Five
Recall the face of the poorest and the most helpless man whom you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him, will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to ‘swaraj’ or self-rule for the hungry and spiritually starved millions of our countrymen? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away. —Gandhi
The reputation of nationalicsm has been most notorious in the ethical sphere. Nationalism has been blamed for promoting intolerance, communal egoism, arrogant patriotism, racist tyranny, and genocide. Dunn argues that nationalism is the
starkest political shame of the twentieth century, the deepest, most intractable and yet most unanticipated blot on the political history of the world since the year 1900. . . . Nationalism does violate so directly the official conceptual categories of modern ethics, the universalist heritage of a natural law conceived either in terms of Christianity or of secular rationalism.1
In this chapter, the pervasive view of the ethics of nationalism as necessarily objectionable is rejected. Nationalism, it is argued, offers a set of moral values worthy of respect and serious consideration.
A discussion of the ethical implications of nationalism will enable us to trace the connections between feelings of belonging and moral obligations, which are not unique to membership in a nation but also to membership in other constitutive communities. The ethical approach presented in this chapter will, therefore, be referred to as “the morality of community.”
The morality of community is not meant to replace liberal morality, and ties of membership are obviously not the exclusive source of moral duties. Rather, it is argued that both these approaches, in a puzzling entanglement, shape our thinking on moral issues.
There are four ways in which the morality of community deepens our thinking on moral issues. First, rather than promoting rational egoism and mutual disinterestedness, it encourages members to develop relations based on care and cooperation. These relations are crucial for the functioning of a liberal state in general, and a liberal welfare state in particular. Second, it can account for our intuition that we have a reason, at least in some cases, to favour those who share their life with us, and about whom we care deeply. Third, the morality of community demonstrates that it is possible for individuals who care about particular others and who are well aware of their specific affiliations, to agree on principles of justice. Fourth, notwithstanding prevalent views, the implications of the morality of community regarding attitudes toward nonmembers are no more and, in fact, probably less self-interested, than those derived from liberal theory. In fact, developing the morality of community leads to a much greater commitment to global justice than that advocated by most liberal writers.
The Morality of Community
One of the distinctive features of membership in a constitutive community is that members view their self-esteem and well-being as affected by the successes and failures of their individual fellow members and of the group as a whole. Consider, for example, the pride and excitement Israelis felt when the writer S. Y. Agnon became the first and only Israeli ever to win a Nobel Prize, the elation in the streets of Tel-Aviv when the Israeli basketball team defeated the Soviet team in the 1970s, and the country’s delight when the Israeli representative became Miss Universe.
Members of a constitutive community are also affected by the personal achievements of their fellows in deeper ways: The achievements of others allow them to enjoy qualities that they cannot develop in themselves and profit from the results of activities they cannot pursue. The richness of their culture, the range of opportunities open to them, the norms, patterns of behaviour, and the values they hold, all are influenced by the activities of their fellow members, whose accomplishments influence their chances of living a full, satisfying, and stable life. You are men, Mazzini tells his fellow Italians, “that is, rational and social creatures capable, by means of community only, of a progress to which no one may assign limits.”2
Both the development of individuals and that of humanity at large depend, according to Mazzini, on the existence of mediating associations that enable the development of a rich and meaningful life and the cultivation of personal attachments without which “there would not be enough substance or convictions in man’s life to compel his allegiance to life itself.”3
From a moral perspective, a more crucial advantage of communal life is that it allows individuals to develop and abide by “a sense of justice.” According to Rawls, the development of a sense of justice is conditional on being situated, on having special relations, on fostering active sentiments of love and friendship, on witnessing the manifest intentions of others to act for our welfare. Our sense of justice is a generalization of “wanting to be fair with our friends and wanting to give justice to those we care for.”4
Informal human communities cannot be maintained, let alone flourish, unless their members develop some sense of mutual responsibility toward each other. Were individuals not ready to dedicate time and effort, and perhaps even occasionally set aside their own interests for the sake of their friends, they would have no friends. Were diaspora Jews to stop caring for Israel and Israel for them, the communal bonds between these two parts of the Jewish people would be considerably eroded. Hence, a sense of mutual care and mutual responsibilities among members can be seen as a precondition for the personal enjoyment of all goods derived from communal life.
