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Rawls’s Communitarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Roberto Alejandro
Roberto Alejandro*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA
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Extract

Most discussions of Rawls’s philosophy tend to neglect the strong communitarian strand of his theory: so much so that in the debate between liberals and communitarians Rawls’s account of community has been for the most part intriguingly absent. This article is an attempt to fill in the gap by offering a discussion of the Rawlsian understanding of community as it was presented in A Theory of Justice and its possible implications for a pluralist society. At the same time, I want to take issue with one of the most influential critiques leveled against Rawls’s conception of the self: namely, Sandel’s critique of the ‘individuated subject’ that, in his view, underlies justice as fairness. Rawls’s constructions, so Sandel argues, rest on an unencumbered self that is individuated in advance and whose identity is fixed once and for all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 75 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 Gerald Doppelt argues that ‘Rawls’s framework can be understood as a “communitarian liberalism”;’ (281), but his focus is different from mine. See his ‘Beyond Uberalism and Communitarianism: Towards a Critical Theory of Social Justice,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 (1988) 271-92. Susan Moller Okin discusses the role of feeling in Rawls’s account of justice, but she does not address Rawls’s vision of community. See her ‘Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,’ Ethics 99 (1989) 229-49. James W. Nickel concentrates on Rawls’s view of political community. See his ‘Rawls on Political Community and Principles of Justice,’ Law and Philosophy 9 (1990) 205-16.

2 Though Rawls’s articles after A Theory of Justice include important developments and, in some cases, modifications of his previous arguments, I do not think that his account of community has been substantially altered.

3 Galston, William ‘Pluralism and Social Unity,’ Ethics 99 (1989) 711-26CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Kymlicka, Will ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1988) 181-204CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Gutmann, Amy ‘Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985) 308-22Google Scholar

6 ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,’ in Rosenblum, Nancy L. ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989) 159-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 3-6.Google Scholar Subsequent references will be integrated into the text.

8 Rawls, J. ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures, 1980,’ The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980) 512-72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 529; hereafter quoted as ‘Dewey Lectures.’

9 The Rawlsian community is a space of harmony and transparency which assumes that men have a natural inclination toward unity. Justice appears as a natural capacity, a built-in mechanism for human sociability, and, Rawls insists, a ‘stable conception of justice elicits men’s natural sentiments of unity and fellow feeling .. .’ (502). It is thus possible to apply to Rawls’s philosophy what he says when describing John Stuart Mill’s theory: ‘[o]ne of a person’s natural wants is that there should be harmony between his feelings and those of his fellow citizens’ (502).

10 Along the same lines, he also argues, that the ‘soundness of our convictions’ depends upon a ‘common perspective.’ ‘The acceptance of the principles of right and justice forges the bonds of civic friendship and establishes the basis of comity amidst the disparities that persist. But unless there existed a common perspective, the assumption of which narrowed differences of opinion, reasoning and argument would be pointless and we would have no rational grounds for believing in the soundness of our convictions’ (517-18, my emphasis). This assertion suggests that though the theory is individualistic, the conception of rationality informing it is social. That is, ‘the soundness of our convictions’ depends upon a ‘common perspective,’ which turns out to be a set of beliefs accepted by a community. This is another instance of Rawls’s communitarianism.

