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Liberalism and Communitarianism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Will Kymlicka
Will Kymlicka*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ08544, U.S.A
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Extract

It is a commonplace amongst communitarians, socialists and feminists alike that liberalism is to be rejected for its excessive ‘individualism’ or ‘atomism,’ for ignoring the manifest ways in which we are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in various social roles and communal relationships. The effect of these theoretical flaws is that liberalism, in a misguided attempt to protect and promote the dignity and autonomy of the individual, has undermined the associations and communities which alone can nurture human flourishing.

My plan is to examine the resources available to liberalism to meet these objections. My primary concern is with what liberals can say in response, not with what particular liberals actually have said in the past. Still, as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts, if nothing else, I hope to show how my arguments are related to the political morality of modem liberals from J.S. Mill through to Rawls and Dworkin. The term ‘liberal’ has been applied to many different theories in many different fields, but I’m using it in this fairly restricted sense. First, I’m dealing with a political morality, a set of moral arguments about the justification of political action and political institutions. Second, my concern is with this modem liberalism, not seventeenth-century liberalism, and I want to leave entirely open what the relationship is between the two. It might be that the developments initiated by the ‘new liberals’ are really an abandonment of what was definitive of classical liberalism. G.A. Cohen, for example, says that since they rejected the principle of ‘self-ownership’ which was definitive of classical liberalism (e.g. in Locke), these new liberals should instead be called ‘social democrats.’My concern is to defend their political morality, whatever the proper label.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 181 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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Footnotes

*

This paper was first presented at the annual meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association at McMaster University, May 1987.

References

1 Cohen, G.A. ‘Self-Ownership, World-Ownership and Equality: Part 2,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 3 (1986), 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Dworkin, Ronald ‘In Defense of Equality,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 1 (1983), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Dworkin, ‘In Defense,’ 24

4 Unger, Roberto Knowledge and Politics (New York: Macmillan 1984), 66-7Google Scholar; Jaggar, Alison Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totawa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld 1984), 194Google Scholar

5 Jaggar, 42-3

6 Jaggar, 86

7 Mill, J.S. Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, Acton, H. ed. (London: J.M. Dent and Sons 1972), 114-31Google Scholar; Dworkin, ‘In Defense,’ 24-30Google Scholar; Nozick, Robert Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), 410-11, 436-40, 498-504;Google Scholar Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (London: Oxford University Press 1971), 206-10Google Scholar; Raz, Joseph The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 291-305Google Scholar

8 Taylor, Charles Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 157Google Scholar

9 Ibid.

10 Taylor, 159

11 Macintyre, Alasdair After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth 1981)Google Scholar, ch. 9

12 Of course, some liberals seem to believe that the exercise of such freedom of choice is also intrinsically valuable, something to be valued for its own sake. Berlin, lsiah (Four Essays on Liberty [London: Oxford University Press 1969), 192)Google Scholar attributes this position to Mill. And indeed Mill does suggest that we should exercise our capacity for free choice because it is our ‘distinctive endowment’ (Mill, 116). But Mill immediately goes on to say that exercising that capacity is important, not for its own sake, but because without it we gain ‘no practice either in discerning or desiring what is best’ (ibid.). Ladenson, Robert (’Mill’s Conception of Individuality,’ Social Theory and Practice 4 [1977), 171)CrossRefGoogle Scholar cites a number of other passages which suggest that Mill is best understood as having ‘attached the greatest importance not to the mere exercise (or existence) of the capacity for choice, but to certain states of affairs and conditions which he believed are the consequences, under favourable conditions, of its free exercise.’

Claiming that freedom of choice is intrinsically valuable may seem like a direct and effective way of defending a broad range of liberal freedoms. But the implications of that claim conflict with the way we understand the value in our own lives in at least two important ways:

(1) Saying that freedom of choice is intrinsically valuable suggests that the more we exercise our capacity for choice, the more free we are, and hence the more valuable our lives are. But that is false, and indeed perverse. It quickly leads to the quasi-existentialist view that we should wake up each morning and decide anew what sort of person we should be. This is perverse because a valuable life, for most of us, will be a life filled with commitments and relationships. These, as Bernard Williams has argued at length, give our lives depth and character. And what makes them commitments is precisely that they aren’t the sort of thing that we question every day. We don’t suppose that someone who makes twenty marriage choices is in any way leading a more valuable life than someone who has no reason to question or revise an original choice. A life with more autonomous marital choices is not even ceteris paribus better than a life with fewer such choices.

