READINGS IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY

Edited by William Connolly and Steven Lukes

Language and Politics edited by Michael ShapiroLegitimacy and the State edited by William ConnollyLiberallsm and Its Critics edited by Michael J. Sandel

Power edited by Steven LukesRational Choice edited by Jon Elster

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Liberalism andIts Critics

Edited by MICHAEL]. SANDEL

nNew York University Press

New York

158 On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour

would be unthinkable without the peculiar constellations of themogern world. To reject them is unthinkable ethically. By the sametoken, it is not possible to simply trace them to a falseanthropology .

The task before us, rather, is to understand the empiricalprocesses that have made modern man lose sight of honour at theexpense of dignity - and then to think through both the anthro­pological and the ethical implications of this. Obviously theseremarks can do no more than point up some dimensions of theproblem. It may be allowed, though, to speculate that a rediscoveryof honour in the future development of modern society is bothempirically plausible and morally desirable. Needless to say, thiswill hardly take the form of a regressive restoration of traditionalcodes. But the contemporary mood of anti-institutionalism isunlikely to last, as Anton Zijderveld implies.9 Man's fundamentalconstitution is such that, just about inevitably, he will once moreconstruct institutions to provide an ordered reality for himself. Areturn to institutions will ipso facto be a return to honour. It willthen be possible again for individuals to identify themselves withthe escutcheons of their institutional roles, experienced now not asself-estranging tyrannies but as freely chosen vehicles of self­realization. The ethical question, of course, is what these institu­tions will be like. Specifically, the ethical test of any futureinstitutions, and of the codes of honour they will entail, will bewhether they succeed in embodying and in stabilizing the dis­coveries of human dignity that are the principle achievements ofmodern man.

NOTES

1 Cited in J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York:Doubleday-Anchor, 1954), p. 33 (myitalics).

2 J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964).3 Ibid.,pp. 271.4 Norbert Elias, Der Prozess der Zivilisation (Bern:Francke, 1969).5 Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: New

AmericanLibrary, 1964),1:25, p. 243.6 Ibid., n:74.7 W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I,v:i.8 ArnoldGehlen, Moral and Hypermoral (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1969).9 Anton Zijderveld, Abstract Society (NewYork: Doubleday, 1970).

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Michael J. Sandel: Justiceand the Good~:-

THE STATUS OF THE GOOD

The difficulty with Rawls' theory of the good is epistemologicalas well as moral, and in this it recalls a problem that arose inconnection with the concept of right - that of distinguishing astandard of assessment from the thing being assessed. If myfundamental values and final ends are to enable me, as surely theymust, to evaluate and regulate my immediate wants and desires,these values and ends must have a sanction independent of the merefact that I happen to hold them with a certain intensity. But if myconception of the good is simply the product of my immediatewants and desires, there is no reason to suppose that the criticalstandpoint it provides is any more worthy or valid than the desiresit seeks to assess; as the product of those desires, it would begoverned by the same contingencies.

Rawls responds to this difficulty in the case of the right byseeking in justice as fairness an Archimedean point that 'is not atthe mercy, so to speak, of existing wants and interests' (1971,p.261). But as we have seen, Rawls' concept of right does notextend to private morality, nor does any other instrument ofdetachment save the good from thoroughgoing implication in theagent's existing wants and desires. 'Purely preferential choice' isthoroughly heteronomous choice, and no person's values orconception of the good can possibly reach beyond it. As Rawlsstrikingly concedes, 'That we have one conception of the goodrather than another is not relevant from a moral standpoint. In

* © 1982 CambridgeUniversityPress.Reprinted from Liberalism and theLimits ofJustice by MichaelSandel,bypermission of the publishers.

160 Justice and the Good

acquiring it we are influenced by the same sort of contingencies thatlead"us to rule out a knowledge of our sex and class' (1975, p. 537).

The limited scope for reflection on Rawls' account, and theproblematic, even impoverished theory of the good that resultsreveal the extent to which deontological liberalism accepts anessentially utilitarian account of the good, however its theory ofright may differ. This utilitarian background first appeared in ourdiscussion of Dworkin's defence of affirmative action; once noindividual rights were seen to be at stake, utilitarian considerationsautomatically prevailed. Although Dworkin defends what he callsan 'anti-utilitarian concept of right', the scope of this right is strictly(if elusively) circumscribed, such that 'the vast bulk of the laws thatdiminish my liberty are justified on utilitarian grounds as being inthe general interest or for the general welfare' (1977, p. 269).1

The utilitarian background to Rawls' conception most clearlyappears in his references to individual moral life. Where justiceas fairness rejects utilitarianism as the basis of social, or publicmorality, it has no apparent argument with utilitarianism as thebasis of individual, or private morality, the Kantian notion of 'dutyto oneself' to the contrary. Rawls describes the utilitarian accountof private morality, without discernible objection, as follows:

A person quite properly acts, at least when others are notaffected, to achieve his own greatest good, to advance hisrational ends as far as possible.... [T]he principle for anindividual is to advance as far as possible his own welfare, hisown system of desires' (1971, p. 23).

