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To burqa or not to burqa?
- The question of whether liberals can ban burqas therefore requires both an ethical evaluation and an empirical (social scientific) one. The first - ethical evaluation - concerns how we weight the harms burqas may impose on vulnerable women, and especially girls completely subject to their family's wishes, against the benefits autonomous women may gain from being allowed to wear them. How, for example, should we value an outcome where one hundred women are liberated from the burqa while one thousand women are prevented from following what they see as their freely affirmed religious duty?