Political Philosophy

by Phil Parvin

  Sandel’s objections so far amount to the idea that, although Rawls’s insistence on the primary importance of the individual’s ability to choose her conception of the good is supposed to ensure neutrality between conceptions of the good, in fact the idea of the unencumbered self which is found in his theory means that many conceptions of the good are ruled out. To put it another way: Rawls’s theory is neutral between all conceptions of the good which are consistent with a conception of the self as unencumbered in the way Sandel describes, but not neutral with regard to conceptions of the good (religious or secular) which invoke a different, less individualist understanding of personhood. Consequently, Sandel believes that Rawlsian liberalism fails on its own terms: it does not provide a principled means of managing the diversity that characterizes modern liberal societies in a way which avoids the state making judgements about the content of people’s conceptions of the good.

  INDIVIDUALISM AS INCONSISTENT WITH THE DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE

  There is a further problem with Rawls’s theory, Sandel argues: the justification of the difference principle. The idea behind the difference principle, Sandel argues, is that the individual does not own her talents, in the sense of full property ownership. In other words, she is not entitled to the products of her talents. Remember, the difference principle is an extremely demanding principle of equality. It allows inequalities only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off. It is not legitimate, according to the difference principle, for an individual to be paid more than others because she is more talented, or because she somehow deserves higher pay because she has produced more than others.

  This is because people’s talents are morally arbitrary. You are not clever, for example, because you have virtuously tried hard to develop cleverness. Although education can have a significant effect, intelligence is something that people are born with and cannot control, beyond certain limits. It is just good luck if you are born clever, and bad luck if you are not. Talents are not deserved, they are morally arbitrary, the result of luck. As a result, Rawls argues, people do not deserve the fruits of their talents. They are not entitled to whatever they can produce through their efforts. Because the difference principle requires that the fruits of people’s talents are shared among society, it must follow that people have no prior entitlement to the products of their talents, simply because they are their talents.

  The problem with this argument, Sandel claims, is not that Rawls fails to show why people do not own their talents but that he gives us no reason to think that society has any greater claim over the products of people’s talents. The difference principle amounts, in effect, to the claim that people’s talents belong to society. Only then is it justifiable to distribute their products among society as a whole. However, the ‘unencumbered self’ thesis implies that individuals have no prior link to their community. Individuals are understood as existing prior to and separate from their communities. The whole basis of the unencumbered self is to distance individuals from communal attachments and obligations. Why then, Sandel asks, are our talents owned by society as a whole, when we as individuals are strictly separated from society? Sandel argues that liberalism makes us ‘more entangled and less attached’. We are more entangled in that we must engage in extensive redistribution, donating the products of our talents to each other. We are less attached in that society is conceived of as a group of mutually disinterested, competing individuals, with no common goal and no prior communal obligations.

  Sandel argues that the difference principle is a principle of sharing. It involves the idea that members of a society should share with each other, some giving the fruits of their labour to others in the name of their shared community membership. As a result, Sandel claims, the difference principle must presuppose some prior moral tie to the community. Why should we share with others in the community if we have no moral obligations to them and to the community? Who should we share with if there is nothing to bind us to other individuals in particular? If we really are to justify the extensive demands that the difference principle puts on us then, Sandel claims, we need to accept both moral obligations to the community and the existence of substantive ties to other members of the community, quite possibly based on a shared conception of the good.

  Sandel’s general point, then, is that Rawls gives insufficient weight to the importance of community. Community plays a role, for Sandel, in constituting our conception of the good, our identity, and our obligations of sharing. A state that is neutral between conceptions of the good, and a conception of the person as an autonomous chooser of her conception of the good, cannot capture the crucial role of community.

  MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment

  Another communitarian, Alasdair MacIntyre, extends the metaphysical critique of liberalism even further than does Sandel (MacIntyre 1981 and 1988). Indeed, he presents an elaborate and wide-ranging critique not just of liberalism, but of the entire set of philosophical and intellectual ideas upon which liberalism is founded. MacIntyre’s critique of Rawls is therefore very radical. MacIntyre’s problem with Rawlsian liberalism is not that it is internally inconsistent, or based on false premises, but that it is rooted in problematic Enlightenment ideas.