To be sure there is one formal principle that seems to providea general answer [to an individual's choice of life plan]. This isthe principle to adopt that plan which maximizes the expectednet balance of satisfaction (1971, p. 416).

For Rawls, utilitarianism goes wrong not in conceiving the goodas the satisfaction of arbitrarily-given desires undifferentiated as toworth - for justice as fairness shares in this - but only in beingindifferent to the way these consummations are spread acrossindividuals. Its mistake as he sees it is to adopt 'for society as awhole the principle of rational choice for one man', to combine 'thedesires of all persons into one coherent system of desire', and toseek its overall satisfaction (1971, pp. 26-7). In so doing, it 'fuses'or 'conflates' all persons into one, it reduces social choice to'essentially a question of efficient administration' (as, presumably,

Michael J. Sandel 161

individual choice can properly be reduced), and so fails to takeseriously the distinction between persons (1971, pp. 27,33).

Justice as fairness seeks to remedy these shortcomings byemphasizing the distinction between persons and by insistingon theseparateness of those diverse 'systems of desires' that utilitarianismconflates. But the grounds for Rawls' departure from utilitarianismin this respect are not immediately apparent. Although he seemsfirm in his view that to each individual human being therecorresponds exactly one 'system of desires', he never sayswhy thismust be so, or what exactly a 'system of desires' consists in, or whyit is wrong to conflate them. Is a 'system of desires' a set of desiresordered in a certain way, arranged in a hierarchy of relativeworth 'or essential connection with the identity of the agent, or is it simplya concatenation of desires arbitrarily arrayed, distinguishable onlyby their relative intensity and accidental location? If it is the second,if a system of desires means nothing more than an arbitrarycollection of desires accidentally embodied in some particularhuman being, then it is unclear why the integrity of such a 'system'should be taken so morally and metaphysically seriously. If desirescan properly be conflated within persons, why not betweenpersonsas well?

If, on the other hand, what makes a system of desires is ahierarchical ordering of qualitatively distinguishable desires,then itwould be no more justifiable to 'conflate' desires within a personthan between persons, and what is wrong with utilitarianism wouldalso be wrong, in this respect at least, with justice as fairness.Thetendency to conflate desires, whether within persons or betweenthem, would reflect the failure to order them, or to acknowledgethequalitative distinctions between them. But this failure cuts acrossthe distinction between individual and social choice, for there is noreason to suppose that a 'system of desires' in this sense corres­ponds in all cases to the empirically-individuated person. Com­munities of various sorts could count as distinct 'systems of desires'in this sense, so long as they were identifiable in part by an order orstructure of shared values partly constitutive of a common identityor form of life. From this point of view, the utilitarian failure totake seriously the distinction between persons would appear a meresymptom of its larger failure to take seriously the qualitativedistinctions of worth between different orders of desires, a failurerooted in an impoverished account of the good which justice asfairness has been seen to share.

For a deontological doctrine such as Rawls' it might be thoughtthat viewing the good as wholly mired in contingency, despite its

162 Justice and the Good

implausibility generally, would have at 'least the redeemingadv~ntage of making the primacy of right all the more compelling.If the good is nothing more than the indiscriminate satisfaction ofarbitrarily-given preferences, regardless of worth, it is not difficultto imagine that the right (and for that matter a good many othersorts of claims) must outweigh it. But in fact the morally diminishedstatus of the good must inevitably call into question the status ofjustice as well. For olice it is conceded that our conceptions of thegood are morally arbitrary, it becomes difficult to see why thehighest of all (social) virtues should be the one that enables us topursue these arbitrary conceptions 'as fully as circumstancespermit'.

THE MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF JUSTICE

Our discussion of the good thus brings us back to the question ofjustice and the claim for its priority, and with this we return to thecircumstances of justice in the original position. Here, the distinct­ness or separateness of persons on which Rawls insists as acorrective to utilitarianism is installed as the key assumption ofmutual disinterest, the notion that individuals take no interest inone another's interests (1971, p. 218). When first we surveyed theconditions in the original position, this assumption in particularand the empiricist rendering of the circumstances of justice ingeneral seemed to undermine the primacy of justice in variousways. Where justice depended for its virtue on the existence ofcertain empirical pre-conditions, the virtue of justice was no longerabsolute, as truth to theories, but only conditional, as physicalcourage to a war zone; it presupposed a rival virtue or set of virtuesof at least correlative status; it assumed in certain circumstances aremedial dimension;' finally, where inappropriately displayed,justice appeared as a vice rather than a virtue. In sum, a Humeanaccount of the circumstances of justice - such as Rawls explicitlyadopts - seemed incompatible with the privileged status of justicerequired by Rawls and defended by Kant only by recourse to amoral meta physic Rawls found unacceptable.

Hume's own view of justice confirms its partiality, at least in sofar as it is derived from premises which Hume and Rawls seem toshare. For Hume, the circumstances of justic-e describe certainunfortunate if unavoidable material and motivational conditionsof actual human societies, most notably moderate scarcity and'limited generosity'. Together, these circumstances demonstrate the

Michael]. Sandel 163

sense in which the arrival of justice signifies the absenceot certainnobler but rarer virtues.