It could be claimed that this argument is a variation on rational egoism suggesting that, since individuals derive personal benefits from the success of their fellow members, they tend to support them in the hope of securing egoistic gains. This type of self-centered justification would still be in agreement with the general lines of the argument, presented here, as long as it is predicated on the premise that, having internalised the principle that they personally benefit by caring for their fellow members, individuals consistently endorse this mode of thinking and do not, in each particular case, reconsider their position. This position enables us to bypass the controversial question of whether, “by nature,” individuals are rational egoists or sympathetic cooperators. If both positions have similar ethical consequences then, no matter how interesting this debate might be, it is of limited practical significance.
The assumption that individuals care for members of their community does not imply that they are naturally altruistic, that they have close and loving relations with every member of their community, that they are equally committed to the welfare of all others, or that they always act with the good of others in mind. I make no attempt to idealise communities or to rely on implausible assumptions about the purportedly harmonious nature of social relationships. The truth is that we might dislike other members of our community, or disagree with them. What, then, is the basis for our relationships? It is neither love nor sympathy but connectedness, the belief that we all belong to a group whose existence we consider valuable. Feelings of shame or anger reflect this connectedness as much as feelings of pride and love. “We are only ashamed of people we are akin to—members of a particular community to which we feel we belong,” says Berlin. “We are ashamed of what our brothers or our friends do; of what strangers do we might disapprove, but we do not feel ashamed.”5 This discussion therefore departs from a rather modest premise: Individuals consider it beneficial to protect the particularistic interests and welfare of their fellow members. Consequently, even though this endeavor might entail sacrifices, their overriding experience will not be one of personal loss but rather of self-fulfillment.6
In light of the importance that many liberal writers ascribe to membership in constitutive communities, we would expect particular attachments and feelings of belonging to play a central role in moral theory. In line with modern liberal philosophy, however, Rawls argues that the “morality of association” (in many respects similar to the morality of community), is merely a stage to be transcended in the course of our moral development. What does “transcendence” mean in this context? Does it imply that we ought to act as if personal commitments are of no moral importance, or rather that the morality of association does not cover the whole of the moral realm and we should view some of our moral concerns as transcending its scope and extending beyond our fellow members to include humanity at large? The morality of community is premised on the latter interpretation. Rather than restrict moral duties to members only, it argues that personal attachments intensify general moral duties and create new ones. Even at the most developed stage of moral thinking, that of the morality of principles, Rawls assumes that associative ties serve to highlight moral feelings, thus making deception and betrayal by our fellows particularly odious:
To be sure, deceit and infidelity are always wrong, being contrary to natural duties and obligations, but they are not always equally wrong. They are worst whenever bonds of affection and good faith have been formed, and this consideration is relevant in working out the appropriate priority rules.7
Although Rawls’ example of the duty to refrain from committing immoral acts leaves open the question of positive duties, his argument nevertheless seems to lead to the following conclusion: When faced with an exclusive choice of alternatives between helping strangers or members of my group—be it my family, my community, or my nation—I have a stronger moral duty to help those to whom I feel close than to help strangers. It would then appear that even individuals who have reached the final stage in the development of their sense of justice, who desire to act out of a conception of right and justice shaped by parties ignorant of their own particularities ought, at times, to prefer their fellow members. Obviously, this need not imply that because our personal attachments lead to an intensified moral duty to care for the well-being of our fellow members, this duty can never be overridden by others. When the needs of strangers are significantly more urgent than those of members, our obligation to help them might indeed be greater than our communitarian obligation to prefer fellows.
Constitutive Ties—Associative Obligations
Expressions such as “How could he do that to his parents?” or “How could she not support women’s rights?” illustrate well the popular perception of constitutive ties as generating special obligations. We are far more disturbed by someone who neglects his own children than by someone who fails to support someone else’s children, by a person who deserts a friend in need than by one who does not help a stranger, by individuals who are indifferent to starving members of their own community than by those who do not care for starving people in faraway countries. These examples are not designed to suggest that we have no obligations to nonmembers in need. Rather, they stress our intuitive belief that it is particularly cruel to overlook the suffering and hardships of those we have a particular reason to care about—our fellow members.
This intuitive belief is grounded in the assumption that deep and important obligations flow from identity and relatedness. Dworkin refers to them as associative obligations, and views them as obligations that social practice imposes on members in biological or social groups, such as the responsibilities toward family, friends, or neighbours. These responsibilities can only count as genuine fraternal obligations when they are viewed as “special, holding distinctly within the group, rather than as general duties its members owe equally to persons outside it,” and as “personal: [that] they run directly from each member to each other member, not just to the group as a whole in some collective sense.”8
The concept of associative obligations is often suspected of serving to cover up a desire to restrict the scope of obligations incumbent on individuals, but this is not necessarily the case. In fact, recognising the binding power of associative obligations increases rather than lessens the scope of our obligations to help others, as the following analysis will show.
