The communitarian idea of justice (short note)

The communitarian idea of justice

Communitarians criticise the liberal-egalitarian theory of Rawls because it puts the individual above the community; for Rawls the individual comes before society, for communitarians society comes first.

Core claims. (1) The self is embedded. Michael Sandel, in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), calls Rawls's individual disembodied, someone who is not part of any society, and Charles Taylor rejects Rawls's atomistic picture of the person. (2) Choice has a context. Because individual choices are made within a social setting, people in the original position might not choose Rawls's principles at all. (3) Justice follows social meanings. Michael Walzer, in Spheres of Justice (1983), argues that goods cannot be distributed until we understand what they mean to the people concerned, how they are made and how they are valued; distributions follow from those meanings, so justice is a principle of the community, not of the isolated individual. (4) The community has priority. In the same tradition Hegel gives the state the first place in fostering the individual as a citizen, and communitarians stress rootedness in meaningful cultural practices over universal values; applied to the world, Nagel and Miller hold that justice is owed through shared institutions and national membership, so it does not stretch to a global scale.

Criticisms. (a) Liberals answer that justice must protect each individual, and some worry that concessions to groups weaken the common citizenship that treats people alike as individuals. (b) A community's shared understandings can themselves be unjust: NCERT notes that few religions treat their male and female members as equals, that dalits have been barred from temples, and that organised religion is often taken over by a conservative faction that will not tolerate dissent. (c) Applied beyond borders, the communitarian view leaves the world's poor outside the circle of justice, which cosmopolitans reject.