Group agency, interference and domination: Renewed normative grounds for collective rights

The main attempts to justify collective rights for cultural or national minorities that are available in the literature, among them those of liberal multiculturalists such as Kymlicka and Patten, have failed to coherently do so. In this dissertation, I offer a new justification for such collective rights, a justification that is built on normative grounds wholly different from those of liberal multiculturalism.In Chapter 1, I explain the arguments that lay at the foundations Kymlicka’s and Patten’s multiculturalist theories and argue that they fail in important and, at least in the multiculturalist framework, insurmountable ways. Most problematically, neither Kymlicka’s nor Patten’s approach can adequately address the claims made by some of the cultural or national groups that are, purportedly, the subjects of their theories. Moreover, I argue that both authors problematically ground their respective approach in the notion of culture and of its value.In Chapter 2, I put in place the first pieces of an argument for collective rights for cultural or national minorities that avoid those drawbacks. I argue that some groups qualify as agents because they satisfy the criteria of agency set by the “standard conception of agency.” To explain how it is so, I offer a functionalist account of group agency according to which certain groups can realize states of affairs that function as (or play the role of) intentions in the explanation of the group’s actions.I turn in Chapter 3 to normative questions and make two central claims. The first, a conceptual claim, is that certain groups, because they are agents, can be subject to interference and domination. The second, a normative claim, is that the interference or domination that happens at the collective level is a significant moral problem because it will have adverse consequences on a group’s members’ agency. I conclude by arguing that we therefore have good reason to protect group agents from interference and domination.Finally, in Chapter 4, I come back to political philosophy and bring the argument home, as it were. Through the example of Indigenous peoples in Canada, I show how cultural or national groups can qualify as agents and how they can be, as group agents, in a situation of domination, in addition to being often interfered with. It is by building on that concrete case that I argue that what group agents like Indigenous peoples—namely, and more generally, cultural or national groups—need to be adequately protected against interference and domination are (genuinely) collective legal rights to self-determination

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