Liberalism, Individual and community

Mathilde Martin November 26th, 2014 5994322 POLI 386 – Final Paper Liberalism, Individual and community “There is no such thing as society. (…) There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”(M. Thatcher, 1987). By the late 1970s, socialist policies had bought Britain to its knees. The state was heavily subsidising loss-making industries; Margaret Thatcher wanted people to view themselves as the masters of their own destiny, rather than subjects of an all-powerful state. She believed prosperity could only be achieved if the masses were economically emancipated and free to pursue the capitalist dream in a free market and competitive economy. She states: “People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”(1987) Thatcher turned to a revolution in which people saw the state as a facilitator and not a provider of prosperity. From a liberal perspective, we can refer to this statement to the empowerment and emancipation of the individual who, in the absence of an over-powering and stifling state, can achieve his potential when there is a genuine meritocracy and a level playing field. Liberalism is a political philosophy concerned with the legitimacy and justification for the exercise of political power and authority. This process of legitimation is directed towards each individual, and this is one dimension of the moral primacy of individuals within liberal political thought. What Liberals claim is that no constitutive attachment, either to state, nation, family or cultural group, must overtake the claims of individuals and their basic rights and status. There is a conflict that arises between the individual and the State, the society: what comes first? Which takes primacy over the other? The Dilemma underlined by Thatcher’s statement is the ambiguous relationship between the individual and society itself within the liberal tradition. Indeed, is the individual primary to society in the sense that society is just a system of cooperation, a contract of individuals for mutual advantage; or conversely, is the individual just a key to understand community as a whole and as the basis for individual’s freedom and identity achievement? The liberal conception of the individual invites us to question the function of the individual towards collective elements in our understanding of the necessary human dependence on culture and community, and social reality. In this essay, we will focus on the different conceptions of the individual and the self and their implications on the concepts of society and community through the debate between Liberalism and its communitarian criticisms. In this sense, the eternal debate between individualism and communitarianism continues to be significant. Liberalism has been questioned by many theorists for its excessive “atomism” and its failure to focus on the values of the community as vital conditions of individual freedom and justice.  For liberals, the basic idea is, based on the moral value of individuals, their freedom and their equal moral status, political power should be exercised only with the free and informed consent of the governed. Although, this consent may be hypothetical regarding the unreasonable character of individuals. Though the exercise of political power without legitimation of actual consent may be non free, that non freedom may be mitigated by the realization that it is at least possible to imagine people consenting to it. This approach is taken by John Rawls, who claims that the basic structure of society as a fair system of cooperation should be governed by principles of justice that would be chosen by free and equal individuals contracting under appropriate conditions in the “original position” (Rawls, 1999). Liberalism places great emphasis on the moral agency of individuals in their ability to lead their lives according to a chosen conception of the good. This ability requires that individuals have beliefs about the natural and social world, about what is valuable and the nature of particular ends to achieve. Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1999) embodies a shift in liberal tradition to a hypothetical consent, from talking about the will of individuals to talking about the reasons that people have for exercising their will in particular ways. Liberalism here can be see as a normative political philosophy holding in some sense that the legitimation and justification of the exercise of political power requires some sort of individual consent rather than the commands of their rulers or the interests of society as a whole. Liberals mays disagree about the nature of the individual consent but they do agree on the general point that some type of individual consent is required, at least for the more significant issues of justice. It is the constant possibility of conflicting claims between individuals and groups over necessary and desired goods, and the possibility that conflict could lead to sectarian struggles that raise issues of justice and the need for political power. The circumstances of justice are “the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary” (Rawls 1999: 109). These conditions make human cooperation possible as there are shared interests to form the basis of this cooperation and necessary as there are conflicting demands to moderate. Besides, in Rawls’ theory, the right is prior to the good. That is, we each understand that we have different conceptions of what is good: some of us might want to maximise our welfare, others might not. The right action, the action which we must do, is the one that lets people pursue their conception of the good, provided that they act in similar ways towards others (Rawls, 1999). Thus, a just social system provides a framework of rights and opportunities within which individuals can pursue their conception of the good life. Rawls endorses what one may call the ideal of fundamental equality, whereby all human beings are worthy of equal concern and respect, and are autonomous moral agents. That is, they know right from wrong, and they have the capacity to frame, revise and pursue a conception of the good (Rawls, 1999). Accordingly, the coercive power of the law can be used against such individuals only if they consent to it (otherwise, they would be treated like children, rather than