Since Michael Sandel raised the issue in “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” the need for a communitarian ethic, especially in contemporary American society, has become the source of lively dispute. Marilyn Friedman’s reply to Sandel in “Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community” is an example that illustrates the issues Sandel’s argument raises. Arguably, for most readers Sandel’s primary claim against the liberal individualism is, as Amy Gutmann puts it, that “liberals must hold a set of implausible metaphysical views about the self. They cannot admit, for example, that our personal identities are partly defined by our communal attachments” (121).
Michael Sandel’s Critique of the Kantian Self
The reader might have guessed (or hoped, or feared) that this criticism of Sandel reaches back to Kant in some way of other and indeed, it does. For Sandel, the idea that we can somehow abstract from the social context within which we formulate our sense of ethical imperatives becomes the basis for a critique of Kantian ethics and of the classical notion of the autonomous individual. Sandel writes,
Now what is to guarantee that I am a subject of this kind, capable of exercising pure practical reason? Well, strictly speaking, there is no guarantee; the transcendental subject is only a possibility. But it is a possibility I must presuppose if I am to think of myself as a free moral agent. Were I wholly an empirical being, I would not be capable of exercising freedom, for every exercise of will would be conditioned by some object. All choice would be heteronomous choice, governed by the pursuit of some end. My will could never be a first cause, only the effect of some prior cause, the instrument of one or another impulse or inclination.
The Procedural Republic 17
What Sandel has in mind is Kant’s idea that we are capable of reasoning in a way that transcends the empirical context in which we are situated when forming our ethical judgments, that a radical kind of freedom is possible for us in doing so, so that he writes quoting Kant, “When we think of ourselves as free…we transfer ourselves to the intelligible world as members and recognize the autonomy of the will” (17). Sandel writes that this implies that the Kantian ethic requires “the notion of a subject prior to and independent of experience” and that this is furthermore a “necessary presupposition of the possibility of freedom” (17).
But this raises an important issue when Kantian ethical theory is applied to politics: is the assumption of a radically free will necessary to ground the notion of freedom? It may be in order to find a metaphysical grounding for morality—as was Kant’s aim. But it can be asked: is this kind of radical autonomy necessary to ground the notion of political freedom? Is there any reason not to bracket these metaphysical claims and take a more pragmatic look at the problem?
Sandel v. Rawls
This is the path Rawls chose in formulating the terms of an original position, a thought experiment in which the members of a society are imagined as being presented with the freedom to choose the original terms of a new society. Behind the “veil of ignorance” concerning their future and social identity, they are imagined to be in a situation in which their own personal interests must coincide with the interests of society as a whole. For example, if someone were to propose that society should be created in such a way as to grant greater freedoms to a certain class or group over others or, alternatively, to deny certain freedoms to others, rationality would guide the parties to the original position toward equity since no one can be sure whether they might fall into a disadvantaged class.
What may be noticed here is the way in which the original position induces a way of reasoning about social justice that renews the Kantian notion of the ideal ethical actor who takes the position of a legislator, one who reasons in such a way as to perpetuate the social good, toward an ideal community. What Rawls accomplishes by the terms of his thought experiment is to formulate the basis for an ethical imperative without the metaphysical baggage the categorical imperative carries. But it should also be noticed, as Sandel does, that both ways of approaching this sense of an ethical imperative involve considering the individual as free in a radical sense. In Rawls’ case, the freedom to choose is again based upon a hypothetical, the possibility of imagining an individual who can reason about the social good from a position outside his or her social circumstances. As Sandel puts it,
As participants in pure practical reason, or as parties to the original position, we are free to construct principles of justice unconstrained by an order of value antecedently given. And as actual, individual selves, we are free to choose our purposes and ends unbound by such an order, or by custom or tradition or inherited status. So long as they are not unjust, our conceptions of the good carry weight, whatever they are, simply in virtue of our having chosen them. We are, in Rawls’s words, ‘self-originating sources of valid claims’.”
The Procedural Republic 20
Furthermore, where Kantian ethical imperatives required an autonomous sense of the self, Sandel coins the term the “unencumbered self” to describe the unbiased state of someone in the original position. In both cases a source of individuality within us that is unconditioned by our social circumstances is the basis for formulating ethical claims that should apply to any social circumstance, that would be rationally applicable not to a particular political order, but to an ideal one grounded in a radically free use of one’s reason.
Sandel’s Critique of John Rawls
It is the possibility of this kind of “self-defining subject” that Sandel rejects in favor of a “constitutive” version of the self, one that is regarded as essentially constituted by the history and circumstances of its development. He does so by pointing out a flaw in Rawls’s move from the difference principle to the claim that, in reasoning from the notion of an unencumbered self, anyone has an obligation to share the results of their good fortune with others for the sake of minimizing inequality (See 22-24). This will be explained in what follows.
First, the difference principle, it may be recalled from section 13 of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, is the idea that whatever causes one member of a society to succeed ought not to be the cause of a decline in another’s life prospects. This is the basis for introducing “fair equality of opportunity” and income redistribution into society in accordance with the ideal of justice as fairness, an ideal Rawls regards as grounded rationally by the constraints of the original position. But, Sandel objects (and this is the hinge point of his argument) that there is no basis for the notion that anything is owed to anyone else in society that might take precedence over the individual’s right to his own good fortune, so long as the self is conceived as not being constituted by its social environment and history. Sandel makes his case as follows:
What the difference principle requires, but cannot provide, is some way of identifying those among whom the assets I bear are properly regarded as common, some way of seeing ourselves as mutually indebted and morally engaged to begin with. But as we have seen, the constitutive aims and attachments that would save and situate the difference principle are precisely the ones denied to the liberal self; the moral encumbrances and antecedent obligations they imply would undercut the priority of right.
