1. These others, it should be noted, include not merely other individuals, but groups and communities as well, which cannot be reduced to mere collections of individuals without begging the metaphysical question in favor of liberalism.

2. Fletcher, George P.. Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships 15 (1992).Google Scholar

3. Sandel, Michael, The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 12 Political Theory 81, 90–91 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical, 14 Phil. & Public Aftairs 223 (1985)Google Scholar; Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity 123–30 (1987).Google Scholar

5. See Calston, William A., Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversityin the Liberal State 152–53 (1991).Google Scholar

6. See Ludan, David, Legal Modernism 385–91 (1994)Google Scholar; Luban, David. The Legal Ethics of Radical Communitarianum (book review), 60 Tenn. L. Rev. 589, 605–08 (1993).Google Scholar

7. The Identities of Persons 11 (Rorty, Amélie O. ed., 1976).Google Scholar

8. My argument is thus in sympathy with that of Will Kymlicka, who believes that Larmore and Rawls concede the metaphysical high ground to communitarians too readily, for in fact the communitarian picture of the self is both descriptively implausible and normatively unappealing. Kymucka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture 58–61 (1989)Google Scholar. My argumentative strategy differs from Kymlicka's, however. He contests the communitarians on the issues of (1) whether, as a matter of empirical fact, we ever find ourselves as unreflectively and totally identified with certain ends that the very possibility of revising them without destroying our identity is unthinkable (the communitarians say yes; Kymlicka expresses reservations); (2) whether the liberal faith that we are capable of revising any of our ends is as unattractive as communitarians make it out to be (the communitarians, and Larmore, say yes; Kymlicka says no); and (3) whether liberalism can still be defended after conceding (1) and (2) to the communitarians (Larmore and Rawls say yes; Kymlicka says no). The latter two points, important though they are, do not actually bear on the metaphysical issue, but the first clearly does. On issue (1), Kymlicka's principal argument against the communitarians is that their view of what it means for a self to be “embedded in communal roles incorporates the sense in which liberals view us as independent of them…. The differences would be merely semantic.” Kymlicka, id. at 58. My objection to communitarian theories of the self is more basic: It is that communitarians offer no defensible argument for the claim that the self is embedded in communal roles in any sense.

The present article likewise overlaps with Carse, Alisa L., The Liberal Individual: A Metaphysical or Moral Embarrassment?, 28 Nous 184 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Again, however, the strategies are somewhat different: Carse concedes for the sake of argument that the communitarian view of the self is true, and then argues that the main features of liberalism remain unharmed by this concession. I draw the line before, rather than after, this metaphysical concession.

9. Galatians 3:28. Of course St. Paul's passage argues for a cosmopolitan vision, which may be inconsistent with communitarian political philosophy.

10. Letter from Birmingham City Jail, in King, Martin Limier Jr., Why We Cant Wait 79 (1963).Google Scholar

11. Shaffer, Thomas L., The Legal Ethics of Radical Individualism, 65 Texas L. Rev. 963 (1987).Google Scholar

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13. Id. at 130 n. Shaffer remarks earlier in the same book, “Moral philosophers know … that the way to keep hold of a trivial subject is to make it complicated.” Id. at 17.

14. I deliberately use Sandel's term “allegiances” rather than “obligations,” because the latter is more a term of art in moral theory. See generally Williams, Bernard, Ethics and The Limits of Philosophy (1985)Google Scholar for a salutary warning against reducing ethics to the study of obligations. I do not mean to deny that obligations form a part of our moral landscape, and it may well be that allegiances impose obligations; Fletcher, for example, analyzes several obligations of loyalty.

15. Sandel supra note 3. at 90. See also Fletcher, , supra note 2, at 120. 146–47Google Scholar (on the permissibility of compulsory loyalty oaths for school children and flag-protection statutes to prevent “a violation of our collective sense of what is permissible in our public space”).

