Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [106]
To live a life is to enact a narrative quest that aspires to a certain unity or coherence. When confronted with competing paths, I try to figure out which path will best make sense of my life as a whole, and of the things I care about. Moral deliberation is more about interpreting my life story than exerting my will. It involves choice, but the choice issues from the interpretation; it is not a sovereign act of will. At any given moment, others may see more clearly than I do which path, of the ones before me, fits best with the arc of my life; upon reflection, I may say that my friend knows me better than I know myself. The narrative account of moral agency has the virtue of allowing for this possibility.
It also shows how moral deliberation involves reflection within and about the larger life stories of which my life is a part. As MacIntyre writes, “I am never able to seek the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual.”38 I can make sense of the narrative of my life only by coming to terms with the stories in which I find myself. For MacIntyre (as for Aristotle), the narrative, or teleological, aspect of moral reflection is bound up with membership and belonging.
We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone’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 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. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my own life its moral particularity.39
MacIntyre readily concedes that the narrative account is at odds with modern individualism. “From the standpoint of individualism I am what I myself choose to be.” On the individualist view, moral reflection requires that I set aside or abstract from my identities and encumbrances: “I cannot be held responsible for what my country does or has done unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. Such individualism is expressed by those modern Americans who deny any responsibility for the effects of slavery upon black Americans, saying, ‘I never owned any slaves.’”40 (It should be noted that MacIntyre wrote these lines almost two decades before Congressman Henry Hyde made exactly this statement in opposing reparations.)
MacIntyre offers as a further example “the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries.” MacIntyre sees in this stance a moral shallowness. It wrongly assumes that “the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses.”41
The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear. For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships.42
MacIntyre’s narrative conception of the person offers a clear contrast with the voluntarist conception of persons as freely choosing, unencumbered selves. How can we decide between the two? We might ask ourselves which better captures the experience of moral deliberation, but that is a hard question to answer in the abstract. Another way of assessing the two views is to ask which offers a more convincing account of moral and political obligation. Are we bound by some moral ties we haven’t chosen and that can’t be traced to a social contract?
Obligations Beyond Consent
Rawls’s answer would be no. On the liberal conception, obligations can arise in only two ways—as natural duties we owe to human beings as such and as voluntary obligations we incur by consent.43 Natural duties are universal. We owe them to persons as persons, as rational