What do we owe one another ?

                                                     JUSTICE AND FREEDOM 

   Egalitarian liberals favor civil liberties and basic social and economic rights --- rights to health care, education, employment, and income security, and so on. They argue that enabling individuals to pursue their own ends requires that government ensure the material conditions of truly free choice. Since the time of the New Deal, proponents of America's welfare state have argued less in the name of social solidarity and common obligation than in the name of individual rights and freedom of choice. When Franklin Roosevelt launched Social Security in 1935, he did not present it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another. Instead, he designed it to resemble a private insurance scheme, funded by payroll "contributions" rather than general tax revenues. And when, in 1944, he laid out an agenda for the American welfare state, he called it an "economic bill of rights." Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to "true individual freedom," adding, "necessitous men are not free men." 
   For their part, libertarians (usually called conservatives in contemporary politics, at least on economic issues) also argue for a neutral state that respects individual choice. But they disagree with egalitarian liberals about what policies these ideals require. As laissez-faire critics of the welfare state, libertarians defend free markets and argue that people are entitled to keep the money they make. "How can a man be truly free," asked Barry Goldwater, a libertarian conservative and 1964 Republican presidential candidate, "if the fruits of his labor are not his to dispose of, but are treated, instead, as part of a common pool of public wealth ?" For libertarians, a neutral state requires civil liberties and a strict regime of private property rights. The welfare state, they argue, does not enable individuals to choose their own ends, but coerces some for the good of others.
   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 pluralistic 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 aspirations to find principles of justice that are neutral among competing conceptions of the good life. 

This is at least the conclusion to which thinking people must be drawn. Having wrestled with the philosophical arguments we've laid out, and having watched the way these arguments play out in public life, many thinking people could not believe 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. Let's 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 (including Prof. Michael Sandel, whose lectures these discussions are based on) challenged the ideal of the freely choosing, unencumbered self along the lines that have been suggested above. 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 BENGS

   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?' "
   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 future."
   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 narrate 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. " 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' 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 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. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my own life its moral particularity.

   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.' " (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 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 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." 

     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 try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships.

   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 ? 

















  







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                                        STORYTELLING BEINGS

   Alasdair MacIntyre offers a powerful answer to this question. In his book