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Are the communitarians right in their criticism of the liberal conception of a person?In this essay I shall examine the question of whether an individual's development as a person is inextricably bound up in their society or, as the liberal conception supposedly claims, a person's development is wholly independent of the community. I shall first examine the conception itself, and attempt to ascertain if it is vulnerable to the communitarians' criticisms. I shall then consider whether it is a conception that any typical liberals actually maintain. Finally I shall consider whether anything actually turns on the answer to these questions. I shall conclude that while the conception is not immune to criticism, it is not one that liberals actually tend to hold, and that nothing crucial in liberalism is affected either way. The liberal conception of a person - according to communitarians - is that their development as persons is in a sense prior to the community to which they are born. A person is born, grows and matures, and once they become a fully developed reasoning adult they look around them at the community they find themselves in and judge it with impartial eyes. They compare the society's values with their own and make a decision as to what kind of a life they wish to lead. Central to liberal thought is the idea that an individual should be able to pursue their own idea of a good life even if it as odds with the values of the community around them. This thesis that a person is complete in themselves, and can be described fully without reference to anything outside them, is sometimes called "atomism". The communitarians counter it with the "embeddedness thesis", which can be viewed as a variety of holism. The embeddeness thesis claims that a person is shaped by their community. As they grow, the values of their parents, their teachers, and society at large are embedded within them, determining their character and values. Once they become fully developed adults, they are a product of society's values and those values are a part of them. Thus they cannot question these values, as the only yardstick they have with which to judge them is that embedded by the society they are trying to judge. Their conception of the good life is necessarily that which their community advocates (Caney, pp274-278). Stronger readings of the thesis claim that these values, once embedded, are permanent and inescapable. Thus, even if it was possible for them to judge their community, it would not be possible for them to form an alternative conception of the good life (Caney, p275; Buchanan, §3). Consider for example, a person who is brought up in a farming community, and is taught from an early age that animals are no more than livestock to be bought, sold and eaten. As far as they know, this is the truth, and it would be incomprehensible for them to suddenly look at the community around them and start advocating vegetarianism and animal rights. However, this example also shows how the communitarian conception of a person can be attacked. All it requires is for the person to be exposed to an influence from outside the community. For example, while out of town he meets and falls in love with an animal rights activist who shows him a new way of looking at the world, which makes him question everything he has been brought up to believe. Indeed, communitarians raised in liberal societies provide a counter example to their own argument. They have supposedly had liberal values embedded within them, yet are questioning them and advocating communitarianism. At the extreme, people can sever all ties with their community. While not an everyday occurrence, it is not unheard of for a person to (for example) convert from Christianity to Islam, change their name, abandon all their ties to their previous life and emigrate to Mecca. However, it is also uncontroversially true that an individual's development as a person is strongly influenced by the community around them. Otherwise identical individuals will turn out very differently if they were born in Oxford, compared to if they were born in Kabul. If an infant was washed on to a deserted island and somehow managed to survive to adulthood without ever encountering any trace of human society, it is unlikely that they would form any conception of the good life beyond basic survival. They certainly wouldn't be debating the relative merits of liberalism and communitarianism. So where does this leave the conception of a person? As is so often the case, the truth is probably somewhere in between. The communitarians have presented the case as a false dilemma (Gutmann, p187). We are not obliged to choose between the extreme - and equally implausible - alternatives of 1) a person is not shaped at all by their community, and 2) a person can in no way critically assess their community. Instead, we can choose a middle ground, and make the weaker claim that a person is to some degree influenced by their community. This is hardly a radical claim, but neither is it trivial. If the liberals are to maintain that individual autonomy comes from a person's being able to critically assess their place in the world, this starts from that individual recognising themselves as a person (Buchanan, §3). Their capacity to self-assess will be - to some degree - determined by their community. If an individual is brought up in a society that has very liberal laws, but where they are taught very tight community values, they may be technically free to leave but in practice unable to do so because the idea is unthinkable (Taylor, pp13-14). Liberals tend to focus on negative freedom, but exercising one's