Examine communitarian perspective on justice. (2019, 15 Marks)
John Rawls called justice “the first virtue of social institutions.” Communitarians reply that justice cannot be derived by abstract individuals choosing universal principles; it must start from the community whose shared goods give it meaning. The claim is best examined by stating its themes and then testing them.
The perspective in five claims
- Situated self: persons are embedded in social relations and constituted by unchosen attachments (Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre). Charles Taylor‘s critique of atomism holds that autonomy grows only inside a sustaining society, echoing Hannah Arendt‘s stress on shared civic life.
- Good before right: Sandel reverses Rawls’s priority of the right; what is just depends on what a community holds good.
- Against neutrality: the state cannot be truly neutral and should promote a common good; neutral liberalism quietly carries its own culture’s assumptions while claiming universality.
- Particularism: in Spheres of Justice (1983), Michael Walzer holds that different goods go by different criteria, fixed by their social meanings. Complex equality replaces any single master principle, Rawls’s included.
- Rights with responsibilities: rights rest on membership.
Testing against theory
- The liberal reply. Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” (1985) and Political Liberalism (1993) made the original position a model of the citizen, not a metaphysics of the self, and grounded justice in a democratic public culture amid reasonable pluralism, a partial concession to heterogeneity.
- Will Kymlicka (Liberalism, Community and Culture, 1989) treats culture as a context of choice: liberals value community yet insist that “no end or goal is exempt from possible re-examination.” Much of the attack hits a caricature.
- The oppression problem. Susan Moller Okin asked whose community sets the terms, since traditions have subordinated women. Walzer conceded that a caste-ordered village could count as just if its meanings were truly shared, exposing his relativism.
Testing against Indian evidence
- Against: in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (27 March 2018) the Supreme Court held khap panchayats’ interference in consenting adults’ marriages illegal. B. R. Ambedkar called the village “a sink of localism.” Here the individual needs protection from the community.
- For: minority cultural rights (Articles 29–30) and plural personal laws recognise groups; Bhikhu Parekh (Rethinking Multiculturalism, 2000) defends such recognition.
- Live contest: the Karnataka hijab split verdict (13 October 2022) and the Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code (in force 27 January 2025; Gujarat and Assam UCC Bills in 2026).
Assessment
The perspective succeeds against the thin liberal self and the neglect of recognition, which matters more as societies become multicultural; Rawls’s political turn concedes as much. It fails as a complete theory, offering no standpoint from which to judge an oppressive community. Amitai Etzioni‘s responsive communitarianism, balancing rights and responsibilities, is the defensible middle ground.
Conclusion
Communitarianism is a necessary corrective, not a replacement: community should shape justice, but communities must answer to it. India’s design, with group rights bounded by individual Fundamental Rights, strikes that balance.