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• Title: Equal Treatment and Exemptions: Cultural Commitments and Expensive Tastes (Report)
• Author : Social Theory and Practice
• Release Date : January 01, 2012
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 268 KB

Description

Religious and cultural minorities are today often exempted from rules that continue to bind their fellow citizens, particularly when these rules directly burden minorities' freedom of religion--for example, restrictions on the carrying of knives in public that prevent Sikhs from carrying one of their five articles of faith, the kirpan (a metal dagger) (1)--but also when the universal enforcement of rules, such as crash helmet laws, would prevent minorities from accessing opportunities more readily available to members of more dominant groups. While multiculturalists celebrate the provision of cultural exemptions as realizing a more substantive equality than that achieved under a difference-blind model of citizenship, (2) critics argue that cultural exemptions are unwarranted in theory and discriminatory in practice. The fairness of the law, it is argued, is not a function of the size of the burden that it imposes upon minorities and majorities alike but of its facial neutrality. This requirement is met insofar as no individual or group is explicitly discriminated against and all enjoy formally equivalent opportunity sets. (3) Indeed, critics claim that the provision of exemptions is here not only unnecessary, it is unfair. As Jeremy Waldron puts it, "[i]t would be quite repugnant if there were one law for the rich and another for the poor"; so why should there be one law for religious minorities and another for the rest of the citizenry? (4) After all, cultural minorities are not the only groups who are substantially burdened by general rules. Crash helmet laws, to take one off-cited example, also heavily burden the interests of Hell's Angels, who strongly desire to ride with the wind in their hair. Yet, the state's interest in reducing the number of serious injuries from motorcycle accidents is here considered to justify forcing Hell's Angels to wear crash helmets; so why should Sikhs be excused from the obligation to wear a crash helmet? (5) The upshot of this critique is that we should treat the burdens of minority cultural and religious commitments much like the costs of expensive tastes: just as people can reasonably be expected to internalize the costs of their tastes, minorities can be expected to shoulder the opportunity-costs of their religious and cultural commitments in the face of otherwise generally applicable laws. So if Jews and Muslims find that they cannot eat meat because they are unwilling to eat animals that have been slaughtered while unconscious, that is simply a cost that they must endure for the sake of their beliefs in the same way that someone who will only eat organic, sustainably farmed meat may too have to go without meat because of her objection to dominant farming practices. (6) In this paper, I explain why this critique of exemptions is mistaken and why commitment to the principle of equality of opportunity, understood in resource-egalitarian terms, supports the provision of certain cultural exemptions. I do so by pointing to a number of important differences between the way in which people endorse their deep-seated convictions and commitments of conscience (of which I take the religious and cultural commitments at issue in exemption claims to be examples) and the way that people hold the sort of expensive tastes that feature prominently in the "equality of what" debate. (7) Many of the religious and cultural commitments at issue in exemption claims, I argue, have the status of beliefs, and people cannot simply decide to forsake beliefs because of their costliness in the way that someone might, for example, choose to forgo fine claret for a cheaper alternative in the face of resource constraints. A further important difference between people's attachment to their religious and cultural commitments, on the one hand, and their attachment to their preferences and tastes, on the other, is that a person's self-respect is not as bound up with the satisfaction of his or her tastes and preferences as

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