'If every man had a tender regard for another, or if naturesupplied abundantly all our wants and desires ... the jealousy ofinterest, which justice supposes, could no longer have place'; nor,says Hume, would there be any occasion for distinctions ofproperty and possession. 'Encrease to a sufficient degree thebenevolence of men, or the bounty of nature, and you render justiceuseless, by supplying its place with much nobler virtues, and morevaluable blessings.' If material scarcity were replaced with abund­ance, 'or if everyone had the same affection and tender rtgard foreveryone as for himself; justice and injustice would be equallyunknown among mankind.' And so, Hume concludes, "tis onlyfrom the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, thatjustice derives its origin' (1739, pp. 494-5).

For Hume, justice cannot be the first virtue of social institutions(at least not in any categorical sense), and in some cases is doubt­fully a virtue at all. In the institution of the family, for example,affections may be enlarged to such an extent that justice is scarcelyengaged, much less as 'the first virtue'. And even in the widersociety, where generosity is more limited and justice more exten­sively engaged, its virtue can only be accounted for against abackground of higher or nobler virtues whose absence calls justiceinto being. In so far as mutual benevolence and enlarged affectionscould be cultivated more widely, the need for 'the cautious, jealousvirtue of justice' would diminish in proportion, and mankindwould be the better for it. Were scarcity or selfishness overcomealtogether, then 'justice, being totally useless ... could neverpossibly have place in the catalogue of virtue' (1777, p. 16), muchless the first place to which Rawls would assign it.

But despite the parallel Rawls himself invites between Hume'saccount and his own, the assumption of mutual disinterest has adifferent meaning for Rawls. It does not imply that human beingsare typically governed by 'selfishness and confined generosity';indeed it is not meant as a claim about human motivations at all.It is rather a claim about the subject of motivations. It assumesinterests of a self, not necessarily in a self, a subject of possessionindividuated in advance and given prior to its ends.

From this there follow important consequences for the status ofjustice. No longer is benevolence prior to justice and in some casesable to supplant it. Since for Rawls, the virtue of justice does notpresuppose egoistic motivations to begin with, it need not await thefading of benevolence to find its occasion, and even the full

164 Justice and the Good

flowering of 'enlarged affections' cannot displace it. Justice ceasesto be merely remedial with respect to the 'nobler virtues', for itsvirtue no longer depends on their absence. To the contrary, wherepersons are individuated in Rawls' sense, justice not only wins itsindependence from prevailing sentiments and motivations, butcomes to stand above them as primary. For given the nature of thesubject as Rawls conceives it, justice is not merely a sentiment or afeeling like other, lesser virtues, but above all a framework thatconstrains these virtues and is 'regulative' with respect to them.

Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no alterna­tive but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governingour other aims. This sentiment cannot be fulfilled if it iscompromised and balanced against other ends as but onedesire among the rest .... To the contrary, how far wesucceed in expressing our nature depends on how consistentlywe act from our sense of justice as finally regulative. What wecannot do is express our nature by following a plan that viewsthe sense of justice as but one desire to be weighed againstothers. For this sentiment reveals what the person is, and tocompromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but togive way to the contingencies and accidents of the world(1971, pp. 574-5).

We have seen how the priority of justice, like the priority of theself, derives in large part from its freedom from the contingenciesand accidents of the world. This much emerged in our discussion ofright and the bounds of the self. In the light of our discussion of thegood we can now also see why on Rawls' theory of the subject, suchvirtues as benevolence and even love are not self-sufficient moralideals but must await justice for their completion.

Given the limited role for reflection on Rawls' account, thevirtues of benevolence and love, as features of the good, are formsof sentiment rather than insight, ways of feeling rather thanknowing. Unlike personal or first-order sentiments and feelings,whose objects are given more or less directly to my awareness,benevolence and love are desires whose object is the good ofanother. But given the separateness of persons and the intractabilityof the bounds between them, the content of this good (that is, thegood I wish another) must be largely opaque to me. On Rawls'view, love is blind, not for its intensity but rather for the opacity ofthe good that is the object of its concern. 'The reason why the

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Michael J. Sandel 165

situation remains obscure is that love and benevolence are second­order notions: they seek to further the good of beloved individualsthat is already given' (1971, p. 191).

If arriving at one's own good is primarily a matter of surveyingexisting preferences and assessing their relative intensities, it is notthe sort of enquiry in which another, even an intimate other, canreadily participate. Only the person himself can 'know' what hereally wants or 'decide' what he most prefers. <Even when we takeup another's point of view and attempt to estimate what would beto his advantage, we do so as an adviser, so to speak' (1971,p.448), and given the limited cognitive access Rawls' conceptionallows, a rather unprivileged adviser at that.

