religion to dissenters in their midst, or insist on illiberal (even if not ‘‘unnat-
ural’’) sexual practices (such as female genital mutilation), cannot escape
regulation by the authority of the state, which must protect the rights of
individuals established by appeal to universal principles. That this standard
might also threaten the viability of the cultural groups otherwise oVered
‘‘external protections’’ is not, for Kymlicka, enough to warrant tolerating any
more substantial departure from the universal principles of liberalism. Like the
Spanish scholastics of the sixteenth century, Kymlicka is moved by an appre-
ciation of the plight of many minority peoples to argue for extending to them
the protection of universal moral law. Nonetheless, like Las Casas and Vitoria
before him, Kymlicka cannot extend to them the right to take themselves
beyond the authority of that law. In the end, a liberal society cannot encompass
highly illiberal elements: universal principle cannot tolerate deep diVerence.
3 The Cosmopolitan Solution
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If the diVerentiated rights solution cannot tolerate deep diVerence, it is
worth noting that it is nonetheless an attempt to go further than earlier
liberal theory to accommodate diVerence on a principled basis. Toleration
might have to be circumscribed by the universal standards of liberal justice.
All the same, at least in Kymlicka’s theory, it has a place of its own. But for a
number of critics of diVerentiated rights, toleration cannot have a principled
place in a theory of the good society in the way that Kymlicka might wish. If
moral standards are truly universal, the case for group diVerentiation di-
minishes, along with the basis for cultural toleration. This point has been
pressed by a variety of critics of group-diVerentiated rights, including some
feminists and liberal egalitarians. It would be unfair to liken these critics too
much to Sepulveda, for whom native Americans were so far inferior to
Europeans as to beWt only for slavery. Liberal egalitarians and feminists (of
all stripes) are strongly committed to principles of human equality. Never-
theless they have at least this much in common with Sepulveda: they view
the distance between universal morality and the particular moralities of
(illiberal) groups as too great to warrant either protection of the groups or
toleration of their ways.
moral universalism and cultural difference 585