The Procedural Republic 23
The upshot is that so long as the classical-liberal notion of the self is maintained, of a self that can lay claim to a radical kind of freedom and autonomy, a radical kind of individuality that does not necessarily need to acknowledge society in formation of its identity, there is no rationale for sharing one’s good fortune with society.
But if that is the case, then Rawls’s assumption of the liberal, individualistic self-concept undermines the difference principle, the principle that a sharing of one’s good fortune coincides with the notion of fairness. How can such a notion of fairness be justified from the liberal individual’s point of view? Would not such an individual have as much right to his assets as society does? It appears that Rawls’s ideal society would enact a structural conflict between individual rights and the claims of society. In short, the difference principle would pit individual rights against the notion of justice as fairness. Furthermore, it should be recalled that Rawls sees the notion of individual rights as having a priority over the social good, so that the social good should neither be attained at the expense of trampling individual rights (See A Theory of Justice sect. 6, pp. 30-31) nor by using some as the means to the happiness of all, and thereby failing to respect each individual as an end in himself (Sandel 20-21). But for Sandel, this priority or the right over the good leads to the potential for individual members of society to feel no attachment to their community; if, instead, the good of the community were prioritized, a societal obligation would become a part of the normal functioning of society (23).
Sandel’s conclusion is that it is the liberal concept of the individual that must be done away with, if this point of conflict is to be resolved, in favor of a new understanding of the individual that is more in harmony with Rawls’s own communitarian ideals where the social good is prioritized. In such a case, one’s personal identity should be seen as constituted by one’s community and its history leading to a sense of obligation:
Can we view ourselves as independent selves, independent in the sense that our identity is never tied to our aims and attachments?
I do not think we can, at least not without cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are–as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have, and to hold, at a certain distance. they go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the ‘natural duties’ I owe to human beings as such. they allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not by reason of the agreements I have made but instead by virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments that, taken together,partly define the person I am.
The Procedural Republic 23
Reply
It must be asked whether Sandel’s critique of Rawls is truly a viable one. His way of reasoning about Kantian liberal autonomy and Rawlsian liberal communitarianism raises a few questions. Does Rawls have a way of responding to the difficulties Sandel raises about the relationship between the self and its attachment to the community? Can Rawls’s difference principle stand up despite Sandel’s critique? Does the capacity to reason hypothetically without any sense of one’s future aims or obligations really entail a self that is radically detached from any moral basis for carrying out those obligations? Doesn’t Rawls’s sense of the liberal self really describe the kind of modern self that exists in any society, capable of reasoning in a detached way about its moral commitments, but prepared to follow through with them or stand opposed to them? Is this not a strength of liberal democracies?
Both Kant and Rawls imagine us to have the kind of self that is capable of reasoning about ethical standards and communal obligations founded upon reason. Yet even a self envisioned as purely rational does not need to be understood as lacking a moral sense. In fact, reasoning from one’s rational self-interest to equity to the sense that the outcome is just requires some kind of moral sense and indeed Rawls builds a moral sense into the reasoning that the participants in the original position carry out (A Theory of Justice 12). Nothing, after all, guarantees that they will reason to Rawls’s conclusions about the just way to order a society, but a moral sense as much as pure reason might be necessary to ensure that they would if they reasoned about things as Rawls suggests they should. In any case, there seems no reason to think that the selves that are “unencumbered” as Sandel puts it, would not be capable of carrying out their obligation to the community and uphold the difference principle on the basis of both reason and a sense of justice, provided that they individually reasoned to Rawls’s conclusions on their own. This is a utopian vision. The alternative would be to envision a society that failed to respect the rationality of its citizens and it is difficult to imagine such a society as a truly ideal one.
In fact, it is difficult to see how to ground a sense of moral rightness without some appeal to reason. Without reason as a check, our sense of moral rightness might well be perverted by our social circumstances towards serving ends that can later be seen as unjust. Our ability to deliberate in the way that Rawls envisions in the original position is simply a more radical form of deliberation than usually prevails in our daily lives. The alternative Sandel envisions is a self that is constituted by its attachment to its community in a such a way that its obligation to that community is never something anterior to its sense of individuality. For such a communally defined self, its obligations to its family, nation, and other human beings would be grounded not primarily upon one’s own independent reasoning, but upon one’s own socially defined identity. Individuality, and self-interest in particular, would not come between such obligations.
Yet, it must naturally be wondered whether the sort of communally constituted self Sandel imagines could find sufficient reason to question its obligations to an unjust community. If individual reason is not in some way prior, even as a capacity to deliberate about hypotheticals, can Sandel’s constituted self come to see the unjust nature of its attachment to such a community and reject them? This objection gains added emphasis when it is considered that Sandel envisions a society in which the common good has a higher priority than individual rights. What moral principle would stand in the way of violating individual rights in the name of the common good in such a society? How could that sense of the good be established in such a society except by individual reason?
Works Cited
Freidman, Marilyn. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Communitarianism and Individualism, edited by Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit, in Oxford Readings in Politics and Government, Oxford University Press, 1992,101-119.
—Gutman, Amy. “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism.” 120-136.
—Sandel, Michael. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” 12-28.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
