How Groups Matter

Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies

Gideon Calder, Magali Bessone, Federico Zuolo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780367601003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135085063
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When groups feature in political philosophy, it is usually in one of three contexts: the redressing of past or current injustices suffered by ethnic or cultural minorities; the nature and scope of group rights; and questions around how institutions are supposed to treat a certain specific identity/cultural/ethnic group. What is missing from these debates is a comprehensive analysis of groups as both agents and objects of social policies. While this has been subject to much scrutiny by sociologists and social psychologists, it has received less attention from a normative and philosophical point of view. This volume asks: what problems are posed to political philosophy by a collection of individuals who act or are treated in a collective way? Focusing not only on ways in which institutions should treat groups, but also on the normative implications of considering groups as possible social agents, when acting either in vertical relations with the state or in horizontal relations with other groups (or individuals), this book explores these issues from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Contributors address both the nature of political and social philosophy itself, and the ways in which specific issues – affirmative action, race, religion and places of worship, the rights of states – have become political and social priorities.

Part I

Situating Groups, Evaluating Group Rights

1 Representing Groups

Gideon Calder

INTRODUCTION

As a matter of course, public policy discourse groups people. Older people; high earners; men; Muslims; the unemployed; smokers; the Afro-Caribbean community; same-sex couples; young people not in education, employment or training. Such headings are crucial vehicles, both in the rhetoric of policy and the details of its implementation. Rather than addressing us individually in some kind of bespoke way, policy targets us via such groupings. It is on these terms both that our entitlements are framed, and that we access them. Some rights are universal and undifferentiated, certainly, but in the great bulk of our lives as shaped by public policy, we feature in the landscape as members of broad categories—subsets of the general population. How these groupings are delineated, and the criteria for inclusion within each, will vary and is typically contestable. That they are invoked, though, seems both inevitable, and a matter of political routine. But do these headings represent real groups—substantive, ef cacious entities? In a mundane, non-technical sense, they do. As my dictionary has it, a group is people ‘located, gathered or classed together’ (Soanes and Stevenson 2010, 630). On these terms, to be a member of a group is to be a member of a social category. Categorizations make groups.¹

Conceptually, as this book shows, we get a different picture. The nature and status of groups are deeply contestable in political philosophy and social theory. On the one hand they are ontologically ambiguous, blurry, unstable, perhaps untenable: so whether or how groups really exist (in general, or in this or that case) is in question. The models and vocabularies of policy, we might say, are one thing, and the lived realities of social life are another. Just because policy categorises, this by no means entails that it does so accurately, or cleanly, or in ways which capture the complexities of ‘ground level’ social dynamics. Misplaced or simplistic categorisations cause trouble, philosophically but also practically—where they may, for example, necessitate remedial action through policy further down the road. And even if groups do exist, in some or other substantive sense, it is not clear what we should do with them, normatively. Should groups have rights? To what extent do they have distinct interests? Should some groups be exempted from laws t hat apply to others, because of these interests, or distinct practices, traditions or beliefs, or on the basis of other kinds of claim? Are groups simply aggregations of the individuals comprising them and their beliefs and desires, or are they something over and above these—and as such, should (some) groups be ascribed moral status in their own right?

The texture of these questions is shaped by the fact that social groups—at least, as we use the term loosely—come in various forms. Membership of them might be chosen, or involuntary. Their ‘groupness’ may arise from interaction among members, or directly shared practices—or it might not. Groups may have clearly defined, agreed-upon interests, commitments and goals—or they might not. They may be a more or less inert social cate-gory—simply individuals or smaller clusters unified by a particular link, ‘classed together’ from an external standpoint—or they may be organised networks. Their members may coexist (in part, or altogether) in a specific location, or be scattered. They may or may not have shared purposes. To talk about groups without specifying which combination of such features they embody, will risk troublesome descriptive looseness. Given the diverse range of candidates for ‘groupness’, it is vitally important to know what kind of group one is talking about. Meanwhile, groups (however embodied, and of whatever kind) will wield debatable kinds of social ef cacy. For some, groups can (sometimes) be agents (see, e.g. List and Pettit 2011). For others, any such talk is a kind of functionalist fallacy, imputing a misplaced separate power to groups over and above the individuals who constitute them (to whose own beliefs and desires any putative ‘group’ agency, and ostensibly ‘groupy’ practices, can be reduced). Thus the explanatory power of concepts of social groups—and how this relates to wider questions of structure and agency—is very much in question.