Although we may at times overcome the difficulty of knowing thegood of a beloved individual whose interests we would advance, theproblem becomes hopelessly compounded when we would extendour love or benevolence to a plurality of persons whose interestsmay conflict. For we could not hope to know their respective goodswell enough to sort them out and assess their relative claims. Evenifbenevolence could be as widely cultivated as Hume in his hypoth­etical vision suggests, its virtue would still not be self-sufficient, forit would remain unclear, without more, what the love of mankindwould enjoin. 'It is quite pointless to say that one is to judge thesituation as benevolence dictates. This assumes that we are wronglyswayed by self-concern. Our problem lies elsewhere. Benevolenceisat sea as long as its many loves are in opposition in the persons ofits many objects' (1971, p. 190). Not surprisingly, the anchor thisbenevolence requires is supplied by the virtue of justice; benevo­lence, even at its most expansive, depends on justice for itscompletion. 'A love of mankind that wishes to preserve thedistinction of persons, to recognize the separateness. of life andexperience, will use the two principles of justice to determine itsaims when the many goods it cherishes are in opposition' (1971,p. 191). Even in the face of so noble a virtue as the love of mankind,the primacy of justice prevails, although the love that remains is ofan oddly judicial spirit.

This love is guided by what individuals themselves wouldconsent to in a fair initial situation which gives them equalrepresentation as moral persons (1971, p. 191).

Thus we see that the assumption of the mutual disinterested­ness of the parties does not prevent a reasonable interpreta-

Of any society it can always be asked to what extent it is just, or'well-ordered' in Rawls' sense, and to what extent it is a com­munity, and the answer can in neither case fully be given byreference to the sentiments and desiresof the participants alone. AsRawls observes, to ask whether a particular society is just is notsimply to ask whether a large number of its members happen tohave among their various desires the desire to act justly - althoughthis may be one feature of a just society- but whether the society isitself a society of a certain kind, ordered in a certain way, such thatjustice describes its 'basic structure' and not merely the dispositionsof persons within the structure. Thus Rawls writes that althoughwe call the attitudes and dispositions of persons just and unjust,for justice as fairness the 'primary subject of justice is the basicstructure of society' (1971, p. 7). For a society to be just in thisstrong sense, justice must be constitutive of its framework and notsimply an attribute of certain of the participants' plans of life.

Similarly, to ask whether a particular society is a community isnot simply to ask whether a large number of its members happen tohave among their various desires the desire to associate with othersor to promote communitarian aims - although this may be onefeature of a community - but whether the society is itself a societyof a certain kind, ordered in a certain way, such that communitydescribes its basic structure and not merely the dispositions ofpersons within the structure. For a society to be a community in thisstrong sense, community must be constitutive of the shared self­understandings of the participants and embodied in their institu­tional arrangements, not simply an attribute of certain of theparticipants' plans of life.

Rawls might object that a constitutive conception of communitysuch as this should be rejected 'for reasons of clarity among others',or on the grounds that it supposes society to be 'an organic wholewith a life of its own distinct from and superior to that of all itsmembers in their relations with one another' (1971, p. 264). But aconstitutive conception of community is no more metaphysicallyproblematic than a constitutive conception of justice such as Rawlsdefends. For if this notion of community describes a framework ofself-understandings that is distinguishable from and in some senseprior to the sentiments and dispositions of individuals within theframework, it is only in the same sense that justice as fairnessdescribes a 'basic structure' or framework that is likewise distin-

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tion of benevolence and of the love of mankind within thefrqmework of justice as fairness [emphasis added] (1971,p.192).

For Rawls, the consequences of taking seriously the distinctionbetween persons are not directly moral but more decisivelyepistemological. What the bounds between persons confine is lessthe reach of our sentiments - this they do not prejudge - than thereach of our understanding, of our cognitive access to others. Andit is this epistemic deficit (which derives from the nature of thesubject) more than any shortage of benevolence (which is in anycase variable and contingent) that requires justice for its remedyand so accounts for its pre-eminence. Where for Hume,we needjustice because we do not love each other well enough, for Rawlswe need justice because we cannot know each other well enough foreven love to serve alone.

But as our discussion of agency and reflection suggests, we areneither as transparent to ourselves nor as opaque to others asRawls' moral epistemology requires. If our agency is to consist insomething more than the exercise in 'efficient administration'which Rawls' account implies, we must be capable of a deeperintrospection thana 'direct self-knowledge' of our immediate wantsand desires allows. But to be capable of a more thoroughgoingreflection, we cannot be wholly unencumbered subjects of posses­sion, individuated in advance and given prior to our ends, but mustbe subjects constituted in part by our central aspirations andattachments, always open, indeed vulnerable, to growth andtransformation in the light of revised self-understandings. And in sofar as our constitutive self-understandings comprehend a widersubject than the individual alone, whether a family or tribe or cityor class or nation or people, to this extent they define a communityin the constitutive sense. And what marks such a community is notmerely a spirit of benevolence, or the prevalence of communitarianvalues, or even certain 'shared final ends' alone, but a commonvocabulary of discourse and a background of implicit practices andunderstandings within which the opacity of the participants isreduced if never finally dissolved. In so far as justice depends for itspre-eminence on the separateness or boundedness of persons in thecognitive sense, its priority would diminish as that opacity fadedand this community deepened.