like individuals with the capacity for rational and moral agency). Furthermore, the most important thing about individuals is that they are autonomous agents, that is, they have the capacity to frame, revise, and pursue a conception of the good life. And what matters most is that they should be able to implement whatever conception of the good we happen to have. If we were to know what our conception of the good is, when choosing principles of justice, we would focus on those rights and freedoms which are necessary to us, to the cost of rights and freedoms which are necessary to others (Rawls, 1999). Dworkin's proposal is similar to Rawls's idea of an original position. We are to imagine people behind a modified “veil of ignorance”(Rawls, 1999). An auction is imagined as a framework for an initial equal share of the resources of society. In other words, all society`s resources are for sale in an auction to which everyone can participate. An equal share however is equal in the sense that shares are proposed forever as “endowment insensitive” and “ambitions sensitive”(Dworkin, 1985). Thus, Dworkin’s theory is that justice argues that government must insure equal concern for each citizen, and he explains within his conception of “liberal equality”, that “equality of resources” gives political legitimacy to liberal-democratic government (Dworkin, 1985). According to Dworkin, equal concern is the sovereign virtue of a political community, in which it is understood as “equality of resources” as the main virtue of the sovereign, and as such, represents the virtue of justice (Dworkin, 1985). However, when speaking about political legitimacy and about an application of the principle of “equal concern”, Dworkin speaks about human rights as the criterion of an equal concern and respect for each human life and every citizen. Thus, it could be concluded that a just distribution of resources with equal respect of human rights represents the framework of political legitimacy (Dworkin 1985). Dworkin wants people's fate to be determined by choices they make from a fair and equitable starting-point. But the ideal of an equal starting point includes not only an unachievable compensation for unequal endowment, but also an unachievable knowledge of future events. Dworkin's insurance scheme is the response to the problem of unachievable compensation for unequal endowment (which is needed to equalize circumstances), and also for unachievable knowledge of future events (which is needed to know the costs of our choices). His taxation scheme is another answer to the problem of applying the insurance issue. By endorsing choice sensitivity, Dworkin is a defender of a free market economy. He argues that so long as people enter the market with a fair share of resources, markets are the best mechanisms for generating distributions sensitive to choice, and for holding people responsible for their choices. Besides, according to Kymlicka, this idea of the envy test expresses the liberal egalitarian view of justice in its most defensible form. If it could be perfectly enforced, three main aims of Rawls' theory would be fulfilled: respecting the moral equality of persons, mitigating effects of morally arbitrary disadvantages, and accepting responsibility for our choices. Such a distributive outlook would be just, even if it allows some inequality in income, because these economic inequalities would come out only as results of different choices but not as results of unequal endowment (Kymlicka, 1989). The primacy of the individual in the foundation of justice throughout liberal perspective is also found in Nozick’s theory (1974): Justice, Nozick argues, is about respecting people’s natural rights, in particular, their rights to property and their rights to self-ownership. We must allow people the freedom to decide what they want to do with what they own. Each person is distinct from each other, each is an individual, and their autonomy has to be respected. People are ‘ends-in-themselves’ (Nozick, 1974), and we cannot use them in ways they do not agree to, even if that would lead to some supposed ‘greater good’ (other people getting what they need). This has a radical conclusion: to take property away from people in order to redistribute it according to some pattern violates their rights. Nozick thinks property rights are important because they derive from ‘self-ownership’ (Nozick, 1974). A person has a right to what they produce, because they own their own labour, which they invest in creating the product. ‘Justice in acquisition’ places constraints on exactly when and how this occurs, but this is the basic idea. And once something is (justly) owned, then justice is all about justice in transfer (Nozick, 1974).  Yet, the moral significance of the human individual that is at the heart of liberalism makes it an individualistic doctrine. Individualism can be seen as a problem in the sense that it presupposes a false social logic by radically atomizing society and dissolving social bound. Charles Taylor questions the liberal individualistic conception of the liberal conception of the individual as autonomous and self sufficient in his essay Atomism (1985), in which, following the Aristotelian tradition, he argues that “man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis” (1985, 190). As a matter of fact, Taylor turns against Nozick’s argument that highlights the concept of freedom as what ultimately defines the individual. Charles Taylor argues the incoherence of individualism throughout liberal theories. He opposes that human beings have capacities; and the affirmation of human capacities that ensure the possession of rights, has normative consequences in that it cultivates these capacities in a society. Taylor underlines the liberal atomistic paradox: Liberalism’s core political value of the primacy of rights affirms these capacities to be nurtured in a society, therefore the obligation to belong to a society should be as fundamental as the assertion of rights (Taylor, 1985). However by asserting the primacy of rights, one cannot always claim an equally fundamental obligation because the assertion of an individual right is achieved at the expense of the society. To assert the rights to the point of destroying society, deprives the environment for nurturing the human capacities. Therefore