Democracy and Respect for Difference: The Case of Fiji

In what follows, I will first offer a capsule history of Fiji. I then will identify some of the moral questions that emerge, both for the inhabitants of Fiji and for us as observers. I will present some tentative answers to these moral questions, reflecting as I go on what this tells us about the possibilities and limits of normative theory, but also trying to note where my normative judgments rest upon features of the story that I think others would want to contest and trying to indicate how alternative readings of the history would affect the normative judgments, if at all. In general, I feel more confident about the importance of the questions I am asking than about the accuracy of my answers, more certain about the inadequacy of theories that do not take these issues into account than about the adequacy of my own theory. I will try to keep that sense in view as I proceed.