(2) Saying that freedom of choice is intrinsically valuable suggests that that the value we attempt to achieve in our actions is freedom, not the value internal to the activity itself. This suggestion is endorsed by Carol Gould (Marx’s Social Ontology [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1978]). She accepts that action is directed at achieving the purposes internal to a given project, and that ‘one is apparently acting for the sake of these purposes themselves posited as external aims.’ But she goes on to say that truly free activity has freedom itself as the ultimate end - ’thus freedom is not only the activity that creates value but is that for the sake of which all these other values are pursued and therefore that with respect to which they become valuable’ (Gould, 118).

But this is false. First, as Taylor rightly points out, telling people to act freely doesn’t tell them what particular free activities are worth doing. But even if it provided determinate guidance, it presents a false view of our motivations. If I am writing a book, for example, my motivation isn’t to be free, but to say something that is worth saying. Indeed, if I didn’t really want to say anything, except insofar as it’s a way of being free, then my writing wouldn’t be fulfilling. What and how I write would become the results of arbitrary and indifferent and ultimately unsatisfying choices. If’writing is to be intrinsically valuable, I have to care about what I’m saying, I have to believe that writing is worth doing for its own sake. If we are to understand the interest and value people see in their projects we have to look to the ends which are internal to them. I do not pursue my writing for the sake of my freedom. On the contrary, I pursue my writing for its own sake, because there are things that are worth saying. Freedom is valuable because it allows me to say them.

The best liberal defense of individual freedoms is not necessarily the most direct one. The best defense is the one that best accords with the way people on reflection understand the value of their own lives. And, if we look at the value of freedom in this way then it seems that freedom of choice, while central to a valuable life, is not the value which is centrally pursued in such a life.

13 Taylor, 157; Sandel, Michael Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982), 161-5Google Scholar

14 Sandel, 94, 100, quoting Robert Nozick

15 Sandel, Michael ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,’ Political Theory 12 (1984), 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Rorty, Richard ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,’ in Hollinger, R. ed., Hermeneutics and Praxis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1985), 217Google Scholar

17 Sandel, Limits of Justice, 58

18 Ibid., 149

19 Ibid., 150

20 Ibid., 152

21 Ibid.

22 Macintyre, 204-5, 201

23 Ibid., 205

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Sandel, ‘Procedural Republic,’ 91

28 Galston, William Justice and the Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980), 44-5; Rawls, 441-2, 543-4Google Scholar

29 Rawls, 440

30 Kant, I. ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Moral,’ in The Moral Law, Paton, H. ed. (London: Hutchinson 1948), 109Google Scholar

31 Raz, 300

32 Williams, Bernard Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press 1985), 170Google Scholar

33 Williams, 108-110, 199

34 Ibid., 169

35 Rorty, 217

36 Ibid., 216

37 Ibid., 217

38 Ibid., 218

39 Unger, 68

40 Macintyre, 205

41 Rorty, 216

42 Ibid., 217

43 Ibid., 219

44 Ibid., 216

45 Walzer, Michael Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell 1985), xivGoogle Scholar (emphasis added)

46 Cohen, J. ‘Review of Spheres of Justice,’ Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986), 467CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Kant, quoted in J. Cohen, 467

48 See, for example, Walzer, 5, 79.

49 Rawls, 18

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 21

52 J. Cohen, 467

53 Dworkin, Ronald A Matter of Principle (London: Harvard University Press 1985), 176Google Scholar

54 Macintyre, 67

55 I discuss communitarian objections to these broader issues of liberal political theory in chapter 4 of Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press forthcoming [1989]).

56 I would like to thank G.A. Cohen, A.M. Macleod and W.E. Cooper for helpful comments on an earlier draft.