ABSTRACT

We often hear talk of the difference between “communitarians” and “liberals” in social theory, and in particular in the theory of justice.1 Certainly a debate seems to have been engaged between two “teams,” with people like Rawls, Dworkin, Nagel, and Scanlon on one side (team L), and Sandel, MacIntyre, and Walzer on the other (team C). There are genuine differences, but I think there are also a lot of crosspurposes, and just plain confusion in this debate. That is because two quite different issues tend to get run together in it. We can call these, respectively, ontological issues and advocacy issues.