The “How Many?” Question: An Institutionalist’s Guide to Pluralism

INTRODUCTION A policy decision to involve the state in either the accommodation or the provision of institutional pluralism entails a crucial design question that is often undertreated in the political morality literature on pluralism. The fact that a pluralist agenda has won the policy debate – that political agency has been mobilized in support of public institutions that would tolerate or express multiple alternatives and respect individual and community choice – does not in itself tell us a lot about the quantity and character of the alternatives that ought to be included in the pluralist regime. Most of the normative inquiry in this area has focused on the external boundaries of the field of options to be devised – that is, whom it might be justified to exclude from the sphere of public respect and accommodation. The typical discussion in this context concerns the variety of illiberal practices exercised by communities that present an otherwise morally sustainable demand for pluralist recognition, and positions vary familiarly. But assume that the external boundaries of the field have been relatively settled: that we have a reasonably articulated theory of what qualifies as a non-legitimate cultural practice, such that we know what is not going to be part of the recognized field of alternatives in our pluralist regime. We are still left with the issue of how to design the field itself, and here the discussion is lacking. Specifically, two interrelated questions arise: (1) What is the pluralistically optimal amount of alternatives a state is required to (strive to) sustain in order to fulfill its political ideal (the N question); and (2) what is the optimal degree of variance the state should (seek to) maintain among the given alternatives (the Δ question)? How large or distinct should a cultural group be in order to warrant political recognition and differentiation? What kinds of courts should a judicial system include, and what variety of schooling should an education system uphold? Should legally recognized familial structures, contractual associations, or property relationships be limited in kind or open-ended?Obviously there is no available method to answer these questions in the abstract, as different pluralistic contexts lead to different institutional demands, and even in particular cases we are not likely to reach something like an exact figure –a “42” à la Douglas Adams.