rights cannot be ensured if individual rights are taken as prior to society. For Taylor, individuals are defined by a sense of “belonging” that forges a distinct awareness of themselves as social beings. Individuals only flourish within the confines of the community through the sense of belonging that they possess (Taylor, 1985). Rights find their meaning in this particular sense of social belonging between individuals: we only value freedom to the extent that we can pursue our ends and develop our abilities; thus, this requires society. Communitarians argue that the autonomous, or ‘unencumbered’ (Sandel, 1982) self of liberalism and modern moral theory is incoherent and unintelligible and requires both an understanding of the individual and reference to substantive conception of the good life. Michael Sandel questions Rawls’ argument in the extent it rests on a flawed conception of the person. Indeed, real people don’t exist under the veil of ignorance. They live in particular places and particular times, they are members of particular communities and have particular attachments and beliefs. In liberalism, the individual capacity to choose is more important than the ends themselves. Its prior existence is what makes legitimate the liberal conception of liberty. However, for Sandel, the ends are social objects, and the self is embedded within a social dimensions. He argues that Rawls’ conception of the self is incoherent to the extent it is “unencumbered” (Sandel 1982): to stop individuals choosing principles of justice in their own interest, they must be prevented from having knowledge of key aspects of their personality (Sandel, 1982). For Sandel, this account of identity is questionable in its assumption that individuals can abstract themselves from particular qualities and still exists as distinct individuals, since their identities are constituted by social bounds individuals form. Members of a society are thus bound by a sense of community in which they conceive their identity defined by the society they are part of (Sandel, 1982). Besides, he argues that Rawls’ concept of the self possesses no constituent characteristics; but that would imply that community could never be a constituent element and just an attribute of the individual. Yet, Rawls’ concept of justice would need a constituent concept of community: without this bound between the individual with society, Ralws’ key argument in favour of a distributive justice would lack any foundation and his theory would fall. Sandel argues that relationships individuals constitute through family, community and nation are both definitive and constitutive of the self. As a matter of fact, Sandel’s self is constituted in part by connections and is opens to transformation in light of a revised self-understanding (1982: 172). Walzer’s work is also impregnated with social criticism regarding liberal theories through the issue of distributive justice. His Spheres of Justice (1983) is an attempt to displace the distributive paradigm from Rawls’ theory. According to Walzer (1983), it assumes that the fundamental issues of political theory are distributive: they involve some institution giving rights, basic liberties etc, to another group that doesn’t have them. These are things that individuals must want regardless of anything else they may want. For Walzer, conceiving all fundamental political issues as primarily distributive has negative political consequences. First, it assumes that there are some goods that all people want. Hence, this entails a uniformity of human nature and moral agency, and thus a denial of cultural and social differences, that would counteract pluralist ideas. Besides, it involves that cultural differences are secondary to individuals’ universal and essential nature. Secondly, the distributive approach assumes that the character and value of the goods to be distributed is uncontroversial. Finally, it assumes the need for a distributive agency whose responsibility would be to maintain and execute this distribution; hence, this idea would support the centrality of the state in liberal conception of justice (Walzer 1983). Walzer questions the implications of distributive pattern by contending that individuals are not passive elements receiving the goods that are exterior to them, but they are rather active in the process by creating social meaning. In other words, the value attached to a particular good to be distributed is not something that can be abstracted from the conditions that give rise to its creation, or from the identities and self-understandings of those involved in the creative process. For Walzer, our identities as persons cannot be given independently of the process and contexts in which we create and discover institutions and practices, which give rise to the social meanings of those things we create, embody within them identified criteria of distribution. The appropriate distribution is the one determined, not by an egalitarian standard, but rather internally conceived to the distributive context and the social meaning of the good itself. Each social or cultural context has a determinate social meaning distinct from others. Individuals are therefore conceived through class and groups in which the distributive paradigm identifies one set of social goods and claims as the common currency (Walzer 1983). Furthermore, an original conception of the individual can be found in the alternative communitarian theory of MacIntyre regarding virtue. Indeed, there are differences within the communitarian camp. While most seek to salvage liberal values from their atomistic foundation, as we have seen, MacIntyre puts more emphasis on the rejection of the modernity of liberalism and is less concerned to establish communitarian basis of liberalism. In his essay After Virtue (1984), he argues that the only viable basis for a moral tradition is the practice of virtue as it was exercised in past societies. this tendency to idealize pre-modern communities can be also in Sandel’s theory; however, MacIntyre can see no emancipatory potential in modernity, seeking “the construction of local forms of community” to escape “the new dark ages which are already upon us” (1984: 263). He argues that in the modern world, people use moral terms even if they are unable to assign any meaning to them, because