Community and communitarianism

Reflections on the nature and significance of community have figured prominently in the history of Western ethics and political philosophy, both secular and religious. In ethics and political philosophy the term ‘community' refers to a form of connection among individuals that is qualitatively stronger and deeper than a mere association. The concept of a community includes at least two elements: (1) individuals belonging to a community have ends that are in a robust sense common, not merely congruent private ends, and that are conceived of and valued as common ends by the members of the group; and (2) for the individuals involved, their awareness of themselves as belonging to the group is a significant constituent of their identity, their sense of who they are. In the past two decades, an important and influential strand of secular ethical and political thought in the English-speaking countries has emerged under the banner of communitarianism. The term ‘communitarianism' is applied to the views of a broad range of contemporary thinkers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and sometimes Michael Walzer. It is important to note, however, that there is no common creed to which these thinkers all subscribe and that for the most part they avoid the term. There are two closely related ways to characterize what communitarians have in common; one positive, the other negative. As a positive view, communitarianism is a perspective on ethics and political philosophy that emphasizes the psycho-social and ethical importance of belonging to communities, and which holds that the possibilities for justifying ethical judgments are determined by the fact that ethical reasoning must proceed within the context of a community's traditions and cultural understandings (Bell 1993: 24-45). As a negative view, communitarianism is a variety of anti-liberalism, one that criticizes liberal thought for failing to appreciate the importance of community. At present the communitarian critique of liberalism is more developed than is communitarianism as a systematic ethical or political philosophy. Existing communitarian literature lacks anything comparable to Rawls' theory of justice or Feinberg's theory of the moral limits of criminal law, both of which are paradigmatic examples of systematic liberal ethical and political theory. For the most part, the positive content of the communitarians' views must be inferred from their criticisms of liberalism. Thus, to a large extent communitarianism so far is chiefly a way of thinking about ethics and political life that stands in fundamental opposition to liberalism. To some, communitarian thinking seems a healthy antidote to what they take to be excessive individualism and obsessive preoccupation with personal autonomy. To others, communitarianism represents a faliure to appreciate the value - and the fragility - of liberal social institutions. The success of communitarianism as an ethical theory depends upon whether an account of ethical reasoning can be developed that emphasizes the importance of social roles and cultural values in the justification of moral judgments without lapsing into an extreme ethical relativism that makes fundamental ethical criticism's of one's own community impossible. The success of communitarianism as a political theory depends upon whether it can be demonstrated that liberal political institutions cannot provide adequate conditions for the flourishing of community or secure appropriate support for persons' identities so far as their identities are determined by their membership in communities. 1 Community If I am a member of a community, I conceive of the goals and values I share with my fellows as essentially our goals and values, not just as goals and values that happen to be the same for all of us because of a contingent convergence of our individual interests. Each member thinks of furthering the community's ends primarily as gains for us, not as a gain for themselves that happens to be accompanied by similar gains for other individuals in the group. In the activities that are the life of the community, individuals think of themselves first and foremost as members of the group. Thus, at least in the course of these activities, the distinction between what is in your interest, as opposed to mine or ours, breaks down or recedes into the background. In contrast, in an association individuals typically conceive of their interests as distinct, even if their goals are collective; that is, as states of affairs that necessarily involve the group. For example, if they are an association rather than a community, when the employees in a firm work together to secure an important contract for the company (the collective goal), each will cooperate with others only to further their own interest, conceiving of it as distinct from, although congruent with, that of the others. A contrast can also be drawn between how the members of a community regard the process of pursuing the common goal and how that process is regarded in an association. In a community, the process itself (or rather the relationships among members of the group that constitute the process) is seen by members of the group to be valuable in itself, independently of whether it is effective in achieving the goal of the process. In an association, the relationships that exist in the process of pursuing the collective goal are viewed as being of only instrumental value for attaining private goods for each of the individuals involved. Since a community is defined at least in large part by a set of shared values and goals, the second element in our analysis of community, shared identity, is at least partly normative. In other words, if in saying who I am I feel it important to identify myself as, for example, a Catholic, then this characterization of who I am is not a description of myself as being a member of a certain religious group; it also includes the awareness that I have certain commitments, an allegiance to certain values and the perception that I have certain obligations by virtue of being a member of this group. These familiar ways of contrasting communities with mere associations have the virtue of throwing the distinction between the two into bold relief, but they oversimplify. Being a community is a matter of degree: groups fall along a continuum, from communities in the strict sense, in which the sense of a shared identity is fundamental to a person's most basic conception of themselves and in which allegiance to the common interest eclipses