| Within the dominant culture, culture tends to be given more weight to explain the behaviour of members of cultural minorities than members of the dominant culture. Drawing on the work of Sherene Razack, Leti Volpp and Anne Phillips, I examine two possibilities as to why this may occur by: racism and multicultural overreach. I then determine that there needs to be an approach which public authorities can employ to unpack the relationship between culture and autonomy in an individual's decision making process. Drawing on the work of Will Kymlicka, Natalie Stoljar and Susan Meyers, and utilizing resources from liberal multiculturalism and relational autonomy, I develop a method to assess the relationship between culture and autonomy which I term critical distance. I analyze four cases involving the decision making process of culture minorities and use critical distance to assess how culture and autonomy inform an individual's decision making process. |