When only nonmembers are in need of help the question of favouritism does not loom large, and our motivation for action stems from general moral principles. When members are involved, we are obliged to weigh their needs against those of others, and favour them only if the gap between their needs and those of nonmembers is not too wide. But there is a third category of cases, in which we are under no obligation to help others, unless they are our fellow members. Even though others may need our assistance, our circumstances at the time may be such that helping them would entail too much of a personal sacrifice. Yet the others in question may be of such importance to us that we might be willing to help them without concern for the hardships involved.
Let us look at a specific example. Ethiopians, like many other Africans, live in conditions of extreme deprivation. This gives all human beings who are better placed a reason to attend to their needs. Israel is troubled by considerable economic difficulties but is still in a better situation than Ethiopia, and is therefore under a general obligation to extend help to the best of its ability. But Israel felt it had an additional obligation to attend to the needs of a particular group of Ethiopians to which it is bound by communal ties—Ethiopian Jews. Israel, as the Jewish nation-state, embarked on a concerted effort to help Ethiopian Jews move to Israel and integrate in their new home, despite the high costs involved in such a venture. In the absence of an additional communitarian obligation, it is unlikely that such additional steps would ever have been taken. The fact that Israelis might not be ready to make a similar sacrifice for the sake of non-Jews does not negate the moral value of this act, which is still motivated by genuine concern for others.9
This kind of favouritism might be suspected as necessarily grounded in the idea that what is mine is more valuable than what is yours. But this conclusion would be misleading. When I claim that charity begins at home I do not intend to imply that the poor of my town are better but merely that, for the reasons mentioned above, I have a greater obligation toward them than to strangers because they are members of my community. Similarly, when I claim that the preservation of my national heritage is more important to me than the preservation of other national cultures, I am merely claiming that this is the case for me, while recognising that for members of other cultures, the preservation of their culture is more important to them. These claims do not hide a chauvinistic agenda, nor do they imply an objective hierarchy among different forms of life. They merely suggest that, based on the discussion developed in Chapter 2 regarding cultural choices, individuals will not participate in a communal life unless they assume that, for their intents and purposes, it represents the best of all viable possibilities.
Associative obligations differ in their nature, since they are contingent on the particular character of the association in question. Different types of communities—families, unions, neighbourhoods—thus generate different associative obligations, reflecting the range of issues characteristic of this type of associative tie. Consequently
I need not act towards my partner as if I thought his welfare as important as my son’s. . . . My concern for my union ‘brother’ is general across the economic and productive life we share but does not extend to his success in social life, as my concern for my biological brother does.10
Even when derived from the same type of associative ties, associative obligations arising from membership in each particular union, neighbourhood, or state, may vary depending on the particular terms of membership and on the nature of each association. Hence, we shall encounter different definitions of what it means to be a devoted friend, a loyal comrade, or a good citizen. Moreover, the intensity of associative ties varies among different cultures. In some societies family ties will generate the most important commitments, while in others they will be overshadowed by ideological, professional, civic, or national attachments.
One last feature characterises associative obligations: Since they grow from relatedness and identity, they are independent of the normative nature of the association. There is no reason to assume, as Dworkin does, that only membership in morally worthy associations can generate associative obligations. For example, members of the Mafia are bound by associative obligations to their fellow members, meaning that they have an obligation to attend to each other’s needs, to protect each other, to support the families of those killed “in action,” and the like. These obligations are not ultimate, and there are obviously sound moral reasons that could override them, but we cannot rule out their very existence. Similarly, citizens of a state involved in an unjust war may be torn between the feeling that they have an associative obligation to serve in the army together with their enlisted fellows, and their commitment to a moral code dictating they should refuse. In these cases, individuals face hard moral dilemmas: Should a person tell the truth or be loyal to friends? Should a Palestinian hand over to the Israeli military police a fellow national who committed a crime? Should a student tell his teacher that his best friend cheated on an important exam? There are no clear answers, and individuals may make different decisions on the merits of each case, but a moral person will be aware of the moral loss entailed by each alternative. Individuals who approach these decisions unaware of the dilemmas implied by them misunderstand the complex range of moral obligations incumbent on them.
If only morally valuable communities could generate associative obligations, the latter would become a meaningless concept. Our obligation to sustain just associations is not contingent on our membership in them but rather on the justice of the association’s actions. Conversely, our obligation to help fellow members derives from a shared sense of membership rather than from the specific nature of their actions. Hence had we been born in a community of “villains” we might, nevertheless, be bound by associative obligations, although the latter could be overridden by moral obligations.