Michael J. Sandel

JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY

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guishable from and prior to the sentiments and dispositions ofindividuals within it.

If utilitarianism fails to take seriously our distinctness, justice asfairness fails to take seriously our commonality. In regarding thebounds of the self as prior, fixed once and for all, it relegates ourcommonality to an aspect of the good, and relegates the good to amere contingency, a product of indiscriminate wants and desires'not relevant from a moral· standpoint'. Given a conception of thegood that is diminished in this way, the priority of right would seeman unexceptionable claim indeed. But utilitarianism gave the gooda bad name, and in adopting it uncritically, justice as fairness winsfor deontology a false victory.

II

For justice to be the first virtue, certain things must be true of us.We must be creatures of a certain kind, related to humancircumstance in a certain way. We must stand at a certain distancefrom our circumstance, whether as transcendental subject in thecase of Kant, or as essentially unencumbered subject of possessionin the case of Rawls. Either way, we must regard ourselves asindependent: independent from the interests and attachments wemay have at any moment, never identified by our aims but alwayscapable of standing back to survey and asssess and possibly torevise them (Rawls, 1979, p. 7; 1980, pp. 544-5).

DEONTOLOGY'S LIBERATING PROJECT

Bound up with the notion of an independent self is a vision of themoral universe this self must inhabit. Unlike classical Greek andmedieval Christian conceptions, the universe of the deontologicalethic is a place devoid of inherent meaning, a world 'disenchanted'in Max Weber's phrase, a world without an objective moral order.Only in a universe empty of telos, such as seventeenth-centuryscience and philosophy affirmed,2 is it possible to conceive a subjectapart from and prior to its purposes and ends. Only a worldungoverned by a purposive order leaves principles of justice open tohuman construction and conceptions of the good to individualchoice. In this the depth of opposition between deontologicalliberalism and teleological world views most fully appears.

Where neither nature nor cosmos supplies a meaningful order to

MichaelJ. Sandel 169

be grasped or apprehended, it falls to human subjects to constitutemeaning on their own. This would explain the prominence ofContract theory from Hobbes onward, and the correspondingemphasis on voluntarist as against cognitive ethics culminating inKant. What can no longer be found remains somehow to becreated.3 Rawls describes his own view in this connection as aversion of Kantian 'constructivism'.

The parties to the original pOsitiondo not agree on what themoral facts are, as if there were already such facts. It is notthat, being situated impartially, they have a clear andundistorted view of a prior and independent moral order.Rather (for constructivism), there is no such order, andtherefore no such facts apart from the procedure as a whole[emphasis added] (1980, p. 568).

Similarly for Kant, the moral law is not a discovery of theoreticalreason but a deliverance of practical reason, the product of purewill. 'The elementary practical concepts have as their foundationthe form of a pure will given in reason', and what makes this willauthoritative is that it legislates in a world where meaning has yetto arrive. Practical reason finds its advantage over theoreticalreason precisely in this voluntarist faculty, in its capacity togenerate practical precepts directly, without recourse to cognition.'Since in all precepts of the pure will it is only a question of thedetermination of will', there is no need for these precepts 'to waitupon intuitions in order to acquire a meaning. This occurs for thenoteworthy reason that they themselves produce the reality of thatto which they refer' [emphasis added] (1788, pp. 67-8).

It is important to recall that, on the deontological view, thenotion of a self barren of essential aims and attachments does notimply that we are beings wholly without purpose or incapable ofmoral ties, but rather that the values and relations we have are theproducts of choice, the possessions of a self given prior to its ends.It is similar with deontology's universe. Though it rejects thepossibility of an objective moral order, this liberalism does not holdthat just anything goes. It affirms justice, not nihilism. The notionof a universe empty of intrinsic meaning does not, on thedeontological view, imply a world wholly ungoverned by regulativeprinciples, but rather a moral universe inhabited by subjectscapable of constituting meaning on their own _ as agents ofconstruction in case of the right, as agents of choice in the case ofthe good. Qua noumenal selves, or parties to the original position,

170 Justice and the Good

we arrive at principles of justice; qua actual, individual selves, wearriv~ at conceptions of the good. And the principles we constructas noumenal selves constrain (but do not determine) the purposeswe choose as individual selves. This reflectsthe priority of the rightover the good.

The deontological universe and the independent self that moveswithin it, taken together, hold out a liberating vision. Freed fromthe dictates of nature and the sanction of social roles, thedeontological subject is installed as sovereign, cast as the author ofthe only moral meanings there are. As inhabitants of a worldwithout telos, we are free to construct principles of justiceunconstrained by an order of value antecedently given. Althoughthe principles of justice are not strictly speaking a matter of choice,the society they define 'comes as close as a society can to being avoluntary scheme' (1976, p. 13), for they arise from a pure will or actof construction not answerable to a prior moral order. And asindependent selves, we are free to choose our purposes and endsunconstrained by such an order, or by custom or tradition orinherited status. So long as they are not unjust, our conceptions ofthe good carry weight, whatever they are, simply in virtue of ourhaving chosen them. We are 'self-originating sources of validclaims' (Rawls, 1980, p. 543).

