| Communitarianism, the approach to political philosophy common to Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, reproduces the proceduralism, the arbitrariness, the indeterminateness about the good—the emptiness—that the communitarians justly condemn in the (non-consequentialist) liberalism of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, et al. Such problems have been apparent to the critics of communitarianism from the onset; yet communitarianism, far from dying off, has been incorporated into liberalism in the form of the primacy increasingly accorded individuals' communally constituted “identities.”; There is a political explanation for the credibility of such a manifestly problematic doctrine (Part I): the communitarians contend that the essence of liberalism—equal individual freedom—is better defended by means of collectivist ontology and epistemology than by individualist metaphysics. Starting from an unquestioned acceptance of the ideal of equal freedom, communitarians work backwards to collectivist metaphysical claims that they leave virtually undefended except on the ground of their purportedly desirable political consequences. But this explanation is insufficient: why would even the most politically complacent philosophers turn to communitarian metaphysics, with all its problems, in order to shore up liberal ethical conclusions? My answer is that communitarians share not only liberals' political values, but their metaethical assumptions (Part II). Drawing on Leibniz's Theodicy, I argue that these assumptions are voluntaristic: like theological voluntarists, both liberals and communitarians assume that some source of normative authority—if not God or the individual, the community—is capable of validating the good. Their voluntarist assumptions explain why communitarians fail to provide any less of an arbitrary and empty approach to the good than do (non-consequentialist) liberals. In turn, the implications of directing the critique of communitarian voluntarism against liberalism is to invalidate, at the metaethical level, many of the foundations of contemporary liberalism: skepticism and nihilism about the good; pluralist conceptions of the good; a “right” to do what is bad; and the idea that freedom is instrinsically, as opposed to instrumentally, valuable. |