any distinct conception of private interest, to mere associations, whose members are connected by the most tenuous and transitory ties of private interests or tastes and whose identity derives chiefly from sources other than membership of the group. For example, in many groups, individuals will be motivated to cooperate with others both by a sense of community, according to which what counts is whether ‘we' succeed, and by their own private interests in the outcome of the common endeavour, which they will be able to distinguish quite clearly from the interest of the group. Similarly, the extent to which the members will conceive of their membership as being an important component of who they are (what their values and commitments are, and so on) will vary across different groups. Thus the extent to which a group is a community will depend upon how dominant the sense of common, not merely congruent, goals is, and how large a role the sense of allegiance to the values and ends of the group plays in each individual's sense of who they are. 2 Communitarianism To determine what, according to communitarians, the true significance of participation in community is, we must see the ways in which communitarians believe liberalism has failed to acknowledge that significance. The first obstacle to reconstructing a positive communitarian view from the communitarian critiques of liberalism is the fact that communitarians have sometimes been unclear about what liberalism is, and in some cases apparently have made uncharitable assumptions about what liberalism is committed to. One useful place to begin is with a rather narrow but clear articulation of liberalism as a minimal political philosophy - a thesis about the proper role of the state. What I shall call the liberal normative political thesis is simply that the state is to place a priority on the enforcement of the basic individual and civil rights, those rights which, roughly speaking, are found in the US Constitution's Bill of Rights and in Rawls' First Principle of Justice, the Greatest Equal Liberty Principle (Rawls 1971: 61) (see Rawls, J. §1). These include the rights to freedom of religion, expression, thought and association, the right of political participation (including the right to vote and to run for office), and the rights of legal due process and equality before the law. This fundamental thesis of liberal political philosophy implies another: namely, that the proper role of the state is to protect these basic rights, not to make its citizens virtuous or to impose upon them any particular or substantive conception of the good life or of the common good. By honouring this commitment to protect individual and civil political rights and forgoing any other projects that would violate them, the state recognizes a distinction between the private and the public spheres, and hence a limit on its own authority as well as a domain of autonomy for individuals. In marking off a private sphere through the protection of individual rights liberalism not only demarcates a domain of autonomy for individuals, it also makes room for a variety of associations - and communities. For this reason it is misleading to say that liberalism protects individual freedom rather than community. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998) Community and communitarianism 3 Communitarian criticisms of liberalism The following four criticisms form the core of the communitarian attack on liberalism. Not all are advanced by every thinker usually labelled communitarian. (1) Liberalism rests on an individualism that is both ontologically and motivationally false. Liberal ontology asserts that only individuals exist and that all putative properties of groups can be reduced to properties of individuals; liberal motivational theory assumes that individuals are motivated solely by preferences for private goods, and that they desire participation in groups only as a means to achieving such goods. (2) Liberalism undervalues political life, viewing participation in the political community as a mere instrumental good, valuable only as a means toward the attainment of the various private ends that individuals have, rather than as something valuable in itself. (3) Liberalism presupposes a defective conception of the self, not recognizing that the self is ‘embedded' in and partly constituted by communal commitments that are not objects of choice. Thus liberalism fails to understand that what one's obligations are is determined, to a large extent, by one's identity as a member of the community and the roles one occupies within the community (see Obligation, political §2). (4) The liberal emphasis on individual rights devalues, neglects, and ultimately undermines community; yet participation in community is a fundamental and irreplaceable ingredient in the good life for human beings. Only the fourth communitarian criticism is a direct attack on the liberal normative political thesis. The other three are instances of a characteristic communitarian move, one which is most explicit perhaps in Sandel and Taylor: namely, that of attempting to undermine the liberal normative political thesis by exposing flaws in the system of beliefs upon which it supposedly rests. As we shall see, one problem with this strategy is the tendency on the part of those who employ it to fail to appreciate the range of different considerations that the liberal can invoke to support the liberal normative political thesis. At most, only some of these justifications may include beliefs which communitarianism shows to be false. Other justifications for liberalism - including what appear to be the most plausible - may remain intact. The first criticism is easily rebutted. The liberal normative political thesis does rest on an individualistic premise, but the premise is neither the ontological individualism nor the motivational individualism which communitarians rightly have attacked. Liberalism is individualistic only in a moral sense. Liberals hold that what matters ultimately, morally speaking, is individuals - their autonomy and wellbeing. Moral individualism does not commit the liberal to ontological individualism: holding that individuals are morally primary does not commit one to denying that groups exist or that they are reducible without remainder to the properties of individuals. Similarly, liberalism can readily admit that in order to describe the interest that individuals have in participating in groups it is necessary to make reference to institutions and practices. Liberals can also agree that the