L5 - community Flashcards
why community - intro
liberalism: now moving on towards critiques -> we should think about it on a principle level, principle that can critique liberalism
can we have a defense of community within liberalism?
social media e.g.
- do immigrants belong to the American society/community
- e.g. contemporary Ukrainians and Palestinians: two conceptions of community in wartime: community among the suppressed or community with solidarity/help from others (e.g. people who say i stand with Ukraine/Palestine)
- e.g. covid value public health, but maybe harm to our community (being able to come together) counts more
“i have a right to object to my taxes being spent on a genocide” = what is the value behind this? who counts as part of the community?
a communitarian critique of liberalism (Sandel)
- Sandel about liberalism
critique of Rawls/liberalism: reminds you what liberalism is
- [Liberalism] might be summed up in the claim that the right is prior to the good, and in two senses: The priority of the right means first, that individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good (in this it opposes utilitarianism), and second, that the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life …Only when I am governed by principles that do not presuppose any particular ends am I free to pursue my own ends consistent with a similar freedom for all” (Sandel 2005 [1984]: 239-40
(principle before the good: freedoms go above goods/outcomes, e.g. freedom of religion no matter if you are religious)
emphasizes that Rawls saved liberalism by moving it past Kantian metaphysics towards the “unencumbered self” (the stick figure) -> helps generate the vaunted “liberal neutrality” (neutral to diff conceptions of the good, diff religions, diff preferences)
this is liberalism at its best BUT is that enough?
Sandel - Communitarian critique of liberalism - his case
Sandel turns to the shortcomings in liberal thinking about the neo-Nazi rallies in Skokie, Ilinois vs Martin Luther King 1950s
- neonazis immediately after the war marching = concerning
- Skokie = many holocaust survivors, many jews
- liberal gov allowed them to march: acc to liberalism you have freedom of speech no matter if what you say is horrible
-> Should white-supremacist groups be allowed to promulgate their racist views? Liberals argue that government must be neutral toward the opinions its citizens espouse
Is there a principled way of distinguishing between [the neo-Nazis in Skokie, Illinois and Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches]? For liberals who insist on being neutral with respect to the content of speech [the] answer must be no ..
- liberalism at its surface would say no: they are both marches so both are equal
-> The need to decide both cases in the same way displays the folly of the nonjudgmental impulse [of liberalism]. The obvious ground for distinguishing the cases is that the neo-Nazis promote genocide and hate, whereas Martin Luther King, Jr., sought civil rights for black. . The difference consists in the content of the speech, in the nature of the cause. There is also a difference in the moral worth of the communities whose integrity was at stake. The shared memories of the Holocaust survivors deserve a moral deference that the solidarity of the segregationists does not
two important things
- what we take to be self-evidently true: freedom of speech, he argues it maybe should not be self-evidently true
- forward vision: hate speech is becoming more prevalent, sometimes we have to ground our values, we can’t just be neutral to them - easy to think about community/solidarity in positive terms, but the neonazis are also a community: the problem was solidarism
Sandel - Communitarian critique of liberalism
Sandel wants to change the language
Sandel argues instead that the right should be grounded in the good.
- “Liberals who think the case for rights should be neutral toward substantive moral and religious doctrines and communitarians who think rights should rest on prevailing social values make a similar mistake; both try to avoid passing judgment on the content of the ends that rights promote … A third possibility, more plausible in my view, is that rights depend for their justification on the moral importance of the ends they serve” (Sandel 1982: xi).
