Access to Opportunities in Multicultural Societies and the Relevance of Public Expression
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909345099 |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Silvina Alvarez |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES
AND THE RELEVANCE OF
PUBLIC EXPRESSION
SILVINA ALVAREZ
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT
The presence of minority groups with cultural backgrounds that differ from main-
stream society cultural standards may determine a gap between social opportunities
and personal options: it can be the case that social opportunities in society as a whole
are not perceived as effective options by the members of minority groups. Further-
more, the building of options is hindered by the sort of hate messages which strongly
affect the portrayal of minority groups and contribute in turn to diminish personal
autonomy. The author affirms that, since options are context-dependent and per-
sonal autonomy relies on them, hate speech in multicultural societies compromises
the degree of personal autonomy of members of minority groups.
KEY WORDS
discrimination; equal opportunities; hate speech; minorities; multiculturalism;
personal autonomy; public expression
1. INTRODUCTION
THECOMPOSITIONof society determines the scenario for the exercise of
individual freedoms. As long as this composition changes, new chal-
lenges are bound to arise for the effective exercise of liberty. In the
past few years, cultural diversity has been identified as a major feature of
contemporary western societies, and such acknowledgement has opened the
debate about the moral, legal and political consequences of multiculturalism.
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
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0964 6639, Vol. 18(4), 543–559
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909345099
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)
In this article I propose to focus on the conditions for the exercise of personal
autonomy in multicultural contexts. Every time society transmits hate
messages, the opportunities of the addressees are strongly affected and
personal autonomy is damaged. Therefore, hate speech – and eventually hate
crimes – have to be analysed taking into consideration social and cultural
features, as well as their effects on life options which are culturally bound. In
multicultural societies, equality of opportunities very much depends on the
conditions for public expression.
In the following pages, I will begin by presenting the concept of personal
autonomy along with a short account of multiculturalism. Moreover, I will
introduce the notion of opportunities and redefine its extension vis-à-vis the
notion of options. I will extensively argue that in order to make social oppor-
tunities available to members of minority groups, their cultural and social
background should be taken into consideration – since the very notion of
opportunities depends on such considerations. Finally, the practice of personal
autonomy in multicultural contexts will be confronted with the scope and
strength of freedom of expression. The case of public speech will be presented
in a double perspective: on the one hand, and following J. Raz’s analysis, I
will emphasize the relevance of public discourse as a major element in the
process for the validation of options, and on the other hand, I will evaluate
the interference of hate speech in the realm of personal autonomy.
I will affirm that the concept of personal autonomy has to be understood
within a sociological context, and that people’s ability to make decisions
depends very much on the building of their options through public discourse.
I will propose a conception of personal autonomy which is gradual and
context-related, and describe a model of multicultural societies capable of
enhancing the practice of autonomy, provided it allows cultural differences
to be part of available opportunities or effective options for the members of
minority groups. Although vital for an autonomous life, the process of recog-
nition and identification of individual options may face serious obstacles in
multicultural societies. This is so because not all groups enjoy the same
degree of acceptance by the other members of society, neither do they have
the same opportunities to express themselves and validate their options. In
achieving recognition and validation, public speech plays a central role. Every
time public messages transmit degrading or humiliating images of a minority
group, the consequences may be significantly adverse and harmful, contrib-
uting to increase marginalization. Such is the case with expressions which
denote disdain, rejection, mockery or hate. Declarations of this kind may be
specially pernicious and destructive when they refer to people or groups of
people who already suffer from discrimination in society.
To put it in a nutshell, hate speech damages the self-portrayal of those
affected by it, reproducing a devalued public image of them. It contributes
to create, confirm or expand stereotypes that produce or exacerbate social
repulsion. In so doing it damages autonomy as well, because its echoes nega-
tively alter the range of suitable and effective options of members of minority
groups.
ALVAREZ: ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITIES
545
2. PERSONAL AUTONOMY AND MULTICULTURALISM
Personal autonomy is based on two issues: rationality and liberty as inde-
pendence. An autonomous agent acts according to rational decisions – which
Kant bases on universal moral rules – free from external impositions. The
notion of independence refers to the absence of external determinants or
obstacles which could decisively influence the agent’s will. The will of the
autonomous person must be expressed freely through personal choices based
on non-externally constrained decisions.
These two requirements, rationality and independence, are nonetheless
insufficient: they don’t fully explain the complex process that the rational and
independent agent has to go through in order to come up with an autono-
mous decision. In order to complete the concept and explain this process
better, the list of conditions for autonomy has been extended. Among the
contributions of the past decades regarding the study of the conditions for
personal autonomy, I would like to focus on one because of its special rele-
vance in explaining the process of decision-making that a person undertakes
in the pursuit of an autonomous choice: Raz’s ‘relevant range of options’.
This condition intends to avoid trivializing personal autonomy as a capacity
for choosing. In other words, the agent has to be enabled to effectively make
relevant decisions. Furthermore, we shouldn’t forget that options are shaped
in specific cultural frameworks and are strongly determined by them. The
agent will recognize an option as long as it is significant for her according to
her social, cultural or economic background.
The condition regarding the relevance of the options establishes a difficult
and very often morally committed evaluation; nonetheless, such an evaluation
still seems necessary. Think about another aspect of the relevance condition
that, as stated by Raz, arises when we pose the following question: can we
say a person is autonomous if he or she only has the possibility of making
trivial decisions? Imagine a citizen in a modern political society who can
only choose between two qualitatively similar options; let’s say you could only
choose between reading newspaper A or newspaper B, both of them run by
the same editorial board. In this case, the person doesn’t seem to have access
to substantially different journalistic options and the choice, therefore, will
not be a genuine one; to call this a choice seems merely a rhetoric assertion.
In the same way, the person who can only choose between reading news-
paper C which informs only about weather conditions and newspaper D
which informs only about traffic conditions doesn’t seem to have a relevant
range of options in the context where the choice is being made – a modern
political society.
These examples draw attention to the fact that the notion of autonomy
cannot be a purely formal one. We see now that the condition of adequate
options takes us into the domain of a concept of autonomy not necessarily
defined by the substantive outcomes of its exercise, but positively defined by
the substantive conditions of that exercise. In the following I will refer to
personal autonomy in this sense, that is, as substantially dependent on viable
options for the agent.
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)
In this sense, group diversity in multicultural societies has to be taken into
account as a salient feature influencing the aspects we have described as essen-
tial for the exercise of autonomy. The building of the options in a context of
strong diversity places the burden of their identification on minority groups
and they may have serious problems in transforming social opportunities
in society at large – mainstream society – into real options for themselves.
Before considering how this process occurs, we have to briefly refer to multi-
culturalism.
The defence of multiculturalism admits various strategies. The promotion of
a group’s culture, as Raz affirms, goes beyond two typically liberal ways of
dealing with multiculturalism: toleration and non-discrimination. The affirma-
tion of multiculturalism implies not merely tolerating, or even avoiding formal
or explicit discrimination,1 but also giving institutional support to different
ways of living. This does not mean toleration and non-discrimination are not
important.2 On the contrary, they happen to be essential for any multi-
cultural society, but they alone may not be enough for the promotion of
positive liberty. It is the cultural context which...
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