Now justice is the virtue that embodies deontology's liberatingvision and allows it to unfold. It embodies this vision by describingthose principles the sovereign subject is said to construct whilesituated prior to the constitution of all value. It allows the vision tounfold in that, equipped with these principles, the just societyregulates each person's choice of ends in a way compatible with asimilar liberty for all. Citizens governed by justice are thus enabledto realize deontology's liberating project - to exercise their capacityas 'self-originating sources of valid claims' - as fully as circum­stances permit. So the primacy of justice atbnce expresses andadvances the liberating aspirations of the deontological world viewand conception of the self.

But the deontological vision is flawed, both within its own termsand more generally as an account of our moral experience. Withinits own terms, the deontological self, stripped of all possibleconstitutive attachments, is less liberated than disempowered. Aswe have seen, neither the right nor the good admits of thevoluntarist derivation deontology requires. As agents of construc­tion we do not really construct (Sandel, 1982, chapter 3) and asagents of choice we do not really choose (Sandel, 1982, chapter 4).What goes on behind the veil of ignorance is not a contract or

Michael J. Sandel 171

an agreement but if anything a kind of discovery; and what goesonin 'purely preferential choice' is less a choosing of ends than amatching of pre-existing desires, undifferentiated as to wonh, withthe best available means of satisfying them. For the parties to theoriginal position, as for the parties to ordinary deliberativerationality, the liberating moment fades before it arrives; thesovereign subject is left at sea in the circumstances it was thought tocommand.

The moral frailty of the deontological self also appears at thelevel of first-order principles. Here we found that the indepen­dent self, being essentially dispossessed, was too thin to becapable of desert in the ordinary sense (Sandel, 1982, chapter 2).For claims of desert presuppose thickly-constituted selves, beingscapable of possession in the constitutive sense, but the deonto­logical self is wholly without possessions of this kind. Acknowledg­ing this lack, Rawls would found entitlements on legitimateexpectations instead. If we are incapable of desert, at least wea~e e~titled that institutions honour the expectations to which theygIve rIse.

But the difference principle requires more. It begins with thethought, congenial to the deontological view, that the assets I haveare only accidentally mine. But it ends by assuming that these assetsare therefore common assets and that society has a prior claim onthe fruits of their exercise. This either disempowers the deontologi­cal self or denies its independence. Either my prospects are left atthe mercy of institutions established for 'prior and independentsocial ends' (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p.313), endswhich mayor may not coincide with my own, or I must countmyself a member of a community defined in part by those ends, inwhich case I cease to be unencumbered by constitutive attachments.Either way, the difference principle contradicts the liberatingaspiration of the deontological project. We cannot be persons forwhom justice is primary and also be persons for whom thedifference principle is a principle of justice.

CHARACTER, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, AND FRIENDSHIP

If the deontological ethic fails to redeem its own liberating promise,it also fails plausibly to account for certain indispensable aspects ofour moral experience. For deontology insists that we view ourselvesas independent selves, independent in the sense that our identity isnever tied to our aims and attachments. Given our 'moral power toform, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good'

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(Rawls, 1980, p. 544), the continuity of our identity is unproblema­tically assured. No transformation of my aims and attachmentscould call into question the person I am, for no such allegianceshowever deeply held, could possibly engage my identity to begi~with.

But we cannot regard ourselves as independent in this waywithout great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moralforce consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparablefrom understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are ­as members of this family or community or nation or people, asbearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, ascitizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more thanvalues I happen to have or aims I 'espouse at any given time'. Theygo beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the 'naturalduties' I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some Iowe more than justice requires or even permits, not by reason ofagreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or lessenduring attachments and commitments which taken togetherpartly define the person I am ..

10 imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments suchas these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but toimagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth.For to have character is to know that I move in a history I neithersummon nor command, which carries consequences none the lessfor my choices and conduct. It draws me closer to some and moredistant from others; it makes some aims more appropriate, othersless so. As a self-interpreting being, I am able to reflect on myhistory and in this sense to distance myself from it, but the distanceis always precariouS and provisional, the point of reflection neverfinally secured outside the history itself. A person with characterthus knows that he is implicated in various ways even as he reflects,and feels the moral weight of what he knowS ...

This makes a difference for agency and self-knowledge. For, aswe have seen, the deontological self, being wholly without charac­ter, is incapable of self-knowledge in any morally serious sense.Where the self is unencumbered and essentially dispossessed, noperson is left for self-reflection to reflect upon. This is why, on thedeontological view, deliberation about ends can only be an exercisein arbitrariness. In the absence of constitutive attachments,deliberation issues in 'purely preferential choice', which means theends we seek, being mired in contingency, 'are not relevant from amoral standpoint' (Rawls, 1975, p. 537).