The observations made so far are, as far as they go, fairly unsensational: when considering the social and political significance of groups, they go with the territory. Still, they are important. What follows is a discussion of how groups are represented in political philosophy, but also of how groups might be represented in political processes. At stake is the relationship of the taxonomy and ontology of social groups, to the group-related normative questions with which political and moral philosophers have, in recent decades, increasingly come to deal. What is striking about those dealings is that they have centred overwhelmingly on cultural groups—to which, to be sure, all of the above questions apply. Anne Phillips wrote in 1995 that when questions of group dif erence intrude on normative political theory, ‘the central preoccupation has been how to be genuinely even-handed between what may be incompatible cultures or traditions or world-views’ (Phillips 1995, 16). It still is. To the extent that such groups are not representative of others, the normative debates which have ensued may be less applicable to other kinds of group of which those working in sociology and social policy will speak routinely, but about which normative theorising about groups has tended to have rather less to say: for example, those based on gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality or disability. This matters, as I hope to show.

The representation of groups, then, is problematic in both descriptive and normative senses. It is dif cult to capture what they are, and it is dif -cult to know how to address their implications in terms of social justice—to redress imbalances of power between groups, to ensure their interests are considered and their voices heard. My assumption in what follows is that these two senses are vitally conjoined, so that each must be considered with the other. If groups matter at all for social justice—if they are not simply an irrelevance, to be kept of its radar—then it is important to consider the nuances of what is shared by groups qua groups, and what makes them different. In sections 1, 2, 3 and 4 I address some of these nuances and argue in favour of a conception of groups which allows more space for those which are not (simply) cultural.

Section 1 sets out a series of statements of significance in how we account for what groups are, what they do, and how individuals relate to them. I argue that these statements fall into two broad categories, on which basis we can distinguish between groups which are belief-dependent, and groups which are not (with ‘beliefs’ here serving as a shorthand for ‘beliefs and desires’). In Section 2 I further unpack what the distinction amounts to, arguing that these two kinds of group are constituted differently, have a different relation to individuals, and depend to diff erent extents on the attitudes of individual members for their constitution. In Section 3 I put forward a related distinction between groups which are (predominantly) cultural and groups which are not—arguing against those, such as Iris Young, who have found different ways of insisting that all groups are culturally constituted, to the same degree. Section 4 of ers further exploration of why it matters that there are groups constituted by neither belief nor culture.

1 INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

Consider these statements.

1. ‘I believe this because I am a member of group x.’

2. ‘I hold these values because I am a member of group x.’

3. ‘I behave this way because I am a member of group x.’

4. ‘I am entitled to a because I am a member of group x.’

5. ‘I am vulnerable to b because I am a member of group x.’

I take it that each statement is plausible, in that each expresses a point which we might expect an individual to make in a contemporary Western society. Yet—whether at the level of ‘lay’ discourse or from a self-consciously theoretical point of view—the sense of each statement changes substantially depending on what is designated by ‘group x’.

Suppose group x is a recognized organized religion. Statements 1, 2, and 3 attribute beliefs and actions to the following of that religion, and are factual claims. And insofar as religions are bodies of belief which promote certain values and require or invite adherents to act in certain ways, the claims are unremarkable. In this case, all that is required for the warranted assertion of statements 1, 2, and 3 is that the individual has a certain relationship to the religion in question—specifically, that they subscribe sincerely to its teachings, and have a reasonable interpretation of their contents and significance. Statements 4, and 5 work in a different direction— they are moral claims.² As such, they are mediated by, or need reference to, intervening or background factors, beyond the sincerity and reasonableness of the individual’s beliefs. Whether I am entitled to something (resources, a service) on the basis of my religious beliefs can only be determined via a consideration of the wider scheme of social justice. Religions are not jurisdictions, and the social or legal entitlements religious beliefs carry with them cannot be thrashed out on their own terms. And whether I am vulnerable to something—discrimination, marginalization, violence—on the basis of my religious beliefs is a sociologically contingent matter.

