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Are Particularistic Obligations Justified? A Communitarian Examination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Amitai Etzioni
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Abstract

Are we justified when we care more about “our own kind” than about all others? Some scholars have tried to provide an answer based on what they consider human nature. Others—on self-interest. The author examines the implications of the constitutive roles community has in our life for this question, as well as the differences it makes when considering what kind of human flourishing we deem of value.

If three children go hungry in a community, the members of this community are more distressed than if thousands starve in some far away country. Moreover, people not only care more about members of their own communities, but maintain that they are justified in doing so, that one has a higher level of obligation to one's “own kind” than to all others. Are such particularistic obligations justified, and on what grounds?

This question has been the subject of an immense amount of deliberation, which is not reviewed here. This exploration is limited to an examination of communitarian justifications for particularistic obligations, and only to those in a societal rather than political context. That is, if concerns the obligations of members of communities, not those of citizens of states.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , Fall 2002 , pp. 573 - 598
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

I am indebted to Andrew Volmert for extensive research assistance and discussion of this essay; to William Galston for suggestions of important resources; to David Lefkowitz, and to Philip Selznik, David Archard, and Lawrence Blum for comments on a previous draft; and to Mark E. Gammon for editorial suggestions.

1. A similar point was made by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, although Smith refers to the difference between a man's reaction to his own problems and a disaster far away (Smith, , The Essential Adam Smith, ed. Heilbroner, Robert L. [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986], p. 106).Google Scholar

2. I would have preferred the term “moral claims” to obligations because obligations, like duties, imply imposition from the outside, while using “moral claims” may help to remind that reference is made to claims whose innate merit we recognize. They are, at least in part, internally motivated.

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10. I am indebted to David Archard for this point.

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16. The most often discussed example of this is William Godwin's suggestion that a person should not save a loved one before a person of greater societal worth (Godwin, , Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Preston, Raymond A. [New York: Knopf, 1926]Google Scholar). Godwin is discussed in, among other works, Williams, Bernard, “Persons, Character and Morality,” in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Baron, “Impartiality and Friendship”; Maclntyre, Alasdair, “The Magic in the Pronoun ‘My’” (review of Williams′ Moral Luck), Ethics 94 (1983): 113–25;Google Scholar Friedman, “The Practice of Partiality.” For a criticism of Williams′ analysis of the example (and the suggestion that the man in the example has “one thought too many”), see Baron, Marcia W., Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

17. Many of the authors who address this oft-discussed case analyze it from a different perspective, suggesting that the person in the case should not think of his wife in the same way he thinks of the stranger (this is Bernard Williams′ point in raising the case in his essay “Persons, Character and Morality,” p. 18).Google Scholar Here, the case is used to illustrate a different point, that the person in the case will not treat his wife in the same way as the stranger (or think of her in the same way) because it is not human nature to do so.

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22. I am indebted to Andrew Volmert for this point.

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24. There is a considerable literature that is critical of functional explanations that cannot be reviewed here.

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40. Letter to author, 29 09 2001.Google Scholar

41. .Ibid.

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44. See, for instance, the vast body of literature examining the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, especially Berman, Sheri, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 43, no. 3 (1997): 401–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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47. I am not arguing that universal commitments′ moral standing is based on their introduction and reenforcement by particularistic relations, but that without these relations people will not acquire or sustain them, whatever their intrinsic merit.

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52. Ibid., p. 197, quoting Eliot.

53. Ibid.

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55. Ibid., p. 369 (emphasis in original).