What Do We Owe to Culture?

Imagine you move to a new country. Everything is different—the language, the food, the way people greet each other, what they think is polite or rude. You want to fit in, but you also want to keep celebrating your own holidays, eating the foods you grew up with, and passing your traditions on to your kids. How much should a country ask you to change? And how much should it change for you?

Now imagine you belong to a small community—say, an Indigenous group that has lived in a place for thousands of years. Your language, your stories, your way of life are all wrapped up together. But the bigger society around you has pushed your people off your land, banned your ceremonies, forced your children into schools where they were punished for speaking your language. What do you deserve now? An apology? Money? Control over your own schools and laws?

These are not just questions about feelings. They are questions about justice. Philosophers who study culture want to figure out what is fair: what do people owe each other when their ways of life are different, when some are powerful and some are not, when cultures change or get destroyed?

This article explores that messy, ongoing debate.

What Even Is a “Culture”?

You might think you know what a culture is. Italian culture, Jewish culture, hipster culture, school culture. But when philosophers try to pin down the idea for legal and political purposes, things get slippery.

One way to think about culture is as an encompassing group—something that shapes almost everything about your life: what you eat, what you wear, what work you do, who you marry, what you believe about the world. Will Kymlicka, a Canadian philosopher, calls this a “societal culture.” He says it provides a “context for choice”: the background that helps you make sense of your options. Without a healthy culture, your choices become hollow or confusing, because you don’t have the framework to understand what they mean.

Think about bread. In one culture, it’s just food. In another, it’s the body of Christ. In another, it’s the center of a sacred weekly meal. The same object means totally different things, depending on the culture you’re in. That’s what a societal culture does—it gives meaning to ordinary things.

But critics say this view is too simple. It makes cultures look like tidy boxes with clear borders. Real cultures are messier. People disagree about what their culture is. Some members are deeply committed, others pick and choose. Cultures change over time—sometimes deliberately, sometimes because of outside pressures. Calling a culture “encompassing” can make it seem like everyone in it thinks the same way, which is both false and dangerous. It can be used to silence people who disagree, especially women, young people, and minorities within the minority.

So other philosophers have offered different accounts.

One alternative is culture as social formation. The idea here is that what binds a culture together is not a fixed list of beliefs or practices, but the experience of growing up under the same institutions—the same schools, the same media, the same political system, the same shared history. People who go through that together end up with enough in common to recognize each other as part of the same culture, even if they disagree about lots of things. This view is more flexible: it doesn’t require everyone to agree on what the culture’s “essence” is. It just says: you were shaped by these forces, and that matters.

Another alternative is culture as dialogue. On this view, a culture is not something you inherit fully formed. It is something its members make together, through constant conversation, argument, and negotiation. James Tully, a political philosopher, puts it this way: cultures are “continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated.” No one gets to declare what the culture really is. It’s always up for debate. This view is good at handling change and disagreement. But it raises a puzzle: if culture is just whatever people are arguing about, how do you know who belongs? How do you decide which group gets special rights or protections?

A fourth view—culture as identity—sidesteps that problem. It says: focus less on the practices and more on how people identify. Someone might feel deeply connected to a culture even if they don’t follow all its traditional rules. This view can also include identities that aren’t exactly cultural—like LGBTQ+ identity—which makes it useful in political debates where people make claims based on who they are. But it risks making culture so broad that it loses its specific meaning.

These four views aren’t just academic word games. Which one you pick changes how you answer the real-world questions that come next.

What Do Minorities Deserve?

Minority groups often ask for special treatment from the state—not because they want extra privileges, but because they face unfair disadvantages. Here are the main kinds of claims they make.

Exemptions. Sometimes a law that applies to everyone accidentally hurts a minority group. Sikhs may need an exemption from laws requiring hard hats on construction sites, because their religion requires them to wear a turban. Indigenous communities may need exemptions from hunting and fishing limits, because those limits make it impossible for them to practice their traditional way of life. The idea is fairness: the law wasn’t designed to target them, but it has that effect. Exemptions fix the problem.

Assistance. Other times, minority groups need the state to actively help them survive. If the only TV shows, newspapers, and school classes are in the majority language, minority languages will fade away. So groups may ask for public funding for minority-language schools, or for support for artists producing work in their language. The justification is still fairness: the majority already has these things; minorities need help to get them too.

Self-determination. This is the biggest ask. Some groups—especially Indigenous peoples and national minorities like the Scottish or Catalans—want control over their own territory and major institutions. They want to run their own schools, make their own laws, manage their own land. This isn’t just about protecting a few cultural practices; it’s about being able to shape the whole society that shapes their children. It’s about not having outsiders decide what happens to them.

Recognition. Sometimes what a group really wants is to be seen and respected. The Québécois in Canada have fought to be recognized as a “nation within a united Canada.” Indigenous communities want land acknowledgements and constitutional recognition. This may seem symbolic, but symbols matter. Being officially recognized as a distinct people says: you are not just a footnote. You are a founding part of this country.

Preservation. Some groups want to preserve their way of life over time. This can get controversial. The Amish, for example, have asked to pull their kids out of school at 14, arguing that mandatory schooling until 16 threatens their community’s survival. Other groups ask for control over family law—marriage, divorce, child custody—so they can handle these matters according to their own traditions. Critics worry that these requests often end up hurting the most vulnerable members, especially women and LGBTQ+ people. If a community is allowed to settle divorces in ways that give women less than they’d get in mainstream courts, is that protection of culture—or just protection of male power?

