Introduction
Major movements in philosophy in the early twentieth century created a special context for diverse analytic, and postanalytic, thinkers to reinvent modes of political theorizing in the Anglophone world.Footnote 1 To many commentators, the drive for analysis and with it the remarkable transitions in how moral and political concerns could legitimately be addressed spelled the “death of political theory.”Footnote 2 Among several contributing factors, the rise of modernist empiricism in the form of logical positivism and ordinary-language philosophy had the most profound impact, with their twin deflationary effects of emotivism and conventionalism with respect to normative issues.Footnote 3 Ever since Isaiah Berlin recorded his worries in this context about the continuing life of political theory, and Peter Laslett famously declared in 1956 that, “for the time being anyway, political philosophy is dead,”Footnote 4 a narrative of death and resurrection has come to define Anglo-American political theory's self-image.
Reciting such obituaries serves to preface the celebration of political theory's re-birth.Footnote 5 And where liberal theory is concerned, John Rawls is routinely credited with single-handedly reviving political theory from its moribund post–World War II state.Footnote 6 The liberal tradition, however, before and alongside Rawls, actually includes multiple and overlapping strains of thought that get eclipsed when Rawls's prominence, and too great a focus on the particular form of argumentation he characterizes, are read back into its history as its main features.Footnote 7 The all too common narrative of Rawls as political theory's savior has rendered virtually invisible other notable ways in which political theory underwent “reinvention” in the twentieth century.Footnote 8 Furthermore, it has allowed the differences and similarities between Rawls and other prominent liberals to be obscured, and thus their relative strengths and weaknesses to be misdiagnosed.
This paper calls attention to the interpretive, humanist liberal strand of thinking that is most clearly evident in the development of Charles Taylor's ideas.Footnote 9 If it strikes some readers as strange to name Taylor a “liberal” at the outset and proceed from this assertion without qualification, then something else needs addressing before the argument can get underway.Footnote 10 Calling Taylor a liberal requires defense only if one construes liberal in the narrowest fashion following the debate sparked by the many responses to A Theory of Justice in the seventies and eighties that divided normative political theory between so called “liberals” on one side and “communitarians” on the other. While it is undeniable that Taylor has been a staunch critic of liberal theory's assumptions of atomism and the primacy of individual rights, along with its proceduralist-cum-adversarial mode of justification, his arguments exhibit a far deeper relationship with liberalism than the liberal vs. communitarian distinction can brook.Footnote 11
For a variety of quite contingent reasons, much of the existing literature associates Taylor's emphasis on interpretation with both “communitarianism” (as opposed to “liberalism”) and “Continental philosophy” (as opposed to “analytic philosophy”). My claim that Taylor offers an alternative defense of liberalism addresses both of these myopias. Taylor's thinking reflects the approach to political philosophy that was earlier shaped by his Oxford teachers, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, who opposed logical positivism and ordinary-language philosophy, and through whom Oxford philosophy on ethics and politics remained broadly humanistic and interpretive. This strain of thought is worth recovering in its own right, but I contend that examining it also makes it possible to see why the differences between Taylor and Rawls should be seen, not in terms of the disputes between liberals and communitarians, but instead as over issues of method, in particular about the independence or autonomy of political philosophy. The shadow of the liberal-communitarian debate is long, and its tendency to falsely polarize issues continues to support common misreadings of Taylor's philosophy, even among some very prominent scholars.Footnote 12
Parts I and II show that far from political philosophy's death and Rawlsian revivification, Rawls and Taylor exemplify distinct modes of post-analytic liberal theorizing that emerged in the late twentieth century out of two very different responses to challenges within analytic philosophy's discursive beginnings.Footnote 13 Rawls sought to emulate the formalism pursued by modernist empiricists like Ayer, Carnap, and other members of the Vienna Circle. He devised a liberal political theory within a decision-making framework that helped him to minimize the interpretive challenges of articulating liberal values amid diverse cultural conditions.Footnote 14 Taylor, on the other hand, took up the critique of modernist empiricism of Berlin and Hampshire, and by also incorporating an essentially interpretive framework from Hegel and the phenomenological writings of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, he effectively brought the insights of an “interpretive turn” to bear on the question of how liberal values in politics might be theorized and defended.