We may belong to more than one association, and some of our associative obligations could conflict. Members of national minorities often experience such dilemmas, as could also be true for women who find that an organisation they belong to endorses sexist policies, or for vegetarians who are members of a community gathering for an annual barbecue. Individuals whose multiple loyalties conflict can only consider the obligations raised by their membership in each group, weigh them fairly, and decide on a course of action.
The argument has so far dealt with associative obligations binding fellow members, but are there any guidelines prescribing how members should be treated?
On the Need for Moral Principles
Many communitarians have suggested that, in a truly communitarian society, there is no need for rules and principles, which are replaced by empathy and care. Sandel’s description of an ideal community, where principles are superfluous, is a good illustration of this tendency:
In a more or less ideal family situation, where relations are governed in large part by spontaneous affection . . . individual rights and fair decision procedures are seldom invoked, not because injustice is rampant but because their appeal is preempted by a spirit of generosity in which I am rarely inclined to claim my fair share.11
In an ideal community of this type, one may get even less than what his “official” dues entitle him to, but this is acceptable since “the question of what I get and what I am due do not loom large in the overall context of this way of life.”12
Liberals also tend to idealize social relations, portraying them as equal and systematic. Although clearly advantageous theoretically, this distorts their real structure. Human affections are never equally distributed, and even within their own families individuals may not be on equally intimate terms with all members. A social theory that relies on a false assumption of symmetry is bound to neglect the need for protecting those who are less liked. A vision of community in which all members love each other to the exact same degree and all relations are perfectly systematic and reciprocal is as frightening as a vision of a community without love. Furthermore, when communal relations are reduced to reciprocity, fairness, or gratitude, there is nothing special or interesting about them; they fail to add any new dimension to our moral thinking and merely become a special case of contractual relationships.
If it is not the case that affections are or should be equally distributed, however, then a human community exclusively grounded in affection will only generate fears and uncertainty. Being aware of the unequal and inconsistent nature of human emotions, it would be rational for members concerned about “not getting their due,” to rely on a set of agreed principles rather than on the feelings others may harbour toward them. Only then might they agree, out of care or love, to share with others what they are rightfully entitled to receive. Following principles may not be the richest, most interesting, or most morally rewarding way to live, but they provide society with “a fall-back position and security in case other constituent elements of social relations ever come apart.”13
Strangely, communitarianism and liberalism converge in the attempt to place all communities other than states beyond the realm of principles. Communitarians offer a view that expresses the priority of culture and tradition over justice. Moreover, since their view of community is far too harmonious, it tends to foster the illusion that principles of justice are made redundant by love and mutual care. For their part, liberals ignore the need for principles to guide communal behaviour, since they tend to play down the importance of particular communities and view the state as the only significant player in the political domain. Consequently, their main concern is to restrict the potential misuse of power by the state, while remaining almost indifferent to possible abuses of power within particular communities. Liberals assume that freedom of association entails granting voluntary communities the right to manage their affairs. Nozick, for instance, argues that “individual communities may have any character compatible with the operation of the framework. If any person finds the character of a particular community uncongenial, he needn’t choose to live in it.”14
This approach seems to imply that striving for a more just community is redundant. This conclusion is both misleading and dangerous. Membership in national communities affects individuals in much more important ways, than liberals tend to assume, and could become even more important in light of the model outlined in Chapter 7.
The claim that principles of justice should feature prominently in the communitarian discussion might seem to conflict with the approach to self-determination suggested in Chapter 3, which granted each community the right to manage its affairs in line with its own tradition and culture. These, nevertheless, are two separate issues. The first is whether the right to national self-determination is to be restricted only to just communities. The answer to this question is negative. Self-determination implies respect for the right of each nation to define its rules of conduct with as little intervention as possible. The second is a theoretical issue: Can liberal nationalism as a theory offer a consistent set of principles of justice valid both within and among communities? The next two sections attempt to justify a positive answer to this question.
Agreeing on Principles of Justice
Two reasons might be adduced for the view that the assumptions of liberal nationalism preclude the possibility of reaching agreement on a set of just principles by which society should be governed.
First, the concept of the contextual individual, which is the basic underlying assumption of liberal nationalism, portrays a person who, by nature, belongs to a particular community (or to several ones) and has a variety of attachments and ties. Although contextual individuals share feelings of belonging with all members of their social group, their degree of affection for each member differs—they have close and loving relations with some, and object to others. The argument that individuals have a reason for preferring those who are close to them would seem to preempt the possibility of reaching agreement on principles of justice.
