Topics Justice

Question Back in 2010, somebody asked a question about group rights, and mentioned the right to transmit one's language. Thomas Pogge replied by saying: "You have a right to speak to your children in the language of your choice; but do you also have a right that they be taught this language in school? Not, presumably, if you're the only speaker of this language far and wide. But if thirty percent of the adults in your town speak Spanish as their native language, then that could be a very compelling reason for requiring that Spanish be taught in the local schools." My question is: Isn't this what democracy is for? If a sufficiently large proportion of a community has an interest in one thing or another, deliberative democracy ought to provide them with a way to satisfy that interest (opening their own schools; mandatory Spanish classes in all schools; extra funding for schools with Spanish classes; etc.). Is that all group rights are, then? People negotiating situations favorable to their interests within a democratic framework? If group rights are the result of successful negotiations in democratic frameworks, then that must mean individuals rights are similar, i.e. the right to life (unless you are killed by somebody defending their own life from you) is a right because it has been (or would be, if anyone bothered to make an issue about it) successfully negotiated in a democratic framework?

Accepted:
February 16, 2012

Comments

It would be nice if democracy delivered this outcome. But in some cases the thirty percent may not have enough bargaining power to achieve it. In this case, Spanish-language classes may not actually happen. If so, I would think, the minority's group right would be violated by the majority.

Like in many other cases, the right outcome here is not whatever results from a democratic process. Rather, the right outcome is the one that accommodates any large minority's expressed desire in the preservation of their language; and that's what members of the majority ought to support and vote for, even if there's nothing valuable they can extract from the minority in exchange. This is not meant to reject democracy -- which may well be the best feasible procedure for reaching the right outcome. It's meant to reject a certain conception of democracy according to which any decision is right merely because it has resulted from a certain democratic process. What has been successfully negotiated in a democratic process may assume the status of a legal right but may nonetheless be morally wrong. And many non-democratic regimes are violating human rights even though there is no democratic process in which these rights so much as could have been successfully negotiated.