Capabilities, Paternalism, and "Linguistic Neutrality"

The capabilities approach traditionally focuses on our real freedom to achieve things that people have "reason to value". Any account of what it is that people have reason to value may become paternalistic if it depends upon controversial assumptions that reasonable people might reject. Liberal theories of linguistic justice face a similar worry – given that (at least some) language policies inevitably privilege some language(s) over others, and given widespread reasonable disagreement about what makes language valuable and the heterogeneity of individuals’ linguistic preferences, the very possibility of "linguistic neutrality" has been questioned by some liberal multiculturalists. Liberal theorists of linguistic justice who wish to deploy a capabilities-based framework must therefore think very carefully about the possibility and nature of "linguistic neutrality", in order to ensure that the language policies we endorse do not imply a controversial conception of what it is that people have reason to value about language. This is important not only because we want to avoid the charge of paternalism, but for the practical reason that policies which can be reasonably rejected are less likely to generate political consensus among those affected. In this paper, I argue that previous attempts to develop theories of linguistic neutrality have been undermined by a tendency to apply these theories to members of idealised, monolithic "language groups", whose members are assumed to have identical monolingual linguistic preferences that are stable over time. In fact, I show that reasonable disagreement about language tracks numerous philosophical disputes that sometimes unite speakers of different languages, and sometimes divide speakers of the same language. I conclude that "what we have reason to value", is not about whether a particular language is spoken, but why and how it is spoken. This suggests that the ideal of linguistic neutrality is even more complicated than previously thought.