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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Theorists with strongly communal understandings of the common good frequently criticize the modern liberal state for failing to provide for the common good and for interfering with local communities. These critics, however, are less clear about what role, if any, the state should play in modern life. In order to trace a middle ground between liberal attempts to justify the state and too hasty communitarian condemnations of it, I develop a two-tiered theory of political justification. All political justification is to be seen in relationship to the common good of a community. While only local communities have a common good and a direct claim to political authority, the state can still have an indirect and derivative authority. After examining how this theory applies to thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, I propose an appropriate model for the relationship between local communities and the state.
1 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 254Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., p. 255.
3 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’. Text unpublished but delivered as a keynote address at ‘The Common Good as Common Project’ Conference from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, March 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nx0Kvb5U04.
4 Thus, in the discussion of ‘political authority’ throughout this essay, I do not necessarily mean by that ‘a right to be obeyed’. In this way, my usage of ‘political authority’ throughout the essay may differ somewhat from that of, e.g., Allen Buchanan. As both Buchanan and Joseph Raz note, at least conceptually, one can have ‘compelling reason’ to follow the directives of an entity, even a political one, in virtue of its issuing them without that entity thereby having a right to obedience (Allen Buchanan, ‘Political Legitimacy and Democracy’, Ethics 112 (July 2002), p. 692. See also Raz, Joseph, ‘The Obligation to Obey: Revision and Tradition’, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 1, no. 1 (1984), esp. pp. 139-149Google Scholar). In Buchanan's usage, an entity is ‘authoritative’ when one has compelling reasons to listen to it and has ‘political authority’ only where the right to obedience also exists. (Buchanan, ‘Political Legitimacy and Democracy’, pp. 691-692). In my usage, to say an entity has ‘political authority’ is usually just to say it is ‘authoritative’ in Buchanan's sense or even to say it simply has political power, taking no definite stand on whether a right to be obeyed is involved. The reason for my less restrictive usage is that it seems to follow MacIntyre's in the essay ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, heavily discussed below, where he does not theorize much about obedience per se and where the phrase ‘political power’ could often be directly substituted for ‘political authority’. This is not to exclude the possibility that MacIntyre needs political authority to include a right to obedience to justify death for the city or that at times he has this stronger meaning in mind. Rather, I have opted for a usage which remains neutral on this matter since his arguments might be adapted for either meaning and so do not turn on getting clarity where MacIntyre himself is silent. (See MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, in Knight, Kelvin, ed., The MacIntyre Reader (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), esp. pp. 241-242Google Scholar).
5 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 254.
6 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. For a further discussion of MacIntyre's distinction between common goods and individual goods on the basis of his earlier writings, see Murphy, Mark, ‘MacIntyre's Political Philosophy’, in Murphy, Mark, ed., Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 160-162CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This distinction is presupposed in the following discussion of common goods and practices.
9 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
10 It should be noted that MacIntyre's use of ‘public good’ in this way is idiosyncratic. Normally, the private-public distinction refers to whether a good is available to all (clean air) or only some (my cheese sandwich). Throughout the paper I will use ‘public good’ as MacIntyre does, although ‘individual good, cooperatively-achieved through government’ is more accurate. There is often an overlap, however, between what are normally thought of as public goods and that to which MacIntyre applies the term.
11 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
12 In Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, as will be discussed.
13 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 187.
14 Ibid., p. 188.
15 Ibid., pp. 188-189.
16 Ibid., p. 188.
17 MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 240, emphasis added.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., emphasis added.
21 MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 241.
22 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
23 MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 242.
24 Ibid.
25 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
26 MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 248.
27 Ibid.
28 MacIntyre allows that perhaps the political common good could be achieved on the level of a small nation-state. In any case, it could not be done on a scale larger than this. See MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’.
29 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), p. 132Google Scholar. See also Osborne, Thomas, ‘MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good’, Analyse & Kritik 30 (2008), p. 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-2008-0105, which discusses this comparison.