Second, this task could be hindered even further by another inherent feature of liberal nationalism, namely, its basic assumption that morality is to be grounded on care rather than on mutual disinterestedness. Because of this basic assumption, liberal nationalism cannot endorse Rawls’ thought experiment. According to Rawls, individuals can reach agreement because they think about justice from behind a veil of ignorance that masks their particular ties and commitments, implying that communitarian values and beliefs should be transcended in the process of thinking about justice. Ignoring communal ties is not only justified on instrumental grounds, but also by claiming that communal ties are contingent and therefore morally irrelevant.
This is the main point of contention between Rawls’ position and the model suggested by the morality of community. Rawls acknowledges that individuals belong to particular communities and that these memberships are highly significant to them, or else he would not have suggested the veil of ignorance as a major feature of his model. Yet Rawls refuses to grant any moral importance to these memberships. This seems particularly odd in light of his argument that in order to develop a sense of justice individuals must be nurtured in a loving, caring community. If our understanding of the need for generalised, impartial principles can only emerge through a commitment to partiality, namely, if the former cannot be attained without experiencing and practicing the latter, then justice cannot become a permanent feature of our moral lives unless we recognise the importance of the morality of community. We pay a price for being trained to act according to principles and—strangely enough—the price is a license to be partial.
It is quite obvious that Rawls’ model can only persist over time if parents, friends, and members of particular associations act partially when expressing their concern for some particular others, thus providing the conditions for a constant regeneration of the sense of justice. Impartiality would then only be required from formal institutions but not from individuals in their everyday lives. Can we detect here the remnants of a Hegelian claim, namely, that the most developed moral life is the public one, and that within the family and civil society we are doomed to experience either particular altruism or universal egoism? If this is the case, then the parties are placed behind the veil of ignorance so as to enable them to transcend the less worthy moral features characteristic of the first two stages. Yet this interpretation contradicts Rawls’ own claim that, even at the stage of the morality of principles, particular relations intensify moral duties. If particular relations are morally inferior, why take them into account at all? Alternatively, Rawls could be said to place the parties behind the veil of ignorance merely as a prudential measure, without which it is feared that no arrangement would be possible. This section suggests that this complex and counterintuitive measure is redundant, and suggests ways of reaching agreement from a contextualized position.
The morality of community allows individuals to think about justice from their own, partial viewpoints. It rejects the view that to reason ethically, to consider things from a moral point of view, means to rely exclusively on an impartial standpoint, and argues that the essence of morality does not concern the ways in which an impersonal, disinterested self acts toward impersonal and equally disinterested others, but rather the ways in which moral agents, bound by ties and relationships, confront other, no less situated persons. It thus presupposes that, in moral behaviour, it is “not the Kantian leap from the particular and the affective to the rational and the universal that makes all the difference; it is rather the Humean step—from the self to someone else.”15 And this step cannot and should not be transcended, but should rather be at the heart of our moral thinking.
Yet, unless we can suggest a process whereby individuals can agree on principles of justice without having to transcend their particularity, extol self-interest and mutual disinterest, all that is left is a choice between a liberal model that disregards the moral importance of particularities, and a national model that precludes the possibility of attaining agreement on principles of justice. In the course of this process, individuals will not be required to redirect their motivations when thinking about justice and to view themselves as mutually disinterested, at
great costs to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are—as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic.16
This book offers a model by which contextual individuals may come to agree on a set of principles of justice, thereby challenging two of Rawls’ basic assumptions: (1) that it is either irrational or immoral for individuals to consider the welfare of particular others when deciding on the moral principles that will govern their community; and (2) that individuals who are aware of their social position, their status, their communal affiliations, and their personal attachments, will inevitably act to secure their own narrow interests and will therefore be unable to reach agreement. The need for the complex restrictions assumed by the veil of ignorance is, therefore, questioned, and another model, grounded in the following assumptions, suggested below:
First of all, we must recognize that these different points of view exist, that the perspectives of others are not the same as ours. But we must not only learn that things look different to them, but that they have different wants and ends, and different plans and motives.19
We are then aware that the preferences and interests of others differ from our own. Because we care about some relevant others—our children, parents, spouses, some other relatives, close friends, and colleagues—we wish to take their preferences and interests into account. We therefore find that we care to defend a much broader range of interests than our own immediate and present ones. Moreover, in the course of their lifetime, those “others” we care about may occupy many roles and social positions, hold different conceptions of the good, and have a variety of interests. It would then be rational for any party trying to secure the welfare of others to defend the variety of interests and positions these “relevant others” might hold.