  We mentioned the Enlightenment briefly in the Introduction. Broadly speaking, the Age of Enlightenment is a term that describes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, when philosophers, scientists, social scientists and others increasingly championed reason as the basis of all knowledge. Central to the Enlightenment was the idea that one could overturn established traditions and systems of knowledge through rational enquiry; that all authority, whether it be religious, political and so on, is only legitimate if it can withstand rational scrutiny. The Enlightenment challenged the idea that human beings should be divided by nations and cultures, since all people are united by a common rationality. Importantly for philosophy, it suggested that we could search for answers to moral and political problems by engaging in rational debate. We could give reasons for our moral judgements, and could construct rational arguments to support those judgements. When faced with a disagreement about an ethical principle, the Enlightenment method engages in rational argument to work out which ethical principle is supported by better reasons and reasoning. It is this, MacIntyre claims, that contemporary thinkers such as Rawls are trying to do: present rational arguments for ethical principles that can be justified universally and absolutely.

  ‘[W]e all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence, what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations, and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity.’

  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 220.

  In fact, MacIntyre argues, contemporary moral debate, whether between academics or between citizens, can never be solved through rationality alone. MacIntyre concedes that it is possible to consider the extent to which an argument is internally consistent, and to engage in reasoning so as to make moral arguments more consistent. But once that is done ethical disagreements boil down to a disagreement about first principles, about substantive moral premises that cannot themselves be explained or justified.

  Imagine, for example, that there is a country that is deeply divided into two opposing groups. These groups are on the brink of civil war. However, one particular charismatic leader is able to unite them. While she is in power, there is peace in the country. Unfortunately, the leader is also a criminal – she is involved in some sort of crime, perhaps money laundering or some other sort of corruption. In this case, justice requi
res that the leader be prosecuted, jailed and removed from office. On the other hand, peace requires that the crime is hushed up and that the leader remains in office, so that she can unite the otherwise warring factions.

  In this sort of debate, MacIntyre would argue, the problem is not that those in favour of justice have an incoherent argument whereas those in favour of peace have a consistent one, or vice versa. The problem, instead, is that reason alone cannot resolve this dilemma. The debate boils down to substantive first principles that cannot be reconciled. There is no single way of deciding between, for example, the value of peace and the value of justice. They are incommensurable. Which one you choose will be based not on rational argument, but on personal preference. It will not be possible to explain, using rationality alone, whether peace or justice should be preferred.

  MacIntyre therefore argues that the ‘Enlightenment project’, as he calls it, was a failure. It has eviscerated our moral lives, leaving us no way of making sense of the most profound moral questions in the world. Moreover, he argues, it has encouraged us to think that it is possible to construct moral arguments without any appeal to wider notions of the good life. Rawls’s project – to come up with a theory of justice which can be justified independently of any substantive conception of the good – is bound to fail: in the absence of a theory of the good, or an overarching telos which describes the ends to which society and individuals should aim, society just becomes a collection of abstract individuals, each with their own particular conception of the good that they have plucked from the air, that no one can really explain to one another, and which cannot provide a resolution to complex moral dilemmas. As a consequence, substantive moral debate collapses into emotivism: the simple expression of what one thinks or feels at any one time.

  To get over this problem, MacIntyre argues that we should reassert the importance of tradition. In the absence of universal agreement, we need to base first principles on the shared values and traditions of our community. Only community, MacIntyre argues, can provide the basis for resolving moral disagreements. Unless we are rooted in a particular community, we cannot give our moral judgements any rational basis. If we are to engage in meaningful philosophical debate, we need to know what our basic premises are, and we need to agree on those premises. Such agreement, MacIntyre argues, can only come from community and tradition. Tradition, as embodied in the communities of which we are a member, provides the telos, the conception of the good, toward which we should aim, and provides too a common ground over which moral disputes can be resolved by appeal to a shared moral vocabulary.

  MacIntyre and Sandel are therefore united in rejecting Rawls’s rejection of teleological moral theory: they argue that the rules which regulate social and political institutions should be rooted in a substantive conception of the good life. Both Sandel and MacIntyre have controversial (and different) ideas about what this conception of the good life should be. However, rather than go into this here, we focus instead on the wider point that MacIntyre and Sandel are making. Rawls believed that utilitarianism failed because it derived the right from the good: it had the wrong structure. MacIntyre and Sandel argue that Rawls was wrong. There may be particular problems with utilitarianism, but the problem is not that it is the wrong structure. The fact is, they argue, that we need to retain the idea of telos, for unless the rules which are to govern our lives are derived from an overarching conception of the good, they are derived from nothing at all.

