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Community: A Work in Progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Bill Shaw
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Abstract:

Professor Ian Maitland advances a version of utilitarianism, constrained by Robert Nozick’s minimal state, that finds no connection between the pervasiveness of “market values,” which he gamely pursues, and the kind of problems that dominate our social scene. In his judgment, the prevailing tendency towards community or communitarian ends needlessly obstructs freedom, the overriding value of the libertarian-minimal state. When coupled with wrongheaded and perverse policies, communitarianism shackles the free market with crippling inefficiencies. This paper will interrogate Maitland’s characterization of communitarianism, challenge his view that traditional values can be instrumentalized without harming community, and paint a more plausible and complex picture of the communitarian tendency.

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Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 671 - 678
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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References

Notes

I would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Chad McCracken and Bill Huie in the preparation of this paper.

1 In further refutation of the “individual versus the wider community” rhetoric, Timothy Fort advances the importance of “mediating institutions” (such as the business community) which have so far been overlooked by communitarian scholars and which bring a much needed dimension of stability, concreteness, and a sense of place to the project. Timothy Fort, “On Golden Rules, Balancing Acts, & Finding the Right Size,” Business Ethics Quarterly 8(2): 347–53 (1998).

2 Allen E. Buchanan, “Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Ethics 99(4): 852 (1989).

3 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974).

4 Elizabeth Anderson, “The Ethical Limitations of the Market,” Economics and Philosophy 6(2): 182 (1990).

5 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995), 148–59.

6 Note that one of Maitland’s main sources for the list of adjectives he associates with community is Anderson’s paper—a paper that seeks to contrast interpersonal contexts in which gift-giving is appropriate with those in which market transactions are appropriate. See Anderson, op. cit., 185–92. That gifts are usually given in communal contexts does not imply that all communal contexts are ripe for gifts. For example, personal rivals may not be likely to give each other gifts—does this mean they have a market relationship? Certainly not. Maitland effectively misconstrues Anderson’s paper, taking the gift-giving contexts to stand for all communal (non-market) contexts. The image of community as a realm without conflict is not required by Anderson’s paper at all.

7 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

8 Id. at 594.

9 See also Robert E. Lane, “The Road Not Taken: Friendship, Consumerism, and Happiness,” Critical Review 8(4): 536–7 (1994).

10 The notion of an ethical baseline should be qualified because the term raises metaphysical problems. What is beneath the line, and in what context is it inscribed? It is actually in these terms that Maclntyre and Rawls have been criticized. See Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Positivists would likely pose a two-fold challenge to such a theory of the good: the basic objection would question the origin of any a priori claim about the good, and the second part of the objection would question one’s access to, or knowledge of, the good. In a related vein, John Rawls has been influential in his view that a theory of justice based on an a priori conception of the good would be too narrow to accommodate all of the competing and yet valid views of just and acceptable behavior. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: BelknapPress, 1971), p. 3l. These views have been reasserted against the communitarianism derivative of Maclntyre’s work in ethics. Jeffrey Paul and Fred D. Miller, “Communitarian and Liberal Theories of the Good,” Review of Metaphysics, June 1990, pp. 913–5.

11 After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

12 Christopher McMahon, “Morality and the Invisible Hand,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (3): 269 (1981).

13 Etzioni, Amitai, “Restoring Our Moral Voice,” Public Interest, Summer 1994, n. 116, p. 107.

14 Spragens, Thomas, “Communitarian Liberalism,” in New Communitarian Thinking, ed. Etzioni (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 37.

15 Id., p. 46.

16 Id., p. 47.

17 Walker, Samuel, “The Communitarian Cop-out,” National Civic Review, Summer 1993, v. 82, n. 3, p. 246.

18 Galston, William A., “The Promise of Communitarianism,” National Civic Review, Summer 1993, v. 82, n. 3, p. 217.

19 Id.

20 Ed. Etzioni (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). “The liberal tradition is characterized by more ‘moral traditionalism and moral complexity’ than its opponents are wont to admit” (p. 3). The self’s ability to sustain a meaningful sense of autonomy is dependent upon the self’s ability to maintain a home ‘within a framework of bonding to other persons and to person-centered activities’” (p. 5).

21 Id., p. 16.

22 Etzioni, Amitai, “The Good Polity: Can I Design It?” American Behavioral Scientist, May/June 1991, v. 34, n. 5, p. 550.

23 Etzioni is joined by another social scientist, Glenn C. Loury, in the view that individuals are socially constructed, and that much of the success individuals experience in adulthood is attributable to “community.”

[Olne can say that an adult worker with a given degree of personal efficacy has been “produced” from the “inputs” of education, parenting skills, acculturation, nutrition, and socialization to which he was exposed in his formative years. . . . [S]ome of the most crucial “factors of production” are only available as by-products from activities of social affiliation. . . . The relevance of such factors, as an empirical matter, is beyond doubt. The importance of networks, contacts, social background, family connections, and informal associations of all kinds has been amply documented by students of social stratification. In addition, values, attitudes, and beliefs of central import for the attainment of success in life are shaped by the cultural milieu in which a person develops. (Loury, “How to Amend Affirmative Action,” The Public Interest, No. 127, Spring 1997, pp. 34–35)

24 Walzer, Michael. “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” New Communitarian Thinking, ed. Etzioni (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 57.

25 Smiley, Marion, Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). Smiley also argues that “responsibility” stands apart from judgment as an independent moral force and is the basis for community-formation.

26 Maitland seriously misreads Tocqueville on marriage. Marriages were indeed agreements based on personal preferences, but whether those relationships were as successful as he implies (assuming that success can be attributed to free choice) or whether many of them were hell-on-earth victims of onerous divorce laws is speculative and remains unresolved. Secondly, Maitland contrasts freely chosen or “contractual” marriages that impressed Tocqueville with those based on other economic arrangements (arrangements resembling “Political or commercial treaties between families” or “feudal” marriages) rather than marriages based on a supposed communitarian mode. Finally, Maitland does nothing to rebut Tocqueville’s point that the intensity of commitment Americans brought to their marriages was, in part, a reaction against the pervasive force of the market and an effort to create relationships that were concrete, personal, and not subject to economic forces. Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), p. 291.

27 Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule (New York: Basic Books 1996).