Examine communitarian perspectives on justice. (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1).
Communitarians are first and foremost concerned with community. Two or more people constitute a community when they share a common conception of good and see this good as partly constitutive of their identity or selves. Such a “constitutive community” may be a close friendship, family relationship, neighbourhood or even a comprehensive political community. Communitarians insist that each of us as individuals develops our identity, talents and pursuit in life only in the context of a community. We are by nature social beings. Since the community determines and shapes the individual nature, political life must start with a concern for the community, and not the individual. In other words, the locus of philosophical concern in reflecting on the ideal and the just state must be the community and not the individual.
The communitarian theorists criticise Rawls’s liberal-egalitarian conception of justice for its emphasis on individual rights at the expense of the good of the community. In his book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Michael Sandel criticises what he calls Rawls’s notion of disembodied or unencumbered self or subject, in opposition to which he advances the notion of the situated self, i.e. the self or subject, who is invariably a member of a community. While, for Rawls, the right is prior to the good and justice is the first virtue of a society, for Sandel, justice is only a remedial virtue that is needed in an individualistic society. For Sandel, moreover, the common good of the community is prior to the rights of the individuals. Charles Taylor, who too is a leading communitarian political philosopher, bemoans liberalism’s “atomistic” conception of the self. According to him, the well-being of the individual depends on the good of his community and therefore, the recognition and protection of the group or cultural rights of the community is not less important than the just distribution of the freedom and equality rights to the individuals.
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