  Case study: Walzer and the spheres of justice

  Another communitarian thinker, Michael Walzer, offers a critique of liberal theories of distributive justice (Walzer 1984). Walzer argues that liberal egalitarian arguments for the redistribution of wealth and resources wrongly assume that there can be one universal metric for working out how resources should be distributed. But there is not. There is no single criterion for distribution: goods may be distributed according to need, or desert, or wealth, or talent, or networks based on family, politics or club membership, or any combination of these and other factors. Consequently, Walzer argues, egalitarians’ search for a single criterion of distribution is a mistake. Instead, goods should be understood as having their own spheres, within which they have their own criteria of distribution. In other words, different goods should be distributed for different reasons and in different ways. An appropriate distribution criterion for one good might be inappropriate for another, and that difference should be accepted. So, for example, we might distribute education according to educational merit, and healthcare according to medical need, and Ferraris according to wealth. We have different criteria for different goods. Different goods are distributed for different reasons.

  Furthermore, Walzer argues, the way in which goods should be distributed is determined by the social meaning of these goods. Goods mean different things to different people in different contexts, and there is no objective truth about the meaning of any particular good. The meaning of a good may be understood very differently in different contexts. Bread, for example, could be understood as a form of food, or a sign of hospitality, or the body of Christ, depending on the context in which it is being used. So: how should we distribute bread? Or anything else? How can we determine whether someone has a ‘need’ for bread, or anything else?

  Walzer argues that the criteria for the distribution of goods are provided by the particular social context in which these goods exist. Consequently, there is no universal, overarching set of criteria for working out who gets what other that provided by social context.

  The reason this is so radical, of course, is it rules out the idea that there is any universal, persistent need for any particular good. There are no universal needs – only those needs which arise out of the social context in which people and goods exist. Therefore, there is no way in which a society could violate its members’ rights by denying them a certain good – provided, of course, that the good was typically denied. Walzer’s theory therefore appears to imply a radical relativism: justice and rights are determined by the society in question.

  Conclusion

  In this chapter, we have considered two communitarian thinkers, each of whom criticizes Rawls and liberalism. Sandel argues that Rawls’s idea of the unencumbered self is a metaphysical idea of the nature of personhood, one which is both empirically incorrect and normatively flawed. In its place, Sandel offers an alternative conception of personhood which holds that persons are constituted by their conceptions of the good, which in turn come from their communities.

  MacIntyre argues that rational argument about moral principles is simply impossible unless it takes place in the context of a community with a shared tradition and set of first principles. Both thinkers reject Rawls’s approach of defining the right independently of, and prior to, the good, and seek instead to reclaim a teleological basis for our moral theorizing.

  Both argue that the abstract individualism at the heart of liberalism is philosophically mistaken and leads to an impoverished and unattractive conception of politics and society.

  In the next chapter, we will consider Rawls’s response to these criticisms.

  Key ideas

  The unencumbered self: The idea – attributed to Rawls by Sandel – that the self exists independently of, and prior to, the various ends and values that it chooses for itself.

  Voluntarist and cognitivist agency: Two differing views as to how persons act in the world, described by Sandel. The liberal (voluntarist) approach is premised on the idea of individual autonomy: the agent autonomously (and rationally) chooses a life for itself from the various options available and pursues that life until it decides to choose a different one. The communitarian (cognitivist) approach suggests that ends and values are not chosen voluntarily but, rather, are discovered through the process of learning about the various groups and communities of which we are members.

  Moral incommensurability: The idea that a conflict between two moral claims or imperatives cannot be resolved by an appeal to norms of rational dia
logue. For MacIntyre, the fact of moral incommensurability proved the failure of the Enlightenment project which, in undermining the authority of tradition, left humanity incapable of understanding their moral lives or resolving moral dilemmas.

  Neutrality: The liberal idea that principles of justice, and the state, should not gain their authority from any particular conception of the good life and should, instead, aim to create social and political conditions in which different people can pursue their own conceptions of the good in their own way, within reasonable constraints.

  Dig deeper

  Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

  Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (London: Fontana Press, 1995).

  Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1986).

  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1994).

  David Miller and Michael Walzer (eds), Pluralism, Justice, and Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

  Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (London: Basic Books, 1984).