11 See, for example, Will Kymlicka, ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism.’

12 This turn of Rawls’s communitarianism shows how mistaken is the attempt to present the liberal communitarian debate as a conflict between society and the individual’s judgment. For this misconstruction, see Will Kymlicka, ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism.’ It could be argued, however, that the self is still prior to its ends in the sense that it can revise them. Rawls himself claims that ‘free persons conceive of themselves as beings who can revise and alter their final ends and who give first priority to preserving their liberty in these matters’ (’Reply to Alexander and Musgrave,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 88 (1974), 641). Kymlicka uses this view to present the principle of reexamination as an important feature of Rawls’s liberalism (Liberalism, Community, and Culture [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991], 15-17). I think that Kymlicka’ s interpretation relies on an extremely selective reading of Rawls’s texts, which fails to explore several important tensions in Rawls’s arguments. There are two grounds that dispute Kymlicka’s view: one is the Rawlsian view of a rational plan; the other is Rawls’s communitarianism. In Rawls’s theory, a rational plan and the person’s conception of the good are bound together. ‘The rational plan for a person determines his good’ (408). More importantly, he goes on, ‘We are to see our life as one whole, the activities of one rational subject spread out in time . The intrinsic importance that we assign to different parts of our life should be the same at every moment of time. These values should depend upon the whole plan itself as far as we can determine it and should not be affected by the contingencies of our present perspective’ (420, my emphasis). This claim is certainly at variance with the principle of reexamination and with Rawls’s own claim that free persons have an interest in revising their final ends. Rawls’s conception of a community of shared interests is the other ground that disputes the principle of reexamination. For Rawls, self-esteem and the conception of the good require a community of shared interests where the individual confirms his own worth. Since this is so, the individual’s membership in that community must also be part of his conception of the good. This individual depends on the standards his associates accept to confirm his own worth, develop his excellences, and complete his own nature. Accordingly, he is not one who is always willing to reexamine his conception of the good. That reexamination may lead him to adopt a conception of the good, which his associates may not accept and thus lose their support. But if he loses the support of his associates, he is not only losing some friends: he would be losing the external source of his self-esteem. A Millian or an Emersonian self would be willing to stand up for its moral independence regardless of what a community of shared interests may do. But it is not clear that a Rawlsian self is equally willing to risk its self-esteem in order to preserve its moral independence. Rawls’s arguments, then, suggest a tension between the self’s moral independence and its self-esteem, and the latter, after all, is the most important good. Kymlicka’s analysis does not explore these tensions in the Rawlsian construction of the self.

13 Dworkin, Ronald ‘In Defense of Equality,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 1 (1983) 24-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Kateb, George ‘Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights,’ in Rosenblum, Nancy L. ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989) 183-206Google Scholar

15 It is worth exploring the similarities between Rawls’s communitarianism and John Dewey’s vision of community. This is a problem that is beyond the scope of this paper.

16 It would be worth exploring whether a Rawlsian community contributes to the same docility that George Kateb ascribes to communitarianism. See his ‘Individualism, Communitarianism, and Docility,’ Social Research 56 (1989) 921-42.

17 It is possible to argue that a person may decide to join other groups, thus showing that she or he is prior to communal standards of self-esteem. There are two arguments to reply to this contention. First, if the self depends on others to affirm its worth, it may be willing to compromise rather than to leave a group that helps it to constitute its identity. Second, even if the self leaves its group, there is one from which it cannot escape, the group which gave it its first experience with the principles of justice, namely, its family. A self that is always open to the possibility of leaving its group is not a Rawlsian self; it is one that is more in line with John Stuart Mill’s account of individuality than Rawls’s. Will Kymlicka, for example, subscribes to this notion that the Rawlsian self is always willing to examine its ends, and, for instance, its membership in a group. See my discussion inn. 12.

18 It is possible to argue that the principles of reciprocity, as Rawls understands them, do not necessarily apply to other virtues like love, excellence, courage. Love, for example, does not depend on the other’s willingness to reciprocate. People tend to love their relatives and friends, even when they do not appreciate that sentiment.

19 Or as Rawls puts it: ‘[the three laws of moral psychology] characterize transformations of our pattern of final ends that arise from our recognizing the manner in which institutions and the actions of others affect our good’ (494).

20 This seeming twist of the Rawlsian discourse may bring up an intriguing problem: how can selves choose principles of justice in the original position, when they do not even have a developed sense of justice, which requires institutions and the influence of ‘the actions of others’ to arise? I will not address this problem here.

21 Rawls himself suggests this reading when he writes: ‘Thus, a conception of the good normally consists of a more or less determinate scheme of final ends, that is, ends we want to realize for their own sake, as well as of attachments to other persons and loyalties to various groups and associations. These attachments and loyalties give rise to affections and devotions, and therefore the flourishing of the persons and associations who are the objects of these sentiments is also part of our conception of the good’ (Rawls, J. ‘Justice as Fairness: Political, not Metaphysical,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 [1985]233-4Google Scholar, my emphasis).

22 See, for example, ibid.

23 It is true that he claims that a ‘conception of justice is but one part of a moral view’ (512). But in Rawls’s philosophy, justice is the most important component of morality. Actually, at other moments he says that justice defines ‘the moral point of view’ (491).

