7 - Three grades of social involvement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2009
Summary
Communitarianism is, among other things, a form of perfectionism. Unlike subjectivists, who identify good lives exclusively with lives that agents would want, choose, or enjoy under actual or ideal conditions, many communitarians maintain that each self is hopelessly compromised by the broader society's culture, traditions, and shared understandings. Because they believe that individuals are not the fundamental moral units, these communitarians contend that what constitutes a good life depends not on any agent's actual or possible desires, choices, or enjoyments, but rather on the culture, traditions, and shared understandings that have shaped these or that provide them with content. However, in the current chapter, I shall contest both the negative and the positive components of this position. Although I share the communitarians' opposition to subjectivism, I shall argue that society's involvement in the self has no clear implications about the good.
The claim that individuals are indissolubly bound up with their society is very familiar. It is easily locatable in the writings of Marx, and is echoed by many on both the political left and the right. The following passages are representative:
In contrast to the individualistic picture of individuals as like onions which, once their outer, culturally-relative skins are peeled off, are “much the same in all times and places” the sociological apperception reveals society as irreducibly constitutive of or built into the individual in crucial and profound ways.
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- Beyond NeutralityPerfectionism and Politics, pp. 156 - 175Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997