Reasoning about “Reasonable Accommodation”: Charles Taylor on Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Quebec

Charles Taylor is a well-known Canadian political philosopher (recently he became the recipient of the internationally renowned Templeton Award) who has been preoccupied with and written extensively on the problem of ( authentic ) identity formation and political recognition in the context of a culturally plural society such as Canada. Taylor illuminates the contradictions that claims to equality and the desire for recognition generate, tracing their origins to the philosophical traditions of Rousseau and Kant. These contradictions have played themselves out, Taylor maintains, in situations such as the debate over the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada. Whether demands for recognition can be met, satisfied, or even addressed through procedural means such as constitutional reform has become a key political question in the Canadian political context. Taylor’s framework for assessing the possibilities for Quebec recognition draws on a distinction between procedural liberalism and substantive liberalism. How does this distinction account for the unique way in which the courts in Canada have united constitutional with political imperatives in dealing with the Quebec situation, exemplified in the 1998 Canadian Supreme Court decision on the question of whether Quebec has the constitutional right to secede unilaterally from the rest of Canada? The Court’s ruling sets out, in a singular way, principles that regulate the rights and obligations of a cultural minority such as Quebec in a democratic setting. More recently, Charles Taylor (along with Gerard Bouchard) has been engaged in a province-wide study commissioned by the Quebec government, on addressing the situation of cultural and religious minorities within Quebec. The recommendations made by the Commission include particular proposals aimed at fostering ‘reasonable accommodation’ under a rubric of ‘interculturalism’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.