The parties do not have to be able to identify completely with the whole range of interests and desires cherished by all others. It might be true, as Hare suggests, that
I cannot know the extent and the quality of others’ sufferings and, in general, motivations and preferences without having equal motivations and preferences with regard to what should happen to me, were I in their places, with their motivations and preferences.20
The model does not propose that the parties should adopt the position of “archangel”—that they could or should incorporate and accurately evaluate all the preferences and interests of those they care about. In their commitment to defend the interests and preferences of others, individuals may misrepresent wishes and preferences. But by taking them into account, they enlarge the scope of positions, conceptions of the good, and interests that they take into consideration.
Suppose I wish to defend a minimal number of ten different positions, which I believe I might occupy in the course of my lifetime. Moreover, suppose I am also interested in ensuring that the ten individuals closest to me find themselves in the best possible position, and they themselves could also be placed in ten different positions during their own lifetimes. Furthermore, the welfare of these ten individuals depends on the welfare of others. For instance, I care about my daughter and I know that her happiness is closely related to the welfare of her spouse, their children, and maybe that of her parents-in-law. I care for the welfare of some of my colleagues, and their welfare is closely related to the welfare of their own families and friends. Obviously, there are cases in which this type of transitivity does not work. If my spouse, whom I love, has an affair with another woman he loves, it seems reasonable to assume that my feelings for him will not extend to her. Even though this example shows that there are limits to transitivity, for the purposes of my model it is enough to show that it is valid in a significant number of cases.21 I thus find myself concerned about many individuals who enter my range of care through my interests and concern for some closely related others.
The spread of care thus looks like a set of concentric circles—individuals care most about those in the circle closest to the centre, but are not indifferent to the welfare of those who occupy farther positions. Hence, although they begin by caring for ten individuals, they find themselves caring about many more, and may therefore be involved in protecting the interests and well-being of numerous others who could occupy a multitude of positions in the course of their lives. Since they are not “archangels,” individuals are unable to estimate with any certainty what positions they should defend. Forced to take into account a wide range of interests and conceptions of the good, individuals soon discover that it is irrational for them to protect any one particular position or interest. In fact, they find themselves in a position similar to that of being ignorant of their own interests. Being risk-averse, it would be logical for them to protect the interests of the worst off and to favour the equitable distribution of those primary goods needed for the pursuit of any particular conception of the good or life-plan that they or those they care for may choose to adopt.
But what if most of the others they know are very much like them and occupy similar social and economic positions? Were this the case, would it not be rational for the parties to protect only the interests of their own ingroup? This might indeed be the case in highly polarised and rigid societies, where memberships seldom overlap. The rigid nature of their social structure, however, places these societies beyond the scope covered by this model, in which mobility, within and between societies, is a central feature. Moreover, the definition of a nation as an “imaginary community” held together by feelings of belonging and connectedness, rules out the possibility of total isolation and indifference among various subgroups. Were such cleavages deep enough, the national community would eventually collapse.
It would also be rational for the parties in this model to protect the welfare of future generations, an impossible task for the disinterested parties in the Rawlsian position. In an attempt to protect the right of future generations, Rawls found it necessary to change his principles and rely on associative obligations. Each generation, he argues, should care for its immediate descendants as fathers would care for their own children. The parties in the original position are thus advised to “imagine themselves” fathers, and if uncertain about how much they should set aside for their children, they should consider “what they would believe themselves entitled to claim from their fathers.”22 Clearly then, Rawls recognises that, at least in some cases, the parties in the original position must acknowledge the power of family attachments and of particular ties, or else the question of justice for future generations cannot be answered. Rawls is therefore forced to impose on the parties two conflicting motivations. The model presented here avoids the need for this duality since the motivations of the parties support rather than hinder the attempt to extend principles of justice to include future generations.
The parties will end up choosing principles of justice similar to those endorsed by Rawls. These principles will guide the conduct of social institutions vis-à-vis their members, namely, institutions will be bound to be impartial when it comes to the different conceptions of the good, interests, and preferences held by their members. But knowing that their first duty is to their members, these institutions will act to promote the latter’s well-being and give preference to the interests of their members over those of nonmembers. Partiality and impartiality may therefore be justified in different contexts.
