Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [105]
Whether egalitarian or libertarian, theories of justice that aspire to neutrality have a powerful appeal. They offer hope that politics and law can avoid becoming entangled in the moral and religious controversies that abound in pluralist societies. And they express a heady conception of human freedom that casts us as the authors of the only moral obligations that constrain us.
Despite its appeal, however, this vision of freedom is flawed. So is the aspiration to find principles of justice that are neutral among competing conceptions of the good life.
This is at least the conclusion to which I’m drawn. Having wrestled with the philosophical arguments I’ve laid before you, and having watched the way these arguments play out in public life, I do not think that freedom of choice—even freedom of choice under fair conditions—is an adequate basis for a just society. What’s more, the attempt to find neutral principles of justice seems to me misguided. It is not always possible to define our rights and duties without taking up substantive moral questions; and even when it’s possible it may not be desirable. I’ll now try to explain why.
The Claims of Community
The weakness of the liberal conception of freedom is bound up with its appeal. If we understand ourselves as free and independent selves, unbound by moral ties we haven’t chosen, we can’t make sense of a range of moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize. These include obligations of solidarity and loyalty, historic memory and religious faith—moral claims that arise from the communities and traditions that shape our identity. Unless we think of ourselves as encumbered selves, open to moral claims we have not willed, it is difficult to make sense of these aspects of our moral and political experience.
In the 1980s, a decade after Rawls’s A Theory of Justice gave American liberalism its fullest philosophical expression, a number of critics (of which I was one) challenged the ideal of the freely choosing, unencumbered self along the lines I’ve just suggested. They rejected the claim for the priority of the right over the good, and argued that we can’t reason about justice by abstracting from our aims and attachments. They became known as the “communitarian” critics of contemporary liberalism.
Most of the critics were uneasy with the label, for it seemed to suggest the relativist view that justice is simply whatever a particular community defines it to be. But this worry raises an important point: Communal encumbrances can be oppressive. Liberal freedom developed as an antidote to political theories that consigned persons to destinies fixed by caste or class, station or rank, custom, tradition, or inherited status. So how is it possible to acknowledge the moral weight of community while still giving scope to human freedom? If the voluntarist conception of the person is too spare—if all our obligations are not the product of our will—then how can we see ourselves as situated and yet free?
Storytelling Beings
Alasdair MacIntyre offers a powerful answer to this question. In his book After Virtue (1981), he gives an account of the way we, as moral agents, arrive at our purposes and ends. As an alternative to the voluntarist conception of the person, MacIntyre advances a narrative conception. Human beings are storytelling beings. We live our lives as narrative quests. “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?’ ”36
All lived narratives, MacIntyre observes, have a certain teleological character. This does not mean they have a fixed purpose or end laid down by some external authority. Teleology and unpredictability coexist. “Like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but none the less our lives have a certain form which projects itself toward our