institutional or social concepts used to describe the interests that individuals have in belonging to groups and pursuing shared ends are not reducible to pre-institutional or pre-social concepts (such as that of the ‘atomistic' individual existing in a state of nature). Liberalism, as a normative political thesis about the priority of the basic civil and political rights (and the proper role of the state and the limits of its authority), does not entail any such individualistic views; nor do the more plausible lines of justification invoked to support the liberal normative political thesis include such views among their premises. The latter justifications are simply attempts to show how a political order that protects the basic civil and political rights, and hence has a rather limited role for the state and a large private sphere in which diverse individuals (and groups) can flourish, will, in the long run, and in the majority of cases, best serve the autonomy and welfare of individuals. The second communitarian criticism, that liberalism undervalues participation in the political community, is harder to assess. Those who voice it sometimes neglect to distinguish clearly between two quite different theses. The first is that participation in the political community is valuable in itself, as a significant ingredient in the good life for all or most human beings. Liberalism need not, and does not, deny this. The second is that the good life requires that one participate in what may be called an all-inclusive political community or in some rather direct and substantial way in the highest-level political organization in one's society. The first thesis is more controversial than the bare claim that participation in some form of community or other is an essential ingredient in the good life. It is the claim that participation in political community is essential. Although clearly in need of systematic defence, the latter claim is not implausible. It can be supported by arguing, as Aristotle seems to have done, that the good life for human beings, or at least the best life, requires the exercise and development of certain powers of will and intellect that can only be achieved through participation in activities in which one rules and is ruled in turn (see Aristotle). Notice, however, that even if this first thesis is granted, we are still a great distance from the second. For one may be able to achieve the good of participation in political community without participating in any significant way in an overarching political community, or the highest level of political organization. All that is necessary is that one participate in one or more political subcommunities, which might include not only local governments but also many other types of communities, religious and secular, in so far as they include a substantial political dimension in their internal activities. Given the apparent diversity of the conditions of human flourishing, the sweeping pronouncement that the good life or even the best life for all (or even most) human beings requires significant participation in the most inclusive form or highest level of political organization appears rather dogmatic. To my knowledge no communitarian has shouldered the burden of supporting this second thesis. The third communitarian criticism is sometimes formulated as the slogan that liberalism - at least the liberalism of theorists such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin - conceives of ‘the self as being given prior to its ends' (Sandel 1984a: 115). Put more positively, this is the thesis that an individual's identity is to a significant degree constituted by an allegiance to the ends to which they are committed by virtue of their membership of the community, and more specifically by the roles they occupy in it. Liberals need not and should not deny that when human beings become aware of themselves as moral agents and when they confront questions about what they ought to do, they already recognize themselves as having an identity. Nor should they fail to acknowledge that this identity is constituted to a large extent by the various roles in which they find themselves in the practices of their community (or communities), and that these roles carry with them certain obligations and commitments. Liberalism need not deny this commonsensical truth, which we may call ‘the fact of embeddedness'. There is, however, a more radical interpretation of the thesis that which liberal thinkers do not espouse - but one which appears to be quite implausible. This is the view that the ends that are ‘given' as part of a person's socially generated identity are incorrigible for that individual, that they cannot meaningfully be objects of criticism by the individual, and hence that they can neither be chosen or rejected by them. It would be uncharitable to say that communitarians unequivocally hold this more radical interpretation of the embeddedness thesis, but there are passages in their writings that suggest that they do: I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part'? We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted.… 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 or that 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. (MacIntyre) If the point is that the self is embedded in the sense that the obligations a person has are given, irrevocably so, by their membership of and particular role within a community, that the obligations that are imputed along with membership and roles are not subject to criticism, and that a person cannot rationally choose to reject such roles, then liberalism does deny the embeddedness of the self. For liberalism, to the extent that it emphasizes individual autonomy, stresses the ability of individuals, at least under favourable conditions in which social practices and institutions allow the free flow of information and untrammelled discussion, to exercise critical judgment about the suitability of their roles and the validity of the values of their communities, and hence to question the obligations that are imputed to them. To put the same point in terms of what may be called the normative significance of identity, communitarians sometimes appear to hold that an individual cannot critically assess those putative obligations that are constitutive of their identity. On the face of it, however, this seems quite wrong. The fact that I am a racist - that racism is partly constitutive of my identity - does not show that I am obliged to treat white people as if they were superior to black people, nor