Kant thinks that Aristotle just made a mistake.

It’s one thing, Kant says,

to support a fair framework of rights

within which people can pursue their own

conceptions of the good life.

It’s something else and something that runs the risk of coercion

to base law or principles of justice

on any particular conception of the good life.

You remember Aristotle says in order to investigate the ideal constitution

we have first to figure out the best way to live.

Kant would reject that idea.

He says that constitutions and laws and rights

rights should not embody or affirm or promote

any particular way of life.

That’s at odds with freedom.

For Aristotle the whole point of law,

the purpose of polis

is to shape character,

to cultivate the virtue of citizens,

to inculcate civic excellence, to make possible a good way of life.

That’s what he tells us in the politics.

For Kant, on the other hand,

the purpose of law, the point of a constitutiion

is not to inculcate or to promote virtue.

It’s to set up a fair framework of rights within which

citizens may be free to pursue their own conceptions of the good for themselves.

So we see the difference in their theories of justice.

We see the difference in their account of

law or the role of a constitution, the point of politics,

and underlying these differences are

two different accounts of what it means to be a free person.

For Aristotle we are free insofar as we have

the capacity to realize our potential.

And that leads us to the question of fit.

Fit between persons and the roles that are appropriate to them.

Figuring out what I’m cut out for.

That’s what it means to lead a free life, to live up to my potential.

Kant rejects that idea and instead

substitutes his famously demanding notion of

freedom as the capacity to act autonomously.

Freedom means acting according to a law I give myself.

Freedom is autonomy.

Part of the appeal, part of the moral force

of the view of Kant and of Rawls consists in

the conception of the person as a free and independent self

capable of choosing his or her own ends.

The image of the self is free and independent

offers a, if you think about it, a powerful liberating vision

because what it says is that as free moral persons

we are not bound by any ties of history

or of tradition or of inherited status

that we haven’t chosen for ourselves,

and so we’re unbound by any moral ties prior to our choosing them.

And that means that we are

free and independent sovereign selves.

We’re the authors of the only obligations that constrain us.

The communitarian critics of Kantian and Rawlsian liberalism

acknowledge that there is something powerful

and inspiring in that account of freedom,

the free independent choosing self,

but they argue it misses something.

It misses a whole dimension of moral life and even political life.

It can’t make sense of our moral experience because it can’t account

for certain moral and political obligations

that we commonly recognize and even prize.

And these include obligations of membership, loyalty,

solidarity, and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons

that we can’t trace to an act of consent.

Alistair McIntyre

gives an account what he calls a narrative conception of the self.

It’s a different account of the self.

Human beings are essentially storytelling creatures, McIntyre argues.

That means I can only answer the question

'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question

of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

That’s what he means by the narrative conception of the self.

What does this have to do with the idea of community and belonging?

McIntyre says this,

Once you accept this narrative aspect of moral reflection

you will notice that we can never seek for the good

or exercise of the virtues only as individuals.

We all approach our circumstance as bearers of particular social identities.

I am someone’s son or daughter,

a citizen of this or that city,

I belonged to this plan, that tribe, this nation.

Hence, McIntyre argues, what is good for me

has to be the good for someone who inhabits these roles.

I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation

a variety of debts, inheritances, expectations, and obligations.

These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point.

This is in part what gives my life its moral particularity.

That’s the narrative conception of the self.

And it’s a conception that sees the self as

claimed or encumbered, at least to some extent,

by the history, the tradition,

the communities, of which it’s a part.

We can’t make sense of our lives,

not only as a psychological matter, but also as a moral matter

in thinking what we are to do

without attending to these features about us.

Now, McIntyre recognizes that this narrative account,

this picture of the encumbered self,

puts his account at odds with contemporary liberalism and individualism.

From the standpoint of individualism

I am what I myself choose to be.

I may biologically be my father’s son

but I can’t be held responsible for what he did

unless I choose to assume such responsibility.

I can’t be held responsible for what my country does, or has done,

unless I choose to assume such responsibility.

But McIntyre says this reflects a certain kind of moral shallowness

even blindness.

It’s a blindness at odds with the full measure of responsibility which sometimes,

he says, involves collective responsibility or responsibilities that may flow

from historic memories.

And he gives some examples.

Such individualism is expressed by those contemporary Americans

who deny any responsibility for the effects of slavery upon black Americans saying

"I never owned any slaves."

Or the young German who believes

that having been born after 1945 means

that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance

to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries.

McIntyre says all of these attitudes of historical amnesia

amount to a kind of moral abdication.

Once you see that who we are

and what it means to sort out our obligations

can’t be separated, shouldn’t be separated

from the life histories that define us.

The contrast, he says, with a narrative account, is clear,

For the story of my life is always embedded in the story

of those communities from which I derived my identity.

I am born with the past and to try to cut myself off from that past

is to deform my present relationships.

So there you have in McIntyre, a strong statement of the idea

that the self can’t be detached, shouldn’t be detached,

from its particular ties of membership history,

story narrative.

Now, I want to get your reactions

to the communitarian critique

of the individualist or the voluntarist,

the unencumbered self.

But let’s make it concrete so that you can react

to more than just the theory of it by looking at

the two different accounts of moral and political obligation that arise

depending on which of these conceptions of the person one accepts.

On the liberal conception,

moral and political obligations arise in one of two ways.

There are natural duties that we owe human beings as such.

duties of respect for persons qua persons.

These obligations are universal.

Then, as Rawls points out,

there are also voluntary obligations.

Obligations that we owe to particular others

insofar as we have agreed

whether through a promise or a deal or a contract.

Now, the issue between the liberal and communitarian accounts of the self,

is there another category of obligation or not?

The communitarian says there is.

There is a third category that might be called

obligations of solidarity or loyalty or membership.

The communitarian argues that construing all obligations

as either natural duties or voluntary obligations

fails to capture obligations of membership or solidarity.

Loyalties whose moral force consists partly in the fact

that living by them is inseparable from

understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are.

What would be some examples?

And then I want to see how you would react to them.

Examples of obligations of membership

that are particular but don’t necessarily flow from consent

but rather from membership narrative community, one situation.

The most common examples are ones to do with the family.