Now suppose group x is disabled people. Disability is not a body of belief, and there is no requirement that members of this group either share values, or act in particular ways because they are members of it. So statements 1, 2, and 3 seem misplaced: a mis-ordering of causes and ef ects. Addressing statements 4 and 5, on the other hand, we might re-run the comments just made about religion. Whether disabled people are entitled to a given service or resource does not stem in some unmediated way from the many conditions which count as disabilities, themselves. It is a matter of the relation between those conditions and the wider parameters and priorities of social justice. And while disabled people are certainly vulnerable to discrimination, marginalization, and violence, this itself is not an intrinsic feature of disabilities themselves, considered apart from the social settings in which people with disabilities live their lives.³

If both subscribers to a religion and disabled people are candidates for groupness, then we notice a discrepancy in their comparison. While questions about entitlement and vulnerability (statements 4 and 5) ‘cash out’ similarly in either case, questions about belief and values (statements 1, 2, and 3) do not. Given the discrepancy, we might conclude that while disability and religious belief are categories, they are too different for both to count as groups—that there are definitive features of groupness possessed by one but not the other. Clearly, this conclusion would follow were we to have ‘wired in’ to the very concept of a group the requirement for a shared, coherent body of beliefs—something typical of religions but not of the disabled (or, for that matter, women, or Afro-Caribbeans). Or we might conclude that they are both groups, but in different ways. To do this, we would need to make the case that groupness can be arrived at from different directions—some belief-dependent, others not.

Now let us switch the phrasing of each statement:⁴

6. ‘I am a member of group x because I believe this.’

7. ‘I am a member of group x because I hold these values.’

8. ‘I am a member of group x because I behave this way.’

9. ‘I am a member of group x because I am entitled to a.’

10. ‘I am a member of group x because I am vulnerable to b.’

Consider again the case where group x is an organized religion. Statements 6, 7, and 8 strike similar notes to 1, 2, and 3—except in a more voluntarist register. So here, membership of the group derives from the individual’s belief and values, with the implication that these pre-date membership— and that membership has been a more or less autonomous choice. One might see 6, 7, and 8 as liberal restatements of the communitarian inflec-tions of 1, 2, and 3. Religious groupness here is something entered into by individuals on the basis of what Rawls (1993) would call their comprehensive doctrines.⁵ To the extent that the liberal model is plausible, in these respects group membership is belief-dependent—in a way which mirrors the communitarian alternative, only with the sequence of confirmation of (a) beliefs and values, and (b) group membership reversed. Statements 9 and 10, however, jar. To say that I am a subscriber to a religion because of what it entitles to me to, or because of ways in which it makes me vulnerable, seems to signal either a mistake on my part, or that my religious beliefs are either insincere (because held only to gain access to an entitlement) or indicative of psychological unease (because prompted, say, by the desire to be a member of a persecuted minority). 9 and 10 seem implausible grounds for group membership.

Compare again the case where group x is disabled people. Here again, statements 6, 7 and 8 seem misplaced. Certainly, solidarity among people with disabilities will be a goal of the disability rights movement. And such solidarity may well be furnished by the fostering of shared beliefs and values (for example, about the nature of disabled people’s oppression, and of the everyday disadvantages caused by neglect or ignorance with regard to disabled people’s situation and needs). But to say that one has entered the category of disabled people because of one’s beliefs and values seems (however well-meaning) to miss the point of what a disability is.⁶ To make the point bluntly, it is having a disability (whatever the criteria for discerning this) rather than beliefs about disability which makes one eligible for membership in the group of disabled people. But statements 9 and 10 again strike a different note. Unlike in the case of religion, it seems plausible to say that my membership of the group ‘disabled people’ is confirmed by the fact that I am designated as entitled to (for example) certain kinds of state support for which only the disabled are eligible. And likewise, my being vulnerable to certain kinds of threat—say, specific forms of discrimination—is indeed a form of confirmation (albeit neither necessary nor suf cient) of my being part of the group ‘disabled people’.

So again, there are clear divergences in the ways in which statements 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 cash out in the case of our two different kinds of group. Statements which work smoothly in terms of religion (6, 7, and 8) seem out of place in the context of disability—and vice versa, with statements 9 and 10. Again, one might argue that it follows from this that there are quite different ways in which groups become constituted, and count as groups, and in which individuals become aligned with them. Or one might argue simply that to call one or other of these a ‘group’ is misnomer—that in terms of how groups matter normatively, one of these is a group and the other is not. In what follows I will argue in favor of the first of these conclusions.

2 BELIEF-DEPENDENT AND NON-BELIEF-DEPENDENT GROUPS

We mentioned earlier that the statements linking group membership with beliefs and desires may be couched in either ‘communitarian’ or ‘liberal’ terms. These labels stand for a shorthand co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Situating Groups, Evaluating Group Rights
• Part II Groups in Practice Constructed Identities, Specifi c Treatments and Legal Recognition
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index