16. Fletcher, , supra note 2, at 17.Google Scholar

17. Sandel, , supra note 3, at 90.Google Scholar

18. Gahton, , supra note 5, at 151.Google Scholar

19. I will use the term “communitarian self” as my term of choice. In my parlance, the term is interchangeable with such terms as “historical self,” “relational self,” “thick self,” “encumbered self,” “social self,” “contingent self,” etc.

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22. Id. at 16.

23. Id. at 25.

24. Id. at 40.

25. Luban, David, review of Fletcher, Loyalty. 41 J. Phil. 144, 145 (1994).Google Scholar

26. Fletcher describes the genesis of his focus on loyalty in a conversation with David Hartman:

I had explained to Rabbi Hartman that I had done most of my philosophical work on the Kantian theory of law and morality. Hartman turned to me, quizzically, and said, “Fletcher, don't you know that Kant's universalistic ethics cannot accommodate special relationships.”

Fletcher, , supra note 2, at ix–xGoogle Scholar. Kant's conception of autonomy implies that, in the end, all moral obligations originate in the will and, hence, in the self. Fletcher's movement from “universalistic ethics” to loyalty-based, particularistic ethics might be understood as an effort to maintain the Kantian idea that moral obligations originate in the self while acknowledging particularistic obligations. These two ideas can be reconciled by incorporating particularistic features into the self. If the self is defined by special relationships, then obligations toward the “others” in those relationships follow from the Kantian thesis that morality originates in the self. I am suggesting that communitarians might do better dropping the latter proposition.

27. See Kymlicka, , supra note 8, at 53Google Scholar (on the “communitarian view of practical reasoning as self-discovery”).

28. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason 31Google Scholar (Beck, Lewis White trans. 1956).Google Scholar

29. It is noteworthy that the idealists were communitarian in their social philosophy.

30. 21Blanshard, Brand, The Nature of Thought 475 (1935)Google Scholar. See also Blanshard, Brand. Reason and Anausis 475–93 (1962)Google Scholar; Blanshard, Brand, Internal Relations and Their Importance to Philosophy, 21 Rev. Metaphysics 227 (1967).Google Scholar

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32. The discussion that follows is a generalization of an argument of Aune, Bruce, Blanshard and Internal Relations, 21 Rev. Metaphysics 237, 238 (1967).Google Scholar

33. We may formalize this proposition as follows: (1) Nec ((xRy) ⊃ (a) (b) (not-(aRb) ⊃ ((x ≠ a) or (y ≠ b)))). That (1) is true is easily shown, for the proposition within the modal operator, ((xRy) ⊃ (a) (b) (not-(aRb) ⊃ ((x ≠ a) or (y ≠ b))), is a logical truth. In order for it to be false. xRy would have to be true while (a) (b) (not-(aRb) ⊃ ((x ≠ a) or (y ≠ b))) is false. In that case, we can find a and b such that not-(aRb) is true while ((x ≠ a) or (y ≠ b)) is false, i.e., while ((x = a) & (y=b)) is true. But then we would have that not-(xRy), and thus that (xRy)&( not-(xRy)), a contradiction.

34. We may formalize (2) as follows: (2) xRy ⊃ Nec ((a) (b) (not-(aRb) ⊃ ((x ≠ a) or (y ≠b)))). That (2) is false is easily shown. Suppose xRy is true, but only contingently so. Then it is possible that not-(xRy), in which case the consequent. Nec ((a)(b) (not-(aRb) ⊃ ((x ≠a) or (y ≠b)))), is false, even though the antecedent, xRy, is true.

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36. Id. at 479–80.

37. Id. at 481.

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39. Id., quoting from Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness 707 (Hazel E. Barnes trans., 1956).Google Scholar

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41. Id. at 981.

