ABSTRACT
Modern political philosophy has been marked by the opposition of two camps – individualists (or liberals) versus communitarians. Individualists are the inheritors of the traditions of Locke and Mill (and many, many others). They speak to values of individual liberty and equality of moral status. In recent times, the most influential spokesmen for this tradition have been John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Contemporary communitarianism has developed as a response to these philosophers. In such writers as Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, we encounter what may be described as ‘metaphysical’ objections to individualist political theories. Though I don’t want to pin names on any of the specific theses that follow, I believe them to be illustrative of a broadly characterizable philosophical position. In the first place, this amounts to a denial that the premises of individualism, the ideals of liberty and equal moral status as I have glossed them, are rich enough to yield conclusions about how our communal life shall be lived. In particular, it is urged that we cannot disassociate ourselves in thought from the concrete ties which bind us in actual relationships to others in order to investigate the legitimacy of the duties they impose. Such ties, we are told, are constitutive of our moral identities. We just cannot, as a matter of fact, attain a theoretical perspective from which we can evaluate their propriety without losing the moral gravity with which their obligations press upon us. The family gives us a plausible example. We just find ourselves with the moral obligations of parents or children, obligations of care and sustenance or obedience and respect. We can’t step out of these domestic roles to appraise the moral norms of domesticity. To do so would be to detach ourselves just one step too far, to ask one question too many, for already we would have lost that immediacy which is distinctive of natural social relationships. And the same thought can be taken to apply in respect of our political obligations: we just find ourselves, willy-nilly, to be citizens of our respective nation-states, which claim our allegiance on the basis of our contingent
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
membership, subject to laws which frame at least the broadest contours of our duties.
