Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [115]
What do you make of the way William Bulger and David Kaczynski contended with their brothers? For Bulger, family loyalty outweighed the duty to bring a criminal to justice; for Kaczynski, the reverse. Perhaps it makes a moral difference whether the brother at large poses a continuing threat. This seemed to weigh heavily for David Kaczynski: “I guess it’s fair to say I felt compelled. The thought that another person would die and I was in the position to stop that—I couldn’t live with that.”70
However you judge the choices they made, it is hard to read their stories without coming to this conclusion: the dilemmas they faced make sense as moral dilemmas only if you acknowledge that the claims of loyalty and solidarity can weigh in the balance against other moral claims, including the duty to bring criminals to justice. If all our obligations are founded on consent, or on universal duties we owe persons as persons, it’s hard to account for these fraternal predicaments.
Justice and the Good Life
We’ve now considered a range of examples meant to challenge the contractarian idea that we are the authors of the only moral obligations that constrain us: public apologies and reparations; collective responsibility for historic injustice; the special responsibilities of family members, and of fellow citizens, for one another; solidarity with comrades; allegiance to one’s village, community, or country; patriotism; pride and shame in one’s nation or people; fraternal and filial loyalties. The claims of solidarity seen in these examples are familiar features of our moral and political experience. It would be difficult to live, or to make sense of our lives, without them. But it is equally difficult to account for them in the language of moral individualism. They can’t be captured by an ethic of consent. That is, in part, what gives these claims their moral force. They draw on our encumbrances. They reflect our nature as storytelling beings, as situated selves.
What, you may be wondering, does all this have to do with justice? To answer this question, let’s recall the questions that led us down this path. We’ve been trying to figure out whether all our duties and obligations can be traced to an act of will or choice. I’ve argued that they cannot; obligations of solidarity or membership may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice—reasons bound up with the narratives by which we interpret our lives and the communities we inhabit.
What exactly is at stake in this debate between the narrative account of moral agency and the one that emphasizes will and consent? One issue at stake is how you conceive human freedom. As you ponder the examples that purport to illustrate obligations of solidarity and membership, you might find yourself resisting them. If you are like many of my students, you might dislike or mistrust the idea that we’re bound by moral ties we haven’t chosen. This dislike might lead you to reject the claims of patriotism, solidarity, collective responsibility, and so on; or to recast these claims as arising from some form of consent. It’s tempting to reject or to recast these claims because doing so renders them consistent with a familiar idea of freedom. This is the idea that says we are unbound by any moral ties we haven’t chosen; to be free is to be the author of the only obligations that constrain us.
I am trying to suggest, through these and other examples we consider throughout this book, that this conception of freedom is flawed. But freedom is not the only issue at stake here. Also at stake is how to think about justice.
Recall the two ways of thinking about justice we’ve considered. For Kant and Rawls, the right is prior to the good. The principles of justice that define our duties and rights should be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the