Both of the concepts of community I distinguished in Chapter 1 play an evaluative role: each picks out a worthwhile type of social relationship. But why do these relationships have value and what sort of value do they possess? Although I have touched upon these questions, in this chapter I propose to explore them in more depth. This requires me to draw some distinctions in value theory, between what I call individualist and collectivist accounts of the value of social phenomena, and between something's being instrumentally valuable, non-instrumentally valuable or a necessary condition of achieving some other value. Having made these distinctions, I apply them to the case of community.

Some preliminary distinctions

Let me begin by distinguishing between individualist and collectivist accounts of the value of social relations and social entities, such as communities. Individualist accounts hold that the value of social relationships or other social phenomena is always reducible without remainder to the value they contribute to the lives of individuals. On this view, the value of a community has to be understood in terms of its contribution to the lives of members and non-members. In contrast, collectivist accounts of value allow that the value of a social phenomenon may not be reducible to the value it contributes to the lives of individuals. Donald Regan, for example, maintains that a community contributes to the value of the universe in which it occurs and its value is over and above the value it has for its members.