- completely diff argument than Rawls: basic defense of rights can’t be severed from the idea of the social good
- we can’t look at freedom of speech before we look at our conceptions of the good
-> This generates a political argument against liberalism;
- US: the loss of democracy in favor of rights = shift from national republic to procedural republic = shift away from language of the good and towards that of the right
- thus the priviliging of negative liberty over positive liberty
- liberalism can eat away at democracy: the more liberal we are the less democratic
- move from the collective good to liberalism, to good procedures = politics of goods to politics of rights
““By the mid- or late twentieth century, the national republic had run its course … And so the gradual shift, in our practices and institutions, from a public philosophy of common purposes to one of fair procedures, from a politics of good to a politics of right, from the national republic to the procedural republic … Where liberty in the early republic was understood as a function of democratic institutions and dispersed power, liberty in the procedural republic is defined in opposition to democracy, as an individual’s guarantee against what the majority might will. I am free insofar as I am the bearer of rights….[As rights and entitlements expand] power shifts away from democratic institutions (such as legislatures and political parties) and towards institutions designed to be insulated from democratic pressures, and hence better equipped to dispense and defend individual rights (notably the judiciary and bureaucracy)
when rights are demarcaded, it is a space absent of politics = more room for rights = less room for politics
Sandel communitarian critique of liberalism - philosophical argumetn
there is something philosophically wrong with liberalism:
the unencumbered self is insufficient to generate principles of justice, bc:
- it requires us to be distant from ourselves, we must find an “Archimedian point”: a point away from you so you can see it as from far
- if we are so distant, can we even be selves (capable of impartial choice)?
- maybe there is no sense anymore - can we ever be truly independent of others?
- “[For justice to be primary] we must stand to our own circumstance always at a certain distance, conditioned to be sure, but part of us always antecedent to any conditions … Deontological liberalism supposes that we can, indeed must, understand ourselves as independent in this sense. I shall argue that we cannot, and that, in the partiality of this self-image, the limits of justice can be found” (Sandel 1982: 10-11)
- Sandel argues that the stickfigure self can build up a story of principles, but that itself is an assumption the stickfigure itself is already shaped by social encasement - what if there can be no individual outside of community
- argues the individual is not prior to the community
- i.e. the community is prior
Sandel - core
Rawls is lying to us: he says if you start with the stick figure, it is neutal to any conception of the good, this is true with ascriptive characteristics BUT it bakes in a prior that the individual is prior to everything else, and that itself is a value: if the thing that is deciding principles of justice is an individuals, the only thing it can do is create principles of justice that prioritize the individual
-> all of Rawls thought experiment is that the individual matters most and thus creates principles that priotize the individual
but maybe individualism is the problem? that we are to individalistic
liberalism can’t help us, bc individualism is baked into liberalism
when you start with Rawlsian conditions, the only thing you are gonna get is liberalism
(slides:)
But there is also perhaps a much larger problem.
What if Rawls privileges a particular conception of the good – namely one that prioritizes individuals.
- If you start with the “unencumbered self” you can only get principles that favor individuals.
- The Rawlsian self is incapable of being either inter- or intra-subjective:
“Intersubjective conceptions allow that in certain moral circumstances, the relevant description of the self may embrace more than a single, individual human being, as when we attribute responsibility or affirm an obligation to a family or community or class of nation rather than to some particular human being … Intrasubjective conceptions, on the other hand, allow that for certain purposes, the appropriate description of the moral subject may refer to a plurality of selves within a single, individual human being, as when we account for inner deliberation” (Sandel 1982)
to what degree is it fair that individualism is a value or is it true that we are all idnividual people so therefore it should be the basis of society
= clear example of the clash of values
(!one of the main defenses of liberalism is that the individual needs protection within the group, bc not all communities are good (e.g. sekts))
step back: communitarianism 101
- definition community
(Avineri, De-Shalit, Kymlicka)
community is hard to define
“Communitarianism is put forward in two spheres.
- claim individualism is the problem: One is methodological, the communitarians arguing that the premises of individualism such as the rational individual who chooses freely are wrong or false, and that the only way to understand human behavior is to refer to individuals in their social, cultural, and historical contexts. That is to say, in order to discuss individuals one must look first at their communities and their communal relationships
- in order to discuss individuals, we need to understand the community first: - The second sphere is the normative one, communitarians asserting that the premises of individualism give rise to morally unsatisfactory consequences. Among them are the impossibility of achieving a genuine community, the neglect of some ideas of the good life that should be sustained by the state, or others that should be dismiss
- regardless of what you think about if the individual or community is prior, liberalism is bad bc it eats away at democracy, the procedure eats away of the common good
what we need to know: 2 diff types of critique
what does it mean for community to be a normative conception?
