativism, is the distribution of social goods responding to their cultural meaning. As seen the debate on polygamy among Mormons, such meanings change over time. Thus, if there exist multiple meanings for any given good, cultural relativism will require reformulation to deal with these competing meanings to apply to social justice, Gutmann explains.

Gutmann rightly points out that because cultures are often distinguished by a set of dominant social understandings, cultural relativism can threaten to identity social justice with the dominant social norms, as seen examples of justifying slavery or women's role. She states that there has been no demonstrated general consensus to the dominant discourses. She states:
"Because social understandings are typically not shared among all members of a culture and dominant understandings do not determine justice, cultural relativism does not fulfill its promise of dissolving multicultural conflicts. It often does not even recognize moral conflicts within cultures, let alone resolve them." (p. 178)

Political Relativism
Gutmann states that social justice, according to political relativism, is achieved through institutional mechanism to adjudicate internal disagreement over social meanings and adjust distribution of social justice based on the outcome. Gutmann argues that political relativism is more adequate response to multicultural conflicts than cultural relativism because its recognition of a political community, where disagreements over social meanings are discussed and negotiated, and a provision for certain forms of procedural justice, such as forums for argument, negotiation, and so on, highlights a necessary condition of social justice; this condition, just procedures, alone, however, cannot guarantee the complete morality, she critiques.

Gutmann implies that democracy is a procedure and does not necessarily determine justice, although democratic procedures may be the best for provisionally settling many conflicts. She continues to argue, "[i]n situations of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts within democratic societies, majoritarian procedures may deny minorities personal security, basic liberty, and decent living standards" (p. 180).

Observing cases where political procedures failed to bring just outcomes, Gutmann states:

"The strength of political relativism lies in its recognition that disagreements over social meanings should be publicly discussed, negotiated, and adjudicated. Its weakness lies in its silence regarding standards, other than social agreement, by which to judge the justice of procedures or their results." (p. 182)

The Relation Between Relativism and Personal Identity
Gutmann asserts that people, belonging to multiple cultures at a time, as well as societies are multicultural even within an orthodox religious group, for instance. This nature, however, does not lead to a cosmopolitan view about social justice, Gutmann notes. People negotiate their identities. Gutmann writes:

"Cultural and political identities are neither given like hair color nor chosen like high cuisine. People select, interpret, and evaluate stories, histories, and customs in attempts to make the best out of the various cultures given to them. They also interpret and evaluate the institutions, laws, practices, and procedures of the political community they inherit...Cultural and political relativism leave too little room for recognizing this distinctively human capacity, exercised most self-consciously by people who endure systematic social injustice." (p. 185)

The Challenge of Relativism
Gutmann argues that a fundamental challenge of relativism lies in that it fails to explain an Archimedean point outside any cultural or political community from which to justify the overriding of local understandings. Looking at Nazi Germany's dominant favor for racial discrimination yet unjust, she calls attention to certain universal values. She clarifies universalism:

"Universalism depends on the possibility of justifying actions to people who do not share the same communal attachments, and this possibility is not undermined by the idea that moral criticism comes from within particular cultures." (p. 192)

Gutmann states that universalism, in practice, better fits the force of criticisms of arbitrary arrests and systematic deception by regime.

The Response of Comprehensive Universalism
Gutmann refers to comprehensive universalism as another response to the challenge of multiculturalism. By comprehensive universalism, she means an ethical application of a set of comprehensive principles of justice to all modern culture. In comparison, she defines deliberative universalism as follows:

Deliberative universalism [sic] relies partly upon a core of universal principles and partly upon publicly accountable deliberation to address fundamental conflicts concerning social justice, conflicts that reason has yet to resolve. (p. 193)

Partly because a universalist political ethics cannot be comprehensive in practice and comprehensive univeralism overlooks moral disagreements, such as individual choice vs. abortion, concerning social justice within a specific local context, Gutmann favors for deliberative universalism, which leaves room for local negotiation.

The Response of Deliberative Universalism
Gutmann succinctly writes:

"Unlike comprehensive universalism, deliberative universalism explicitly recognize that some conflicts over social justice cannot now (or perhaps ever) be resolved by a comprehensive, universally justifiable set of substantive standards. These conflicts are best addressed and provisionally resolved by actual deliberation, the give and take of argument that is respectful of reasonable differences." (p. 197)

In this way, she convenes relativism and universalism. Gutmann's favor for deliberative universalism partly stems from the condition that the reasonable argument can create. She writes:

[T]he give and take of respectful argument can create the broadest justifianle consensus across a range of reasonable but conflicting positions because mutual respect enjoins an economy of moral disagreement, the search for substantive points of convergence between fundamentally irreconcilable positions. (p. 199)

Gutmann alludes that the difference between deliberative universalism and political relativism lies in that social justice consists of deliberation as well as substantive principles that are necessary to secure basic human well-being. (p. 200) In this respect, Gutmann stresses that there should be certain conditions for deliberation to work in society, because "deliberation not only supplements substantive principles of justice but also presupposes certain substantive principles as well as procedural requirements." (p. 200) Thus she calls for substantive and procedural principles that make deliberative universalism distinctively suitable for making decisions about social justice.

Another reason for favoring deliberative universalism that Gutmann mentions is that "multiculturalism requires deliberation on many matters of social justice" (p. 204).


[Gutmann's emphasis on deliberative universalism is comparable with Charles Taylor's 'minimal rationality', as Bhabha summarizes (the location of culture, 2004). For Taylor, a plurality of standards which stem from incommensurable cultures does not rule out judgments of superiority. Rather, it is the plurality that exist between the incommensurable that leads to such judgments. He states:

What more is involved comes out of in the different judgments we make when we compare incommensurable cultures and activities. The judgments take us beyond merely formal criteria of rationality, and point us toward the human activities of articulation which give the vale of rationality its sense. (Philosophy and the Human Sciences, p. 151)

Thus, Talyor refutes pluralism and calls attention to the rationality that is formed through our comparative judgments between incommensurable cultures. This rationality not only avoids inconsistency among cultures but also constitutes superior judgments out of our attuned and humane interests in other cultures that coexist in the same space.]