Culture, neutrality and minority rights

Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition offers a new and powerful argument to support the ‘strong cultural rights thesis’. Unlike other culturalist arguments, his argument is not based on a problematic and essentialist conception of culture but on a particular understanding of liberal neutrality as fair treatment and equal recognition. What justifies the existence of such rights is not culture itself but what culture means for people and the negative consequences it can have for them when they form a cultural minority. Patten’s argument, however, faces another challenge: I argue that culture and neutrality cannot be fully reconciled, and that, ultimately, the concept of culture might not be playing any significant role in his argument for minority rights