According to this view, the relevant distinction is not between the public and the private sphere but between attitudes toward members and nonmembers. We can now reformulate the central claim of the morality of community that members should come first, and redefine it as follows: Whereas partiality toward members is justified, one ought to be impartial among members. The model offered here regarding the formulation of principles of justice could be applied in any large community with similar results, namely, impartiality among members would be endorsed as the valid rule of conduct.
The relevant group should thus be defined in each case. For example, one of the implications of the right to culture discussed earlier was that different cultural groups have a right to establish schools that cater to their specific needs. It is justified for these schools to favour children who belong to the group they are meant to serve, but it would be unjustified for them to discriminate in any way among these children. When hiring workers for an Afro-Caribbean community centre, it might be justified to prefer Afro-Caribbeans, but it would be unjustified for the Afro-Caribbean director to prefer her sister over all other candidates.
These examples illustrate how overlapping memberships complicate the picture and might lead to moral dilemmas. Suppose I am a member of a municipal committee selecting candidates for a municipal program, and my best friend is among the applicants. Do I have a reason to prefer him? In my capacity as a member of this committee, my reference group is the community at large, and I must therefore act impartially toward all the candidates who meet the residence requirement. Only after the committee has ruled on this issue, do I have reason to speak to my friend, and to my friend only, and sympathise with his disappointment, or share his delight for getting the job.
At times, dual loyalties might lead to personal tragedy. Suppose that a general has to decide which of three battalions will be sent into a dangerous battle, and he knows that his son is serving in one of them. As a father, the general has a duty to protect his son, but as a military commander he should send the best battalion and disregard his personal concern. By doing the right thing, the general could indeed find himself in the very tragic position of being forced to send his son to an almost certain death.
The morality of community thus assumes that to be just normally presupposes not only that
an agent is attached to certain abstract concepts and ideals, but also more fundamentally that he is attached to and cares for his community, and that he has a sense that his own good and that of those he cares for most is associated with the general adherence to [some] ideals.23
It thus ignores neither the power of particular attachments nor the need for principles. It recognises the binding force of membership and the particular duties derived from it, although without granting them ultimate priority. It therefore argues that, knowing what is the right thing to do in each case demands that we weigh a wide range of considerations, some mutually incompatible and incommensurable. Untidy compromises do not merely reflect difficulties in the implementation of moral principles but the deeper, inherent complexity of the moral sphere.
Caring for Nonmembers
Why are we so troubled by the idea that charity begins at home? Why is it so morally disturbing to think that we have special relations with our fellow members, and that these relations require us to attend to their needs before we attend to the needs of nonmembers? In short, why are partiality and favouritism so morally worrisome?
It seems that our aversion to favouritism is not so much related to the notion of caring for particular others as it is to the idea of conferring legitimation on an attitude that disregards the needs of nonmembers. It is for this reason that even those who accept some measure of favouritism as justified, tend to restrict it as much as possible. Dagger, for example, suggests that compatriots take priority only in the case of “other things being equal.”24 This view tends to minimise the significance of membership, by implying that we are only justified in providing for the welfare for our fellow citizens if all other noncitizens are needy to the same degree. But this is never the case. Most of us believe that we should first attend to the needs of our own citizens, allowing for a much greater deviation from universal principles than the one justified by the notion of “other things being equal.” This implies that we tend to grant membership, as well as the obligations that follow from it, a much more substantive role in our moral thinking than Dagger would care to admit.
Gewirth attempts to justify ethical particularism on universal grounds, and argues that the right of individuals to establish voluntary communities derives from universal principles of human rights. Voluntary associations have special collective purposes which, in turn, “justify the particularistic, preferential concern that members have for one another’s interests.”25 This preferential concern, however, cannot “extend to violate the moral rights of other persons.”26 This approach thus focuses the discussion on the rights of others and its scope depends on the understanding of these rights. “Rights” can be interpreted in negative terms, namely, as the right to act freely and without external intervention. This interpretation leaves very broad scope for particularistic rights; in fact, the only duty to outsiders would be to refrain from interfering with their lives, “to leave foreigners as we found them.”27 This approach makes allowances for extensive preferential treatment, and turns any form of support for nonmembers into supererogatory acts. But if nonmembers are also supposed to enjoy positive rights, such as the right to be sheltered, fed, and educated, it becomes very difficult to justify any form of partiality. In these circumstances, distributing resources among members would be justified only if it could be proven that, in doing so, we are not depriving nonmembers of their rights. Therefore, the license to favouritism within Gewirth’s argument might be either too restricted or too broad. In fact, the problem with most liberal justifications of favouritism is that they imply much greater favouritism toward members then they care to admit.