- communitarians: it is morally good that the self be constituted by its communal ties… only by virtue of our being members of communities can we find a deep meaning and substance to our moral beliefs
- !!!individualism fails to generate the normativelly attractive society
- as we become more individualistic there is something deep missing about our societies, our culture is getting lesser and lesser
is this importance of society important enough to diminish the value of individualism?
so: like republicans, communitarians are trying to expand the circle of politics (vis a vis rights)
- want more politics rather than liberalism that gives you freedom from politics
step back: communitarianism 101
why does community matter?
2
(community also matters for liberals)
- dedication to the social good (via Charles Taylor)
- problem for liberalism: as we stop having social glue, we stop being committed to liberal values, bc the whole point is that the principle is radically redistributive, but if we no longer feel part of a community, we are less willing to do this
- We fear that when people don’t share the common good they won’t be committed to the polity.
- This means that people won’t be willing to redistribute, undermining the whole liberal project in the first place:
- “[Distance from community] means we become unwilling to shoulder the burdens of liberal justice. As a result, liberal democracies are undergoing a ‘legitimation crisis’ – citizens are asked to sacrifice more and more in the name of justice, but they share less and less with those for whom they are making sacrifices” (Kymlicka 2002: 252-3).
- So if what keeps state together is a sense of identity, how can this be cultivated? What constitutes it?
- e.g. mini churches: all committed to value of redistributing, of helping out each other, OR committed bc all look like each other
- no one is gonna redistribute until you’ve build up a continuity -> migration destroys societies bc we didn’t pre-build up a society in which others belong
- the theory is destroyed by the practice bc not enough attention to how society works: we don’t want to redistribute to people who don’t look like us
- social glue? but how can this be created (and at what cost?)
- an emphasis on a common way of life (communitarian)
- an emphasis on common nationhood (liberal nationalist)
- an emphasis on political participation (civic republican)
addendum: liberal nationalism
can we make nationalism liberal?
nationalism has been source of last decades’ bloodshed, it doesn’t have a shiny history
David Miller makes a case for liberal nationalism
- natinalism problem is that it is illibea, but you can’t hav liberalism without some version of a society in which people dont care about each other enough to redistribute
liberal nationalism =
“[Social unity] requires that citizens share more than simply liberal principles, but less than a shared conception of the good life. What could this be? … States try to develop solidarity by appealing to ideals of nationhood. Each state tries to convince its citizens that they form a ‘nation’, and hence belong together in a single political community, and owe each other special obligations. Since the people who share a state are not only co-citizens, but also co-nationals, there is a natural bond of solidarity, and a natural desire to exercise self-government… Liberal states actively promote this sort of ‘thin’ national identity. And they do so, not in order to promote a particular conception of the good life, but rather to increase the likelihood that citizens will fulfill their obligations of justice. People are more likely to make sacrifices for others if these others are viewed as ‘one of us’, and so promoting a sense of national identity strengthens the sense of mutual obligation needed to sustain liberal justice” (Kymlicka 2002: 261; 265)
- social unity should be more than we are all individuals, but less than a hegemonic idea (like only this religion)
- we are stuck: liberalism needs community and community needs liberalism = without liberalism individual rights are trampled, without community our socieities die
we need to create a sense of social unity somehow
- e.g. by taking the good bits of nations: shared poems, histories, shows (!not the part where you kill everyone that’s not in your nation)
- diff to find balance between good elements of nations
- has to come through culture: e.g. food (if youthink it can be fixed through politics than youre probs a republican)
Or, a more liberal approach: use group rights to protect communities. (More on this later)
communitarianism and its critics
communitarian objection + response
communitarian objection 1: liberals assume people are selfish
- “Morality requires that we act not simply as egoists, but recognize that others may have claims on us” (148)
liberal response 1: you are pre-ego, indvidiualism is not egoism
- if individuals matter, all individuals matter, not just me
communitarian objection 2: liberals advocate a minimal state
liberal response: whether the state is minimal depends on interpretation, not principles
- ’ … Different versions of liberalism will imply different precise roles for the state – including different degrees of, and justifications for, redistribution – and there is nothing in the idea of a state founded on the principles of ‘liberal individualism’ that limits it only to the minimal role advocated by libertarians (`150-1)
communitarian objection 3: liberals prioritize rights over duties or responsibilities
liberal response: liberals do care about duties
- The more rights people have against one another, the more duties they own to one another
- if you have rights, you have a duty to respect those of others
- liberals dont’ focus on duties outside of rights
communitarian objection 4: liberals believe values are subjective
liberal response 4: liberals think some values are objective (JUSTICE)
. communitarian objection 5: liberals neglect how individuals are socially constituted
liberal response 5: libeals also believe we are socially situated, but that it is not essential:
- How could anybody deny that people derive their self-understandings from the societies in which they live? … But the fact that we choose from a set of socially defined options, and that, as individuals, we are undoubtedly subject to social influences (family, school, media) that lead us to choose some rather than others, does not establish that reflection and choice are illusory” (159).