Part III explains how Rawls's method and Taylor's critique of methodology reflect profound disagreement on two major issues: (1) whether a proceduralist approach to political philosophy is coherent, or ultimately ends up being inarticulate about its own commitments; and (2) whether proceduralism provides an attractive approach to securing mutual respect in modern pluralistic societies, or the suppression of background assumptions engenders misrecognition, hence injustice. On Taylor's account, political theory is about properly explaining social phenomena. Proper social explanation, moreover, requires a deep hermeneutics to understand what people do for the reasons they do them, which can never be bypassed in order to understand what moral commitments people have, or should have, when deliberating matters of justice or public policy. This aim would seem to place Taylor at cross-purposes with Rawls, rather than qualify him as a genuine rival, since Rawls's primary purpose was never to explain social phenomena. We may thus be tempted to take separate lessons from each and choose between them as a matter of personal preference or philosophical style, or given the particular circumstances of the issue at hand.
I contend, however, in Part IV, that what Taylor shows us is that the choice between the Rawlsian method and the Taylorian critique of methodology is not a trivial one between two independently viable modes of liberal theorizing—between viewing normative justification as a separate activity with separate goals from that of social explanation or viewing them as interdependent. Rawls and Taylor do not merely operate at different levels. Rather, the upshot of Taylor's arguments about the necessary connection between what moral commitments people have and the particular background conditions against which they shape and hold their identity is that the latter cannot effectively be set aside. His argument for why interpretation must always be connected to justification and vice versa is that justification only ever occurs interpretively, as explanation of the already immanent and lived-through understandings that make up shared practices. This feature of Taylor's approach, the capacity to give an account of Rawls's method, but not vice versa, appears to constitute an asymmetrical advantage that is unmatched by Rawls.
The paper concludes by further assessing how Taylor's approach may offer important lessons for political theorists concerned with ethical pluralism, since, contrary to Rawls, Taylor remains far more open to the idea that normative theory and ethics overlaps with social theories, and therefore with the philosophy of social sciences. The interdependent relationship that Taylor posits between social theories and the practices they bear on, however, means that even the practice of normative theory is susceptible to change given the language of explanation we employ. If we agree that our theories not only represent the objects they are about, as natural-science theories aim to do, but can also shape, importantly, the practices they bear on, then Taylor effectively challenges us to reject the quietist conclusion about methodology, “to each his own.” In other words, how we go about interpreting our practices will bear directly upon the condition we seek to explain, and thereby determine what forms of liberal theorizing remain viable going forward. Needless to say, further debate will be required to determine who offers a more practically useful approach to justification in any given instance. My reading of the alternative approach found in Taylor shows why that is not a choice to be taken lightly; and this paper aims to provide much needed fodder for this further debate.
I. The Idea of a Liberal Theory in the Twentieth Century
The separate careers of these two contemporaries are marked by the way each grapples with the paramount concern at the heart of modern liberal theory, namely, ethical pluralism and the prospects for democratic solidarity. Too great an emphasis on their opposed reactions to modernist empiricism, however, makes it all too easy to advance, as many have, facile characterizations that pit the abstract and ahistorical liberalism of Rawls against Taylor's historicist and particularist communitarianism. Such labels, however, obscure the many deep normative commitments that they share, including the value of civic friendship and mutual recognition among free and equal persons, the importance of fair schemes of cooperation, and the need to secure social goods through shared institutions, as well as the aim to draw normative commitments from society's constitutive understandings, and of advancing theories about such commitments as “best” accounts. Place too much emphasis on their shared normative concerns, however, and we risk running together what are essentially divergent conceptions of the craft of political philosophy—its preconditions, its role in social life and justification, and what, if anything, the burdens of interpretation demand.
Their divergence on the method of political philosophy draws support from two quite different theories of meaning that emerged at a pivotal moment in Oxford philosophy in the 1950s. Rawls was a Fulbright fellow at Christ Church in 1952–1953; and Taylor was a reader in PPE from 1952 to1955 and remained as fellow of All Souls until 1961 when he finished his doctorate.Footnote 15 Their crossing denotes two very different responses to how political philosophy might be deployed in the wake of analysis, and marks a significant point of departure for what came to be two divergent forms of late-twentieth-century liberal theorizing.Footnote 16
During his graduate years at Princeton, Rawls had already begun to formulate a distinctively modernist project that set out to justify moral judgments in a manner that parallels scientific knowledge, and likened ethical reasoning to rules of logic and language, which are neither subjective nor descriptions of fact.Footnote 17 The year at Oxford put Rawls in close company with thinkers who helped him to develop the idea of justifying substantive moral principles by reference to an appropriately formulated deliberative procedure.Footnote 18 In formulating his criteria for agreement on moral judgments between reasonable persons under conditions of disagreement, Rawls apparently drew on many sources, including Wittgenstein's naturalism and his analogy of language to games, as well as Quine's holism in the justification of ethical principles; but his debt to Carnap is unmistakable.