they are no longer bounded to a whole of moral beliefs. Such a notion of the good and perfect virtue is meaningless. MacIntyre relies on a recovery of Aristotelian virtue theory which offer a conception of the good that give an account of what human beings require to live their human life. The loss of moral certainty and community is a result of the rise of instrumentalist and exchange relationships, which separated individuals from each other and from society. This abstracted community away to external sphere in politics, imposing identity upon individuals externally. The advocacy of pre-modern communities in opposition to central state societies leads MacIntyre to positively evaluate those social and cultural forces which have survived in the modern world by their closed nature. Such communities are thus incompatible with egalitarian justice and cultural openness which characterizes post modern and post liberal attempt to constitute community. We find this trend in Marxist theories that revaluate the moral failures of modernity but do so by seeking more secure foundations for morality through identity and community, those forms being discernible though history and modernity itself. Finally, we can underline Rawls’ response to most of these communitarian criticisms in his second major work Political Liberalism (1993), in which he clarifies a number of the claims he made in a Theory of Justice (1999). Among those critiques, we can summarize few: Rawls’ metaphysical conception of the individual as detached from his ends, and therefore the implausible universal character of his conception of justice; and the neglecting of his theory regarding the importance of communal goods and attachments in individuals’ lives. In response, Rawls argues the following points: His conception of justice is meant to be political and not comprehensive, that is, it rests on the political conception of the individual and applies to the basic political and social institutions of society, and not all of them. Hence, individuals are capable to detach themselves from their ends and attachments when thinking about principles of justice. He is not supposing that they are capable to do so in their common life (Rawls, 1993). The scope of justice is limited and thus individuals in their private lives can deploy and pursue a variety of comprehensive moral conceptions of what the good life is. Besides, far from being universal, Rawls makes sense of the fundamental and shared ideals constitutive of democratic society. He echoes Walzer’s claim that a theory of justice should sensitive to the social and shared understandings of a given community at a given time. Rawls therefore relies on the fact of reasonable pluralism in which individuals will hold different comprehensive moral and metaphysical doctrines given the society they live in. respect for individuals therefore requires that we come up with a theory of justice that doesn’t presuppose the idea that individuals, as rational and moral citizens, can all endorse it, regardless of their own moral doctrines (Rawls 1993). Therefore, we must distinguish them from public reasons from comprehensive moral and religious doctrines. The issue regarding the significance of the human person is at the heart of theoretical debates between liberalism and communitarianism. Individualism is globally seen as a problem in that it presupposes a false social ontology by radically atomizing society and dissolving social bonds. Many liberal perspectives are indeed subject to such criticisms. However, some would argue that it is not an essential failure for liberalism to be “atomistic” in the sense it is individualist in an ethical or normative way. That means, in asserting the equal dignity of persons it attaches supreme ethical significance to the human person. This does not involve the denial of any social ontology and how individuals may find their identities in. It simply asserts that the social account of identity arrives second after the ethical significance. No Liberal is require to follow Thatcher’s statement; what liberals do claim is that no constitutive attachment must trump the clams of individuals and their basic rights and status.  To conclude, there is a division between a conception of community which is made by the people themselves and a conception in which community is supplied for the people. Marx engaged in an attempt to secure the conditions of real community, a community constituted from below, from the masses, and based on an appropriate social identity. Communitarian critics attempt a synthesis in which individuality and communality are not antithetical but rather combines in a community, which reconciles the individual with the social self (Taylor 1982; Buchanan 1989). Therefore it tried to develop a concept of self able to combine individual and collective identity within a community that would overcome the public-private dualism in order to unify autonomy and sociality. However, as with any dualism, individual and community appear as interdependent and thus imply a need to get to the source of this antithesis in the division of social space into public and private spheres, impersonal and personal. Attempting to synthetize the to discourses would only subvert the dualism of the term. Marx finally offers a discourse which avoids dualism and conceives individuals an communities not in antithetical terms as part individual and part social but as both one and other. Embracing a nostalgic conception of community, like communitarians do, would not solve the problems posed by the autonomous and disembodied self of the liberal tradition. Marx offers a critical project of individuals and communities aiming to replace not only the disembodied self but also the liberalism/communitarianism dualism on which that issue is based (Elster 1986).  Bibliography Buchanan, Allen E. (1989) “Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism”. Ethics 99 (4), 852-882 Dworkin, Ronald. (1978) A Matter of Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Elster, J. (1986). An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will. (1989) Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press MacIntyre, Alastair. (1984) After Virtue: A study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. 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