Rawls’ idea of ‘liberal self’ is too individualistic. Explain, in this context, the communitarian critique of Rawls’ theory of justice. (2023, 15 Marks)
The communitarian case against John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) is an argument about the self. If the person who chooses the principles is misdescribed, the principles lose their authority.
The Rawlsian self
- In the original position, parties choose behind a veil of ignorance: rational, mutually disinterested, and ignorant of their own conception of the good.
- Rawls holds that “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it” (§84). A person is defined by the capacity to choose and revise ends, not by any particular end.
- Hence the priority of the right over the good and a neutral state.
The communitarian critique
- Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982) calls this the unencumbered self. Real persons are encumbered: family, nation and faith are constitutive, not chosen. A person without such attachments would be “wholly without character, without moral depth.”
- Sandel turns Rawls against himself: the difference principle treats talents as a common asset (§17), which presupposes a constitutive community that Rawls’s account of the self denies.
- Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) offers the narrative self: “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?'” Virtues, justice included, are learned inside a tradition’s practices, so principles drawn from a hypothetical choice lack moral roots.
- Charles Taylor (“Atomism”, 1979) argues that autonomy itself is formed within a sustaining society (the social thesis). His “Politics of Recognition” (1992) adds that identity is shaped by others’ recognition, so a difference-blind liberalism fails minority cultures.
- Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983): distributive rules follow the shared meanings of goods, which abstract choosers cannot generate.
The liberal reply
- In “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” (1985) and Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls called the original position a device of representation modelling the citizen’s public identity; a religious conversion changes one’s moral identity, not one’s standing as a citizen.
- Will Kymlicka answered that liberals need only hold that “no end or goal is exempt from possible re-examination”; culture is the context of choice.
Indian illustration
- Reservation treats caste groups as the unit of redress (Indra Sawhney, 1992), and State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) permitted sub-classification within Scheduled Castes: a communitarian concession inside a liberal constitution.
- Yet B. R. Ambedkar defended the individual against caste community. The encumbered self may be encumbered by domination.
Conclusion
The charge of excessive individualism is half right. Sandel shows that Rawls’s egalitarianism presupposes more community than his account of the self admits, and Taylor that identity needs recognition. Rawls’s political turn blunts the metaphysical objection. The better synthesis keeps the revisable, rights-bearing self for public justice while accepting that such selves are formed in communities.