that it is impossible for me to criticize my racist beliefs and reconstitute my identity as that of one who is dedicated to racial equality. It makes perfectly good sense to say that I ought to disavow my racist identity and strive to construct a new, nonracist identity. The communitarian might reply that even when criticism of culturally-imputed obligations and values does occur, it must always proceed by drawing on conceptual, factual and moral resources that are themselves available only through the culture in question. This may in fact be what MacIntyre has in mind when, immediately following the passage cited above, he states that the obligations one inherits from one's social roles are one's moral starting point. The implication is that one may not remain at this starting point. One may come to revise one's conception of what is valuable, what one's obligations are, and so on - but only by utilizing tools of criticism that are also given by one's community. On this interpretation, the embeddedness thesis is the claim that if an individual is able to exercise critical judgment about whether to act on the values and perceived obligations that are imputed to them by their community, this is only possible by drawing on perspectives that are available within the very communal normative structure that imputes the values in the first place. If this means that all factual assumptions, concepts and moral principles that an individual relies on to criticize the values of his own community must be wholly endogenous to that community, must originate there or must be widely accepted there, then it not only appears to be false, but would seem to rest upon a view of communities which, ironically, is ‘atomistic individualism' writ large. On this view, communities and the systems of values they embody are like the self-contained, sui generis and impermeable ‘bare individuals' which communitarians believe to people the illusory world of liberal theory. But surely it cannot be denied that communities interact and that they borrow from one another's cultures, any more than it can be denied that the values of individuals are shaped by the social forces within which they develop. In fact, modern societies are characterized by not only a plurality of interpenetrating communal cultures within the boundaries of a given society, but also by increasing interaction among different societies as the global economy and the global culture it brings with it expand. For example, Western principles concerning human rights in general and the equality of women in particular have been used, with some success, to criticize the assigned roles and perceived values and obligations of non-Western societies. Once it is recognized that criticism of acculturated values sometimes relies at least in part on beliefs, concepts or principles that originate outside the culture, then even the more moderate version of the embeddedness thesis is seen to be implausible. Nevertheless an important truth remains: even if one is able to criticize obligations that are constitutive of one's culturally-assigned identity, all reasoning about what one ought to do must begin with a recognition of who one is and what one's obligations are as determined by one's identity. If this is what is meant by embeddedness, then communitarians have articulated an important truth about the nature of ethical reasoning and critical ethical reflection - one which liberal thinkers have perhaps generally neglected. What is not clear, however, is how taking this fact of embeddedness seriously affects the conclusions about the state and individual rights which liberalism seeks to defend. The fourth and final communitarian criticism of liberalism is potentially more telling. The claim is that liberalism exalts individual autonomy to the neglect and detriment of community. The communitarians' point, presumably, is both that: (1) the justifications liberals offer to support the normative political thesis concerning the priority of basic individual, civil and political rights rest on an excessively positive valuation of individual choice or autonomy; and that (2) implementing the liberal priority on these individual rights is damaging to communities. Contemporary liberals have offered strong arguments against both elements of the communitarian attack. First, liberal theorists can and do explicitly recognize the importance of community, and to that extent do not assume that individual autonomy is the sole value to be protected. Some of the most prominent contemporary liberal theorists, including Rawls, Dworkin and Feinberg, are most naturally read as ascribing to a moral individualism that bases the case for individual rights ultimately on both the autonomy and the wellbeing of individuals (Buchanan). If this is the case, then all that is needed to incorporate a fundamental appreciation for community into the heart of the liberal justification for individual rights is the commonsensical thesis: for all or most human beings, participation in communities is an important ingredient in their wellbeing, as something that is intrinsically valuable. Once again, there is nothing in liberal theory, or at least in its more plausible variants, that precludes a recognition of the truth of this thesis. Some contemporary liberal thinkers have argued that participation in community is also valuable because the community's shared values provide a context for meaningful choice (Kymlicka 1989: 205-19). To the extent that this is so, the opportunity to participate in flourishing communities is valuable not only from the perspective of individual wellbeing but also from that of individual autonomy, since autonomy can flourish only where meaningful choices are possible. Liberalism, therefore, can include a proper recognition of the importance of participation in communities for individuals and can avoid an exclusive emphasis on individual autonomy that would neglect the importance of community for individual wellbeing. In addition, a number of liberal thinkers have pointed out that liberalism's priority on individual civil and political rights not only provides scope for individual autonomy but also serves to protect communities and to allow them to flourish (Feinberg 1988: 108-12; Buchanan 1994: 11-15). To understand how individual rights protect communities, consider the rights to freedom of association, expression and religion. Historically these rights, as well as political participation rights and legal due process rights, have provided a strong bulwark against attempts by the state or