42. Id. at 965.

43. Id.

44. I should stress that Dan-Cohen would not accept this characterization of his theory, for elsewhere he criticizes communitarianism. Dan-Cohen, Meir, Between Selves and Collectivities: Toward a Jurisprudence of Identity, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1213, 1235 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Dan-Cohen, , supra note 38, at 966.Google Scholar

46. Id. at 968.

47. Id.

48. Subsequently, Dan-Cohen derives the fundamental communitarian notion of groups constituting identity as a corollary to his theory, further confirming it as a variant of the communitarian theory:

To say that someone … is an American is to designate what is likely to be an important aspect of her self…. By assuming subject-responsibility for being an American, she acknowledges her American identity as a constitutive element of herself.

Id. at 987.

49. Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice 152 (1981).Google Scholar

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51. Id. at 963.

52. Id. at 981.

53. Id. at 979.

54. Earlier in the article, he argues (hat inanimate objects can become part of our selves, approvingly quoting Merleau-Ponty's opinion that “It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space.” Id. at 967 (quoting Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception 145 (Colin Smith trans., 1962)Google Scholar). One hopes that Merleau-Ponty does not mean the word “literally” literally.

55. See Feinberg, Joel, Collective Responsibility, in Collective Responsibility 59 (Larry May & Stacey Hoffman eds., 1992).Google Scholar

56. More accurately, “he.”

57. This is not to deny that a total, Jekyll-and-Hyde change in personality might best be described as a change in person. It is in the less extreme, everyday cases that the two concepts diverge.

58. Sandel, , supra note 3, at 91Google Scholar. The identical language appears in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, supra note 49, at 179.Google Scholar

59. Sandel, , supra note 3, at 87.Google Scholar

60. Kant, Immanuel, Doctrine of Justice, in The Metaphysics of Morals, 96 (Mary Gregor trans., 1991)Google Scholar, §24. Brecht wrote an amusing poem about this definition, suggesting that these are contracts so frequently violated that soon it will be necessary to send in the bailiffs.

61. See Fletcher, . supra note 2. at 15Google Scholar: “In oversimplified terms, the ethic of loyalty takes relationships as logically prior to the individual, while liberal morality thinks of the individual, existing wholly formed, choosing to enter into relationships.”

62. Sandel, . supra note 49, at 64.Google Scholar

63. In addition, “constitute” has often been used by philosophers in the tradition of German idealism from Fichte to Husserl as a term of art referring to “transcendental constitution.” What does this mean? At worst, “transcendental constitution” sometimes means little more than some kind of inexplicable metaphysical causality, discernible by philosophical speculation rather than empirical investigation. When philosophers use the term this way, the concept plainly begs all the important questions, since no one has adequately explained what this kind of causality is. Alternatively, “transcendental constitution” can be given a more analytically precise definition: “X transcendentally constitutes Y” means that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y. To say that relationships constitute the self is then to say that these relationships are a necessary condition for the possibility of (having a) self. I regard this as a variant of the logical priority thesis—the relationships are logically prior to the self—and so I will not undertake an independent discussion of transcendental constitution.

64. Fletcher, , supra note 2, at 15Google Scholar. Though Fletcher describes this proposition as “oversimplified,” he neither disowns it nor explains wherein the oversimplification lies. I propose to take it at face value.

65. I have borrowed the arguments of this paragraph from my review of Fletcher, , supra note 25, at 145–46.Google Scholar

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67. Id. at 603.

68. See, e.g., the section on teaching ethics in Kant, 's Doctnnt of Virtue The Metafhisics of Morals, supra note 60, at 266–68Google Scholar, §§49–52.

69. I take the term “practical spontaneity” from Allison, Henry E., Kants Theory of Freedom 40–41 (1990).Google Scholar

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73. Id.

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76. Luban, , Mid-Course Corrections, supra note 75, at 454–55.Google Scholar

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79. I owe these points to Lea Brilmayer.

80. Introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, xxvii (Leavitt, David ed., 1994).Google Scholar

81. For an interesting discussion of Rawls's views on the nature of the subject, see Michelman, Frank I., The Subject of Liberalism, 46 Stan. L. Rev. 1807 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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