No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Response to “On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2011
Extract
Martha Nussbaum, in a reaction to the cultural relativism that pervades much of social science, made the following comment:
Highly intelligent people, people deeply committed to the good of women and men in developing countries, people who think of themselves as progressive and feminist and antiracist, are taking up positions that converge … with the positions of reaction, oppression, and sexism. Under the banner of their radical and politically correct “antiessentialism” march ancient religious taboos, the luxury of the pampered husband, ill health, ignorance, and death. (And in my own essentialist way, I say it at the outset. I do hold that death is opposed to life in the most binary way imaginable, and slavery to freedom, and hunger to adequate nutrition, and ignorance to knowledge.)
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2011
References
1 Nussbaum, Martha C., “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 204.
2 It is unclear whether Etzioni holds to the strong position that ontological individuality is incompatible with any notion of community. We take on this and related positions in Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Rasmussen, Douglas B., “The Myth of Atomism,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 4 (June 2006): 841–68Google Scholar. For an earlier commentary on liberalism's ability to embrace community, see Buchanan, Allen E., “Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (July 1989): 852–82Google Scholar.
3 Communities can, of course, have their own internal procedures for critical assessment of community norms. This is not of too much help theoretically, since it simply begs the question of a standard to evaluate the procedures.
4 Etzioni is quite mistaken when he describes the premodern position on legitimacy as being secured by “a divine force or by tradition” (107).
5 A related point can be found in Ian Shapiro's valuable discussion of legitimacy in The Moral Foundations of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google ScholarPubMed. Instead of speaking of these values as being rooted in consent, Shapiro speaks of a rootedness in the Enlightenment. I would generally share his view and perhaps in other contexts would use the same language. I might note in addition that Shapiro also reminds us that liberals do not have to come only in packages of consent theorists. Utilitarians can be, and often are, liberals, but their ground is overall happiness rather than agreement.
6 We deal with the Nussbaum (and Sen) case in “Liberalism in Retreat,” Review of Metaphysics 62, no. 4 (2009): 875–908Google Scholar. Sen is considered separately along these lines in Anthony de Jasay's “On ‘Rightsism,’” as yet an unpublished review of Sen's The Idea of Justice.
7 Similarly, simply because practice P or moral value V is acceptable or worthy it does not follow that it ipso facto gains the status of something that should be encouraged by political means.
8 As a pure communitarian it may be that the only choice Etzioni has is to claim that communal self-evidence just is what it means to be moral principle.
9 In addition, that likely consensus about the violation of basic human rights might also be an indication that the state is suited only to the task of the protection of basic rights, or so we have argued elsewhere. See Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J., Norms of Liberty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
10 Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009)Google Scholar. Also see our “Retreat from Liberalism: Human Capabilities and Public Reasoning,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 15, no. 1 (2009): 1–25Google Scholar.
11 Hirschman, A. O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google ScholarPubMed. Hirschman puts the problem simply and best when he says, “My principal point—and puzzlement—is easily stated: exit has been accorded an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition, but then, suddenly, it is wholly proscribed” (106).
12 This applies not only to Sen and Nussbaum but also to Putnam, with his “idealized inquiry,” and to Habermas, with his “discourse ethics,” as Douglas Rasmussen has argued elsewhere. See, for example, Rasmussen, Douglas B., “The Importance of Metaphysical Realism for Ethical Knowledge,” Social Philosophy & Policy 25, no. 1 (2008): 56–99Google Scholar. I thank Douglas Rasmussen for comments on drafts of this response.
13 For an excellent account of the role of exit and its several complications within liberal theory, see Kukathas, Chandran, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chaps. 4 and 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Arnold Kling makes a similar point and applies it to thinking about political organization as well. As he puts it: “The exit/voice paradigm is quite useful in distinguishing competitive government from democratic government. Competitive government relies on exit to produce change. With competitive government, unresponsive governments lose constituents, in the same way that unresponsive businesses lose customers. Democratic government relies on voice to produce change. With today's high concentration of political power, it is all too easy for government to ignore the public's voice” (Unchecked and Unbalanced [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010]Google Scholar, 89).
15 One is strongly reminded of Habermas when reading Etzioni's essay, though unlike Habermas I believe Etzioni is moved at least in part to avoid pure proceduralism. Nonetheless, the following from Haberman captures much of what is going on in Etzioni: “Our central task is to explain (a) why the democratic process is understood as a process of legitimate legislation; and (b) why, in the process of drawing up constitutions, democracy and human rights are interconnected from the very outset. The explanation consists in the demonstration that (a) to the extent that the democratic process satisfies the conditions for an inclusive and discursive formation of opinion and will, it establishes an assumption that the results will be rationally acceptable; and that (b) the legal institutionalization of this kind of process of democratic legislation demands that the basic liberal and political rights be granted simultaneously” (Habermas, Jürgen and Ratzinger, Joseph, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006], 25–26)Google Scholar.