rival communities to destroy or dominate minority communities. They allow individuals to partake of the essential good of community, and to enjoy the context for meaningful choice that community values provide, both by protecting existing communities from interference and by giving individuals the freedom to unite with like-minded others to form new communities. It is wrong to assume, then, that because the rights which liberals champion are individual rights, the purposes those rights serve and the values upon which they rest are purely individualistic. This is not to say, of course, that any existing liberal theory provides a fully satisfactory way of accommodating both the importance of individual autonomy and the importance of participation in community. Nor is it to suggest that the particular understandings of the scope and limits of individual rights that liberals typically advocate successfully resolve all conflicts between the interests of individuals qua individuals and the interests of communities. Perhaps the most obvious instances of such unresolved conflicts - and of the challenge to liberalism that they represent - lie in the area of tensions between the interest in preserving a community's longstanding culture (or certain central features of it) and the liberal commitment to ensuring that children are educated so as to be able to make their own choices as to how to live. For example, some religious communities in the USA and elsewhere have sought an exemption from public schooling requirements on the grounds that exposure to ideas and values dominant in the majority culture would weaken their own community's traditions. Here there seems to be a direct conflict between liberalism's emphasis on individual autonomy and freedom of expression, and the value of preserving a community. And to say, as I have done, that liberalism ought to and can recognize the importance of participation in community for the wellbeing and autonomy of individuals does not in itself shed any light on how the balance should be struck between the individual rights liberalism has traditionally championed and the need to protect cultures when the former and the latter are in conflict. If striking an adequate balance requires rejecting what I have taken to be the core of liberalism - the normative political thesis of the priority of individual rights - then the fourth major communitarian criticism of liberalism will be telling: the liberal priority on individual rights will be seen to rest on an inadequate appreciation of the value of community. If this is the case, then perhaps the most fruitful line of development for communitarian thought would be a concerted effort to show how political systems that only recognize individual rights as basic fail to respond satisfactorily to the need to preserve communities. One important element of this line of inquiry is the question of whether states should recognize group rights that are justified according to the protection they provide for communities or their cultural values and that are basic rights in the sense of not being generated through the exercise of the individual rights which liberalism recognizes, such as the right to freedom of association and the legal right to make contracts. (Examples of basic group rights - those not generated through the exercise of individual rights - might include language rights for national minorities and collective land rights for indigenous peoples). If the liberal thesis of the primacy of individual rights rules out recognition of any basic group rights, then a successful case for basic group rights (as needed to provide sufficient protection for communities) would be a conclusive communitarian objection to liberalism thus interpreted. As a way of developing systematically communitarianism both as a positive view and as a critique of liberalism, this line of research may prove crucial (see Multiculturalism). 4 Conclusions If communitarianism is understood as being, or as centrally including, a radical critique of liberalism, where the latter is construed narrowly as the normative political thesis that the proper role of the state is to uphold the basic individual civil and political rights, then the communitarian project has thus far proven inconclusive. For liberalism can, and a growing number of contemporary liberal thinkers do, take the value of participation in community seriously - thus acknowledging the central tenets of communitarianism while denying that liberalism cannot incorporate them. However, if liberalism is understood to exclude entirely any role for basic group rights in the protection of cultural communities, then the communitarian critique of liberalism may well turn out to be telling. Alternately, communitarianism might be viewed more positively, not primarily as a criticism of the liberal normative political thesis but as a rationale for an expanded and enriched research agenda in ethics and political philosophy. Taking the importance of community seriously in political philosophy would mean acknowledging and attempting to resolve systematically the conflicts that can arise in any theory that recognizes the importance of both individual autonomy and participation in communities. And doing so may require rethinking the scope and limits of theories of individual rights and a willingness to entertain the possibility that these rights must be supplemented with special group rights designed to provide added protection to especially vulnerable communities. In ethical theory the communitarian message is to take seriously the fact that to a large extent moral obligations are the product of explicit choices or voluntary agreements made not by autonomous individuals operating in a social and institutional vacuum, but by individuals who regard themselves and are regarded by others as members of communities, as occupants of particular social roles. In addition, communitarianism stresses a fundamental truth about how ethical reflection and argumentation must begin; namely, in the concrete context of social practices in which individuals find themselves and in an awareness that the sense of self and the recognition of moral values are inextricably bound together. Thus, another important item on the agenda for a communitarian ethical theory is a careful articulation of the extent to which the social starting place that supplies one's identity places unsurpassable limitations on the sorts of moral conclusions one can draw and the kinds of moral commitments one can come to make through a process of rational reflection.