autonomy requires positive freedom. This is hardly a fatal blow to liberal theory, but is perhaps a point worth addressing. So, we have established that the purely atomist conception of a person is flawed. Now, let us consider whether any liberals actually hold this view, or whether it is no more than a communitarian straw man. Much recent communitarian criticism has been directed at Rawls' A Theory of Justice, and some of his ideas do lend themselves to accusations that he is advocating atomism. Rawls claims that our natural assets - our skills, character, and even our genetics - are undeserved. Just as it is unfair for one person to be born into wealth and status while another is born into poverty, it is equally unfair for one person to be talented and motivated while another is crippled and lazy (Rawls, p89). He seems to be saying that, when I am born, various advantages are bestowed upon me. They may be mine but they are not me (Sandel, p143). This in turn suggests that what constitutes the self is little more than a bare locus, a featureless rationality that becomes embodied. A person is not only prior to their community, but prior to their body and mind. However, these are highly metaphysical claims, and are not really related to Rawls' central purpose, which is to establish his theory of Justice as Fairness. If we look elsewhere in his book, we will find him stressing the importance of community, and talking about how individuals are shaped by it. We even find some communitarian sympathies. We are led to the notion of the community of humankind the members of which enjoy one another's excellences and individuality elicited by free institutions, and the recognise the good of each as an element in the complete activity the whole scheme of which is consented to and gives pleasure to all. (Rawls, §79, p459) To describe Rawls as an atomist therefore is somewhat inaccurate. If we look further afield at other notable liberals we find that many (if not all) of them concede or advocate the embeddedness thesis. John Stuart Mill readily concedes that individuals are raised within a society, and are shaped by it. He maintains only that each individual can then come to look at the customs he has been raised to know and ask how well they apply to his own life (Mill, p122). In his 1992 paper, Caney lists and quotes a number of others, including Raz, Dworkin and T.H.Green (Caney, pp4-5) In fact, there is no need for any liberal thinker to reject the embeddedness thesis. The communitarian strategy appears to rest on the belief that liberalism has a certain conception of the person as its foundation, and thus a criticism of that conception is a criticism of liberalism itself. However, liberalism relies very little on any kind of conception of a person beyond a rejection of the strongest version of the embeddedness thesis - which, as we saw earlier, is implausible anyway. To paraphrase Walzer, liberalism is not a theory of what constitutes the self. Rather, it is a theory of how selves - however they may be constituted - interact with each other (Walzer, p21). Its main aim is to find a model of a society in which people can happily coexist despite radically different world views, including differences in views on the self (Gutmann, p185). A liberal society requires a very minimal and uncontroversial conception of a person to function. At its core, liberalism is about the freedom to choose. A person has the right to make their own decisions based on their own values. For liberalism to be possible, all that is required of a person is that they are capable of reflection, of valuation, of choice and of acting upon that choice. Humans are clearly capable of all these things, and I'd hope that all but the most implausible conceptions of a person would include these characteristics. As briefly discussed above, liberalism generally focusses on negative freedom - the freedom from restrictions. Even if the strongest version of the embeddedness thesis is true, and an individual is truly incapable of breaking free from their community's values, liberalism would still maintain that it is unacceptable for the state to impose its will on its citizens. Even if we never choose to go against our upbringing, the possibility should exist nonetheless. After all, just because we cannot escape our society's values, does not mean those values are in any way validated. Being imprisoned is not justified by the impossibility of escape. Liberalism may seem more closely related to an atomist way of thinking, but it does not require it. At most, it requires that an atomist way of thinking is not excluded. If individuals feel closely bonded to their community, or their country, then a liberal system would allow - even encourage it. In fact, a system that discouraged communitarian thought would be distinctly illiberal. In conclusion, the communitarian criticism of the liberals' supposed conception of a person is misguided on a number of levels. While the strongest atomist conception of a person is certainly implausible, so too is the strongest version of the communitarians' embeddedness thesis. If we look at various liberal writers we see that none of them advocate the atomist thesis as communitarians claim. Finally we have seen that in any case the conception of a person is far from critical to liberal thought. However, we did observe a point that liberals may need to address, namely that a person's embedding in a society will affect their positive freedom. Therefore, although some notable points were raised, I conclude that the communitarians are not right in their criticism of the liberal conception of a person. Bibliography
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