- yes you are socially constittud, but that doesn’t matter for justice
. communitarian objection 6: liberals undervalue communal relations, shared values and identity
. liberal response 6: Liberals undervalue communal relations, shared values and identity
- liberalism is concerned with the state, but society can be communitarian in nature: liberalism is a doctrine about what the state can do to, and for, its citizens … [This leaves] plenty of room for people to pursue communal values
- justice is a common good: “Citizens of a liberal state share a common aim … that of creating and sustaining a set of social and political institutions that treats citizens justly. Communitarians who accuse liberals of neglecting the idea of the common good miss the point that liberal justice can itself be a common good when it is shared by citizens and pursued by them together … [A liberal state can be thought of as an] overarching community, founded upon respect for the individual, which allows its citizens to engage in communal (religious, artistic, familial) activity in pursuit of the more particular ends that they share with others” (162).
- He thinks this is one of the triumphs of liberalism, that people privilege their identity as citizens over everything else
COMMUNITARIAN OBJECTION 7: liberals wrongly think the state should be neutral
!!idea/concept of neutrality is important
lot of emphasis of liberalism is neutrality about diff conceptions of the goods (if you like bowling or not, if you are christian or muslim, if you are neonazi or a feminist)
!!these two are really important
Liberal Response 7: Neutrality is justified because there is an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls):
- “Members of today’s advanced societies disagree in their comprehensive doctrines. But they nonetheless coincide in affirming the core liberal values of freedom (spelled out in terms of the capacity to frame, revise and pursue a conception of the good) and equality. There is, for him, an ‘overlapping consensus’ on these distinctively political values” (165-6)
- all agree on a basic idea that everyone should have a right to have their own conception of the good
- because we all agree on certain things we can be neutral to other things
BUT: Swift thinks it’s a mistake to collapse liberalism and neutrality, for 2 reasons
- some goods the state can promote - i.e. political liberalism
- “Rawls thinks that some state action in favour of particular comprehensive doctrines can be justified. What is not justified is for such conceptions to influence state action where it involves constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice … So a Rawlsian state can subsidize art galleries and museums and national parks, if that’s what its citizens vote for” (166)
- the fact that we agree there are multiple conceptions of the goods makes room for them
!!know the world neutrality and perfectionism!!!
- Liberals can also be perfectionist (following Joseph Raz).
- “[For perfectionists] nothing in the liberal picture tells against the state acting to encourage its citizens to live valuable lives and discourage them from living worthless ones … By subsidizing (and in other ways encouraging) valuable ways of life, and taxing (and in other ways discouraging) worthless or empty ones, the state can promote the well-being of its citizens” (166-167).
- In some ways, perfectionism
actually forges a link between liberalism and communitarianism
- states can be perfectionist: in liberalism we all pursue our own ends, but still belive in some things in the state that make us all better, e.g. high school - if you already believe a liberal state can send you to high school, you believe it
- even a liberal state can force you to be better, to enhance it citizens
-> we don’t have to be too strict in our line between liberalism and communitarianism: we still want structure that the basis is liberalism, but some tolerance for more communitarian ideas (e.g. about education)
perfectionism: idea that the state doesn’t just wants to be neutral towards you, but also that it may want to make you better