Let us assume that the parties in Rawls’ original position were to decide on their attitude toward nonmembers. Since they are aware of their membership in a particular society, and since they are self-interested, it would be rational for them to refuse to share any of their resources with nonmembers. While this argument is developed in greater detail in the next chapter, its conclusions are also relevant to the present discussion: If liberal morality indeed endorses a more radical form of favouritism and social egoism than that advocated by the morality of community, then some of the strongest objections against the moral implications of nationalism are misplaced.
But the morality of community has another advantage, deriving from the nature of modern membership. Modern individuals belong to a complex network of memberships, which is conducive to allaying fears about nonmembers. After all, the same people who are not members of one community we do not belong to—say a church—could be members of another community we are affiliated with—say a union. Hence, those we consider our fellow members do not necessarily belong to one closed and homogeneous group. If each individual has different circles of membership, and if there is no one ultimate membership that includes all others, the distinction between members and nonmembers becomes blurred. Given the nature of memberships in the modern world, the morality of community need not be as xenophobic as would appear at first glance. I see myself as an Israeli, but I am also a member of the academic community and therefore committed to the notion of academic freedom. I therefore have a duty to support Palestinian colleagues in their struggle to reopen the universities closed by the Israeli army in the West Bank. Obviously, the duty to defend academic freedom is a general duty, but the fact that I am a member of the academic community and share this membership with members of other nations intensifies my duty to defend their interests. Hence, I am less troubled by the fact that brokers at the Israeli stock exchange failed to organise a sit-down strike in solidarity with Palestinian academics, than by the fact that no Israeli university has officially done so.
In the previous section we concluded that the morality of community justifies favouritism, implying that in each particular case it is justified to favour members, namely, those who belong to the group relevant to the action in question. The answer to the question of who is a member will, however, vary in line with the activity being considered. When considering whether to contribute money to a political campaign, one should take into account one’s political loyalties rather than one’s family ties. I need not support a member of my family who upholds a political position I oppose. But when deliberating whether I should contribute a kidney to my sister, her political opinions will be irrelevant.
The morality of membership is often assumed to lead not only to xenophobia, but also to extreme communal egoism. Berlin forcefully attacks egoistic memberships of this kind:
Finally, by a development which need cause no surprise, full-blown nationalism has arrived at the position that, if the satisfaction of the needs of the organism to which I belong turns out to be incompatible with the fulfillment of the goals of other groups, I, or the society to which I indissolubly belong, have no choice but to force them to yield, if need be by force. If my group—let us call it nation—is freely to realise its true nature, this entails the need to remove obstacles in its path. Nothing that obstructs that which I recognize as my—that is, my nation’s—supreme goal, can be allowed to have equal value with it.28
This is an adequate description of the moral implications of national theories providing ultimate justification for the absolute priority of the needs of fellow members. The integration of liberal and national values inherent in the morality of community, however, precludes the possibility of granting ultimate value to national goals. We should be careful not to obscure the difference between the selfishness characterising the ultimate versions of nationalism Berlin speaks of, and the individualistic liberal nationalist approach, which justifies the right of individual members of every nation to give preference to the shared pursuit of common interests. This distinction resembles that drawn by Barry between selfishness and individualism. Selfishness, argues Barry, is “the pursuit of one’s own interests without regard to the interests of others,” while individualism is “the doctrine that it is legitimate to pursue one’s own interests on the same terms as those on which others are free to pursue theirs.”29
While liberal nationalism suggests that individuals have a reason to be concerned with the welfare of their fellows before they are concerned with the interests of nonmembers, it places this argument within the framework of a universal theory. Participants in communal struggles, patriots, and devoted nationalists, suggests Mazzini, are not to be freed from asking themselves the Kantian question:
You must ask yourself whenever you do an action in the sphere of your country, or your family . . . if what I am doing were done by all and for all, would it advantage or injure humanity? And if your conscience answers, it would injure humanity, desist; desist, even if it seems to you that an immediate advantage for your country or your family would ensue from your action.30
Communal membership will be meaningless unless individuals learn to see it as tied up with their own identity, and perceive fellow members as partners in a shared way of life, as cooperators they can rely on. Having developed this attitude, they cannot but care for other members, wish them well, delight in their success, and share in their misfortune. These feelings provide individuals with a reason to attend first to the needs and interests of their fellows. If the moral force of such feelings is denied, ruling out any special attention to fellow members, the social structure might collapse and we shall be left with isolated individuals and an abstract humanity.