When I act out of more or less enduring qualities of character, by

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contrast, my choice of ends is not arbitrary in the same way. Inconsulting my preferences, I have not only to weigh their intensitybut also to assess their suitability to the person I (already) am. I ask,as I deliberate, not only what I really want but who I reallyam, andthis last question takes me beyond an attention to my desires aloneto reflect on my identity itself. While the contours of my identitywill in some ways be open and subject to revision, they are notwholly without shape. And the fact that they are not enables me todiscriminate among my more immediate wants and desires; somenow appear essential, others merely incidental to my definingprojects and commitments. Although there may be a certainultimate contingency in my having wound up the person I am ­only theology can say for sure - it makes a moral difference nonethe less that, being the person I am, I affirm these ends rather thanthose, turn this way rather than that. While the notion ofconstitutive attachments may at first seem an obstacle to agency­the self, now encumbered, is no longer strictly prior - some relativefixity of character appears essential to prevent the lapse intoarbitrariness which the deontological self is unable to avoid.

The possibility of character in the constitutive sense is alsoindispensable to a certain kind of friendship, a friendship markedby mutual insight as wellas sentiment. By any account, friendship isbound up with certain feelings. We like our friends; we haveaffection for them, and wish them well. We hope that their desiresfind satisfaction, that their plans meet with success, and we commitourselves in various ways to advancing their ends.

But for persons presum,edincapable of constitutive attachments,acts of friendship such as these face a powerful constraint. Howevermuch I might hope for the good of a friend and stand ready toadvance it, only the friend himself can know what that good is. Thisrestricted access to the good of others follows from the limitedscope for self-reflection, which betrays in turn the thinness of thedeontological self to beginwith. Where deliberating about my goodmeans no more than attending to wants and desires given directlyto my awareness, I must do it on my own; it neither requires noradmits the participation of others. Every act of friendship thusbecomes parasitic on a good identifiable in advance. 'Benevolenceand love are second-order notions: they seek to further the good ofbeloved individuals that is already given' (Rawls, 1971, p. 191).Even the friendliest sentiments must await a moment of introspec­tion itself inaccessible to friendship. To expect more of any friend,or to offer more, can only be a presumption against the ultimateprivacy of self-knowledge.

174 Justice and the Good

For persons encumbered in part by a history they share withothers\ by contrast, knowing oneself is a more complicated thing. Itis also a less strictly private thing. Where seeking my good is boundup with exploring my identity and interpreting my life history, theknowledge I seek is less transparent to me and less opaque toothers. Friendship becomes a way of knowing as well as liking.Uncertain which path to take, I consult a friend who knows mewell, and together we deliberate, offering and assessing by turnscompeting descriptions of the person I am, and of the alternatives Iface as they bear on my identity. To take seriously such deliberationis to allow that my friend may grasp something I have missed, mayoffer a more adequate account of the way my identity is engaged inthe alternatives before me. To adopt this new description is to seemyself in a new way; myoid self-image now seems partial oroccluded, and I may say in retrospect that my friend knew me betterthan I knew myself. To deliberate with friends is to admit thispossibility, which presupposes in turn a more richly-constituted selfthan deontology allows. While there will of course remain timeswhen friendship requires deference to the self-image of a friend,however flawed, this too requires insight; here the need to deferimplies the ability to know.

So to see ourselves as deontology would see us is to deprive usof those qualities of character, reflectiveness, and friendship thatdepend on the possibility of constitutive projects and attachments.And to see ourselves as given to commitments such as these is toadmit a deeper commonality than benevolence describes, a com­monality of shared self-understanding as well as 'enlarged affec­tions'. As the independent self finds its limits in those aims andattachments from which it cannot stand apart, so justice finds itslimits in those forms of community that engage the identity as wellas the interests of the participants.

To all of this, deontology might finally reply with a concessionand a distinction: it is one thing to allow that 'citizens in theirpersonal affairs ... have attachments and loves that they believethey would not, or could not, stand apart from', that they 'regard itas unthinkable ... to view themselves without certain religious andphilosophical convictions and commitments' (Rawls, 1980,p. 545). But with public life it is different. There, no loyalty orallegiance could be similarly essential to our sense of who we are.Unlike our ties to family and friends, no devotion to city or nation,to party or cause, could possibly run deep enough to be defining. Bycontrast with our private identity, our 'public identity' as moralpersons 'is not affected by changes over time' in our conceptions of

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. the good (Rawls, 1980, pp.544-5). While we may be thickly­constituted selves in private, we must be wholly unencumberedselves in public, and it is there that the primacy of justice prevails.

But once we recall the special status of the deontological claim, itis unclear what the grounds for this distinction could be. It mightseem at first glance a psychological distinction; detachment comesmore easily in public life, where the ties we have are typically lesscompelling; I can more easily step back from, say, my partisanallegiances than certain personal loyalties and affections. But as wehave seen from the start, deontology's claim for the independenceof the self must be more than a claim of psychology or sociology.Otherwise, the primacy of justice would hang on the degree ofbenevolence and fellow-feeling any particular society managed toinspire. The independence of the self does not mean that I can, as apsychological matter, summon in this or that circumstance thedetachment required to stand outside my values and ends, ratherthat I must regard myself as the bearer of a self distinct from myvalues and ends, whatever they may be. It is above all anepistemological claim, and has little to do with the relative intensityof feeling associated with public or private relations.

