Democratic Community: Nomos XXXV

2. Ideal Communities and the Problem of Moral Identity

2 IDEAL COMMUNITIES AND THE PROBLEM OF MORAL IDENTITY KENNETH MINOGUE My aim is to make certain critical points about normativism, which is the belief that moral and political philosophy should demonstrate the basic practical rules for distributing goods so as to constitute a just society. Any modern theory of a perfect community is normativist in this sense. The main argument purports that the normativist has a seriously inadequate view of the moral life. In ignoring the fact that human beings are not merely rational agents, and social beings, but also, and quite distinctively, sustainers ofmoral identities, normativism has, for all its dazzling technical sophistication, banalised our understanding of both moral and political life. I preface this argument, however, with some more general remarks about normativism and political philosophy. I Everyone agrees, as a recent survey by Will Kymlicka puts it, that there has been an "explosion of interest in the traditional I should like to express my gratitude to the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green Ohio, for providing the leisure and facilities for writing this chapter. 41 42 Kenneth Minogue aim of defining the one true theory of justice."\ Kymlicka is referring, of course, to the vast growth of normative political philosophy that has followed in the wake of A Theory ofJustice by John Rawls. This "explosion" is all the more remarkable if one remembers the positivist domination of political studies in the middle of the century. The history of this revived normativism is an interesting one, and some of it can be related to the fortunes of Marxism during this period. In Marxist terms, normative political theory is a type of utopianism. Radical political thinkers, denied the project of revolution by the collapse of Marxism, have resigned themselves to designing paper utopias. There is however a striking difference between these two intellectual tendencies. Marxism was a kind of poetry of human productivity. It made a hero out ofthe producer and was notably indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, distribution and distributors . The objective correlate of this socialist disdain for distribution was the pile of badly made commodities rotting and rusting at the railway sidings of twentieth-century command economies. Prestige came from busting norms; no one in such a Marxist society got much out of moving commodities from the producer to the consumer. Normative political philosophy is distributive prose rather than the poetry of production. It seems to be as indifferent to production as old-fashioned socialists were to distribution. Indeed , the whole of justice turns into the problem of how to distribute goods and losses without any very direct relation to law and order or even constitutionality.2 To mark its new role, the term ')ustice" is commonly partnered by "social," and social justice is what happens when all basic goods, which may notionally include individual talents and skills, are centrally distributed in accordance with a rational scheme. In actual societies, of course, people acquire goods in large part by working in pursuit of their interests to earn them. The normativist tends to resent the fact that self-interest is the major distributive mechanism in liberal democratic society, identifying it with irrationalism and the rule of greed. The basic aim of much normativism is to replace self-interest by central distribution: command consumerism . In doing for themselves what should be done for them IDEAL COMMUNITIES 43 by society, individuals threaten, according to the normativist, what we can only call the "domination" ofjustice. The basic question we may ask is: Why is there no conservative version of normative political philosophy? Elaboration of this question requires us briefly to consider both philosophy and conservatism. Philosophy is a reflective understanding of the whole, and normativism, as a body of theory that can find no place for one of the major tendencies of the Western political tradition, is obviously leaving something out. Normativism is practical theory designed to change the world. It is unmistakably a form of imperialistic rationalism, exhibiting the academic will to power that breaks out in many twentieth-century forms. Consider from another field the remark: "Unless the ideals expressed in great works of literature and art ... can and do become politically empowered, there seems to be no point in teaching them."s Philosophy, however, is not concerned with power; it does not even begin until we take the next step and reflect on both changes in power, and on what is being set...