Rights against cultural loss. Cultures change all the time, and that’s not always bad. But when a culture is destroyed by force—through colonization, genocide, or laws designed to erase it—that’s a different matter. Indigenous communities whose children were taken and put in residential schools didn’t lose their culture accidentally. They had it stolen. In those cases, the demand isn’t just preservation. It’s reparations for a wrong.

Cultural defense. In court, some defendants have argued that their cultural background explains why they committed a crime. A man who killed his wife might say his culture taught him that honor demanded it. This defense has mostly been rejected by courts, and for good reason: it treats culture as an excuse for harm, and it gives the most powerful members of a community the right to define what the culture is. Respect for culture cannot mean deferring to whatever the local authorities say.

Rights against appropriation. Should a white person be able to wear dreadlocks? Should a fashion brand use Indigenous patterns in a clothing line? Some argue that cultures have exclusive rights to their own symbols and practices. Others say that mingling and sharing is just what humans have always done. The question is complicated when the borrowing happens between unequal groups—when a powerful majority profits off the culture of a disadvantaged minority without permission or respect.

What About the Majority?

Minorities aren’t the only ones who make cultural claims. Majorities do too.

One big claim is the right to control borders for cultural reasons. Some philosophers argue that a country has a right to maintain its own culture, and that this can justify limiting immigration. The argument goes: a shared public culture creates trust, and trust makes it possible for people to cooperate—to pay taxes, support public schools, agree on laws. If too many newcomers arrive too quickly, that cultural fabric might fray.

But this argument is dangerous. It has often been used to disguise racism. The Asian Exclusion Acts in early 1900s North America were justified as “cultural preservation.” So were the “Muslim bans” of the 2010s. Many critics say that you cannot appeal to “culture” to exclude people in desperate need. Even if culture matters, it doesn’t matter that much.

A related claim is the right to demand integration. Once newcomers are admitted, can the state require them to adopt the majority’s language, values, and practices? Most philosophers think some integration is reasonable—but not total assimilation. Newcomers should not have to abandon their own histories and identities. The key question is: are the forums where culture gets shaped genuinely open to everyone? If minority voices can actually influence the majority’s culture, then asking them to adopt some of its features might be fair. If not, it’s just domination dressed up as welcome.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Notice something: the same concept—culture—is being used on all sides. Minorities use it to demand protection. Majorities use it to demand conformity. Both sides can make the argument sound like a matter of justice.

This is why philosophers argue about what culture even is. If you think culture is an encompassing, unchanging whole, you might be more likely to say it deserves strong protection—but you also risk trapping people inside it. If you think culture is just whatever people happen to be arguing about right now, you might be better at handling change and disagreement—but you might struggle to say why any particular group deserves special rights at all.

There is no tidy answer here. That’s partly because the questions are genuinely hard, and partly because they are political: people disagree not just about what’s fair, but about who gets to decide.

What philosophy can do is make the disagreements clearer. It can show you what is at stake when someone says “we have to protect our culture.” It can help you see that the same words can mean very different things. And it can remind you that behind every abstract argument about cultural rights, there are real people—kids who have to choose between their grandmother’s language and the language of their country, families trying to keep their traditions alive while also fitting in, and communities that have had their whole way of life taken from them and are still trying to get it back.

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Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Societal culture	A way of life that shapes most dimensions of people’s lives, giving them a “context for choice”
Culture as social formation	The idea that what holds a culture together is shared experience of the same institutions, not agreement on specific beliefs
Culture as dialogue	The idea that cultures are constantly being made and remade through argument and negotiation among members
Culture as identity	The idea that what matters is how people identify with a group, not whether they follow particular practices
Exemption rights	Requests to be excused from laws that accidentally burden minority groups
Self-determination rights	The claim of a group to control its own territory and major institutions
Cultural preservation	The right of a group to take steps to ensure its way of life continues over time
Essentialist objection	The criticism that some views of culture wrongly assume all members share the same fixed set of values and practices

Key People

• Will Kymlicka – A Canadian political philosopher whose idea of “societal culture” is one of the most influential ways of thinking about what culture is and why it deserves protection.
• James Tully – A political philosopher who argued that cultures are constantly “contested, imagined and reimagined” by their members.
• Sarah Song – A contemporary philosopher who has questioned whether “culture” is really a separate thing from race, religion, and ethnicity, or whether appeals to culture often hide other kinds of claims.

Things to Think About

1. If someone is born into a culture but rejects most of its practices, are they still a member? Does the answer change if the culture is a minority group asking for special rights?

2. A minority community asks for the right to settle family disputes—divorce, custody—according to its own traditions. These traditions give women less power than they’d have in mainstream courts. Should the state grant this right? What if the women in the community say they support the tradition?

3. Your country is deciding whether to fund a school that teaches in a minority language. But only a handful of elderly people still speak that language. Is preserving it worth the money? Why or why not?

4. The majority culture in your country says it needs to limit immigration to “preserve its way of life.” How would you tell the difference between a genuine cultural concern and simple prejudice? Is there a clean way to draw that line?

Where This Shows Up

• School debates about whether holidays from different cultures should be recognized, or whether students should be allowed to wear religious symbols.
• News stories about immigration rules (“integration tests”), indigenous land rights, or cultural appropriation scandals.
• Court cases where religious minorities ask for exemptions from vaccination laws, military service, or school curriculum.
• Everyday life in any country where multiple cultures exist side by side—which is basically everywhere now.