Understood as an epistemological claim, however, the deonto­logical conception of the self cannot admit the distinction required.Allowing constitutive possibilities where 'private' ends are at stakewould seem unavoidably to allow at least the possibility that'public' ends could be constitutive as well. Once the bounds of theself are no longer fixed, individuated in advance and given prior toexperience, there is no saying in principle what sorts of experiencescould shape or reshape them, no guarantee that only 'private' andnever 'public' events could conceivably be decisive.

Not egoists but strangers, sometimes benevolent, make for citizensof the deontological republic; justice finds its occasion because wecannot know each other, or our ends, well enough to govern by thecommon good alone. This condition is not likely to fade altogether,and so long as it does not, justice will be necessary. But neither is itguaranteed always to predominate, and in so far as it does not,community will be possible, and an unsettling presence for justice.

Liberalism teaches respect for the distance of self and ends, andwhen this distance is lost, we are submerged in a circumstance thatceases to be ours. But by seeking to secure this distance toocompletely, liberalism undermines its own insight. By putting theself beyond the reach of politics, it makes human agency an articleof faith rather than an object of continuing attention and concern, a

176 Justice and the Good

premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement. Thismiss~sthe pathos of politics and also its most inspiring possibilities.It overlooks the danger that when politics goes badly, not onlydisappointments but also dislocations are likely to result. And itforgets the possibility that when politics goes well, we can know agood in common that we cannot know alone.

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Charles TayIar: Hegel: Historyand Politics ~t-

NOTES

1 For a compelling critique of Dworkin'sviewin this respect, see H. L. A.Hart (1979,pp. 86-9).

2 Fordiscussionof the moral, political,andepistemologicalconsequencesof the seventeenth-century scientificrevolution and world-view, seeStrauss,1953; Arendt, 1958, pp. 248-325; Wolin, 1960, pp.239-85;andTaylor, 1975, pp. 3-50.

3 As one liberal writer boldly asserts, 'Thehard truth is this: There is nomoralmeaning hidden in the bowelsof theuniverse.... Yet there is noneedto be overwhelmed by the void.Wemaycreate our own meanings,you and I' (Ackerman, 1980, p.368). Oddly enough, he insists nonethe less that liberalism is committed to no particular metaphysic orepistemology,nor any 'Big Questionsofa highlycontroversial character'(pp.356-7, 361).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman,B.A. 1980. Social Justice in the Liberal State, New Haven.Arendt,H. 1958. The Human Condition, Chicago.Dworkin,R. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously, London.Hart, H.L.A. 1979. Between utility and rights.In The ldea of Freedom,

ed. A. Ryan, pp.77-98. Oxford.Hume, D. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, ed. L. A. Selby­

Bigge,1978. Oxford.Hume, D. 1777. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1966

edn, La Salle, Illinois.Kant, I. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason, translated by L. W. Beck,

1956.Indianapolis.Rawls,J. 1971. A Theory of Justice, Oxford.Rawls, J. 1975. Fairness to goodness, Philosophical Review, 84,

pp.536-54.Rawls, J. 1979. A well-ordered society. In Philosophy, Politics, and

Society, 5th series, eds P. Laslett and J. Fishkin,pp.6-20. Oxford.Rawls, J. 1980. Kantian constructivism in moral theory, Journal of

Philosophy, 77, pp.SI5-n.Sandel,M. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge.Strauss,L. 1953. Natural Right and History, Chicago.Taylor, C. 1975. Hegel, Cambridge.Wolin, S. 1960. Politics and Vision, Boston.

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... Kant's moral theory remained at the edges of politics, as it were,setting limits beyond which states or individuals should not tread.For Hegel, in contrast, morality can only receive a concrete COntentin politics, in the design of the society we have to further andsustain.

This set of obligations which Wehave to further and sustain asociety founded on the Idea is what Hegel calls 'Sittlichkeit'. Thishas been variously translated in English, as 'ethical life', 'objectiveethics', 'concrete ethics', but no translation can capture the sense ofthis term of art, and I propose to Usethe original here. 'Sittlichkeit'is the usual German term for 'ethics', with the same kind ofetymological origin, in the term 'Sitten' which We might translate'CUstoms'. But Hegel gives it a special sense, in contrast to'Moralitat' (which of course has a parallel etymological origin in'mores', although being Latin it would not be so evident to Germanreaders).

'Sittlichkeit' refers to the moral obligations I have to an ongoingcommunity of which I am part. These obligations are based onestablished norms and uses, and that is why the etymological rootin 'Sitten'is important for Hegel's use.I The crucial characteristic ofSittlichkeit is that it enjoins us to bring about what already is. Thisis a paradoxical way of putting it, but in fact the common life whichis the basis of my sittlich obligation is already there in existence.It is in virtue of its being an ongoing affair that I have theseobligations; and my fulfilment of these obligations is what sustains

*© 1975 Cambridge UniversityPress.Reprinted from Hegel by CharlesTaylor© 1975, by permission of thepublisher.