30 MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 242.
31 Ibid.
32 MacIntyre, ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’. While the text of this lecture is not published, what he says here can be easily harmonized with what he has written elsewhere, certain differences in tone notwithstanding. Even if MacIntyre's views in this lecture are meant to be provisional, he still suggests here one plausible way to give a justification of the state consistent with his previously stated views on the common good.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 I take it that this limited justification for the state should be acceptable to MacIntyre given his premises. It is true that Mark Murphy reads MacIntyre as giving an altogether negative assessment of the possibility for state justification and that MacIntyre's more conciliatory language comes from judging that since the state is not likely to go anywhere, local communities may as well use it to their benefit on a case-by-case basis. One reason Murphy thinks MacIntyre might be cautious of even a limited justification is that the kind of common deliberation present in local communities which keeps them from overstepping their authority could not exist within the state as such. But, as Murphy notes, this is largely an empirical question. There may be mechanisms for local communities to hold a limited state in check and that association within a state significantly benefits communal life. So, in Murphy's assessment, it is not a stretch to think that MacIntyre should support a limited state along the lines I am proposing after all. See Murphy, ‘MacIntyre's Political Philosophy’, pp. 170-172.
36 Sandel, Michael, ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self’, Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984), pp. 87-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 89-90, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591784012001005. For a much longer treatment of the claims in this paragraph, see Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982Google Scholar).
37 Sandel, ‘Procedural Republic’, p. 91. Emphasis in original.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. 92.
40 Ibid., p. 93.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., p. 94.
43 Taylor, Charles, ‘Alternative Futures: Legitimacy, Identity, and Alienation in Late-Twentieth-Century Canada’, in Laforest, Guy, ed., Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Cf. MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, p. 242.
45 Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures’, p. 90.
46 Ibid., p. 89.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 92.
50 Ibid., p. 94.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 102.
53 Ibid., pp. 102-6. Quote on p. 106.
54 As one example of this approach, consider Rawls, who writes that ‘The fundamental organizing idea of justice as fairness, within which the other basic ideas are systematically connected, is that of society as a fair system of cooperation over time’ and that ‘The idea of social cooperation requires an idea of each participant's rational advantage, or good. This idea specifies what those who are engaged in cooperation…are trying to achieve, when the scheme is viewed from their own standpoint’. (Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], pp. 15-16Google Scholar.) One should bear in mind that here Rawls is proposing we treat people as individuals from the political point of view, which does not rely on a philosophical commitment to individualism. Indeed, adopting the above political conception of justice might be seen as a way of expressing the shared values of a contemporary political community characterized by pluralism. See Mulhall, Stephen and Swift, Adam, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 198��99, 201-02Google Scholar.
55 I am thinking, for example, of Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, Macpherson, C. B., ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1690] 1980Google Scholar), ch. IX, where individuals are said to leave the state of nature for the preservation of property. We can think of communities as doing the same sort of thing by uniting under the state.
56 One suggestion that points in this direction is made by Iris Marion Young, who proposes that one could apply a version of the Millian harm principle to delimit the autonomy of local communities as well as that of individuals. However, Young concludes that application of such a principle would normally lead to greater restrictions on the autonomy of the smallest local governments. Instead, she favors strong regional governments as a way to mitigate the effect of local resource inequalities. See Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 250-54Google Scholar. This raises questions I have not settled in this essay about just how small a community must be to have a substantive common good.
57 See Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures’, p. 93 for an example of one who thinks individual rights are compatible with what Taylor calls a ‘participatory society’.
58 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 36-37 for one place where he discusses the concept of ‘reasonable pluralism’.
59 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 26Google Scholar.
60 Ibid., esp. ch. 5-6, pp. 75-130. On p. 45 Kymlicka discusses how group-differentiated rights may apply in some cases to individuals and in some cases to whole groups.
61 Ibid., pp. 35-37.
62 See Locke, Second Treatise of Government; John Rawls, Political Liberalism; Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997Google Scholar).