24 Rawls, J. ‘The Sense of Justice,’ Philosophical Review 72 (1963), 299CrossRefGoogle Scholar, my emphasis

25 When Rawls refers to associations as ‘an institutional setting’ that is ‘just’ (491), it is not clear whether he is referring to his two principles of justice, or whether the justice associations embody is different from Rawls’s two principles.

26 Rawls, J. ‘The Priority of Rights and Ideas of the Good,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (1988) 251-76Google Scholar; ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,’ Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987) 1-25

27 In his articles after A Theory of Justice, Rawls has not modified this position. Justice is a highest-order interest that ought to regulate our character and public life. See his ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus.’

28 In his articles after A Theory of Justice, this problem has become more complicated. Now individuals are presented as having both a public and a nonpublic identity. Justice must define the individual’s public identity, while comprehensive doctrines may define his private identity. But those doctrines have to comply with the principles of justice. Again, many citizens may question the priority justice continues having in the definition of their nonpublic identity.

29 This position, it should be said in passing, is in tension with his conception of justice as reciprocity: we expect the other person to respond in kind. But in a Rawlsian society, our expectation is mediated by institutions.

30 This is not necessarily Rawls’s case, but it is a well-known scenario in liberal societies.

31 A possible liberal reply is that such a conception of oppression is not rational, and that such a society is not oppressive. But the Rawlsian view of rationality and oppression is one view among others, and, even in liberal societies, there is hardly a consensus on it.

32 It is worth noticing that an alternative view of society such as the one propounded, respectively, by Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Walzer, and George Kateb, does not rely on the fixed place of justice, and it is not by any means clear that such a society would be an oppressive setting.

33 If my argument is correct, Rawlsian liberals ought to argue, explicitly, (1) that justice is not an object of choice; (2) that diversity is valid only after we accept the fixed place justice must occupy as the central virtue of our character; and (3) that the centrality of justice in our character is compatible with the Rawlsian critique of perfectionism.

34 Sandel, Michael Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982), 64Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be integrated in the text as LLJ.

35 Susan Moller Okin presents a critique of this idea, but her aim is to defend the original position, not to see how Rawls’s comrnunitarianism may challenge Sandel’s interpretation. See ‘Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,’ 245-6.

36 Sandel hints at this distinction in his discussion of desert, but he does not develop it (LLJ, 82-95).

37 According to him, the self cannot choose ‘that which is already given (this would be unintelligible)’ (LLJ, 58). But if the individual reflects upon what is given and reaffirms it, he is clearly making a choice, though, for Sandel, this is ‘unintelligible.’ It is so if we assume the fixity of the oppositions he presents.

38 Sandel is consistent in insisting on these kinds of oppositions. In a recent article he poses the following question: ‘What then is the resemblance between heterosexual intimacies on the one hand, and homosexual intimacies on the other, such that both are entitled to a constitutional right of privacy?’ And he answers: ‘This question might be answered in at least two different ways — one voluntarist, the other substantive. The first argues from the autonomy the practices reflect, whereas the second appeals to the human good the practices realize’ (534). This Sandel opposes ‘the autonomy the practices reflect’ to the human goods they realize. This opposition presupposes that autonomy is not a human good and this presupposition is problematic. Instead of opposing both categories, it is better to see autonomy as a human good that contributes to define other human goods. For example, it is doubtful that the human good expressed, say, in personal relationships, can be realized without assuming the autonomy of the participants. A forced marriage could contribute to procreation and even to a stable family, and some people may consider it a human good. But this good would be realized at the expense of two individuals who found themselves in a marriage without having exercised an autonomous choice. Could human goods be realized without autonomous individuals? (See Sandel, Michael ‘Moral Argument and Liberal Toleration,’ California Law Review 77 [1989]521-38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.)

39 See John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political, not Metaphysical,’ 233; and ‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,’ 270.

40 Kant, I. ‘Idea for a Universal History,’ in Reiss, Hans ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970), 45-6Google Scholar

41 Plato, The Republic, R.W. Sterling and W.C. Scott, trans. (New York: Norton 1985), Book IV, 434d, 435e, 441a, 441c,d