Rawls was impressed with the approach to meaning that Rudolf Carnap and members of the Vienna Circle employed, and he saw them as worth emulating.Footnote 19 He adopted Carnap's conviction that from an adequate theory consisting of a formal set of axioms and principles we can adequately explain, predict, and deduce the very ethical judgments we make. Rawls sought to identify formal principles that would explain appearances, and to discover a logical syntax of moral judgments, clearly evident in his concepts of “reasonable man,” his views on “considered judgments,” and most famously his arguments from “the original position,” including the feature of “the veil of ignorance.” Pogge writes, “As with later versions of the original position, Rawls was hoping that he could derive substantive results from an exact and elaborately justified specification of a hypothetical situation—that is, without having to implement a procedure with actual participants.”Footnote 20 By the 1970s, Rawls's liberal philosophical project effectively elevated a form of moral theorizing that buys into the notion of the autonomy of ethics to the center of Anglo-American political theory. With force, Rawls argued that moral theory and the study of structures as they relate to our moral sensibilities and natural attitudes are all independent of theories of meaning, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.Footnote 21 He sought to detach the definition of social justice from the diverse moral aspirations and pursuits of individuals within society.
Taylor's intellectual roots at Oxford reveal, instead, the continuation of an alternative interpretive and humanist liberal strain of thinking that was largely shaped by Berlin and Hampshire against logical positivism and ordinary-language philosophy, against the arguments of Carnap, Ayer, and Austin and the rise of modernist empiricism.Footnote 22 Although Berlin was initially drawn to the logical positivists' suspicion of metaphysical claims and preoccupation with the nature and authority of knowledge, he expressed frustration with the account of meaning they propounded. In his 1939 essay “Verification,” Berlin fundamentally took issue with the philosophical endeavor to reduce all explanation to a privileged category of basic propositions.Footnote 23 Later writings continue to show his deep resistance to the operational idea of positivism, and his view that the principle of verification was tantamount to attempting to define what philosophy could legitimately aim to say, which had the defective consequence of turning any potential philosophical disagreement into a mere procedural problem.Footnote 24 To regard philosophy in purely operationalist terms akin to scientific theory is to leave no room for historical imagination or for insight.
For Berlin, the logical-positivist assumption that the meaning of our statements about reality can be given by our procedures for finding it out betrayed a psychological need for certainty that fuels a reductivist drive he referred to as the “Ionian Fallacy,” or, “the erroneous assumption that everything is made out of, or can be reduced to, or understood in terms of one and the same substance or type.”Footnote 25 He insisted on the model of verstehen over wissenschaften because he viewed the concepts and categories of human experience as requiring a broader range of tasks than logical positivism could ever allow.Footnote 26 In addition to Berlin's critique of scientism and insistence on an inside view when it comes to historical understanding, Taylor was clearly impressed by Berlin's preoccupation with the importance of moral evaluation in politics. Taylor was also drawn to Hampshire's arguments for why not everything can or should be reduced to a single model, theory, standard, or ideal. Like Berlin, Hampshire opposed the way the new empiricist wave in the philosophy of mind, redolent of Hume, reduced human experience to a succession of impressions and ideas, which rendered persons passive observers instead of self-willed, space-occupying experimenting agents in the social world.Footnote 27 Against logical positivists and sense-datum philosophers, Hampshire argued for the primacy of intentionality that is unified in mind and body in our conceptual scheme.Footnote 28 He insisted on distinguishing between human actions and mere events, on the basis of his theory of freedom and the fundamental difference he saw between the objects of decision and prediction.Footnote 29
Thus, even before Taylor completed his doctoral dissertation at Oxford in 1961, a critique of naturalism in the human sciences in general and behaviorism in particular, it was his supervisor, Hampshire, who had already expounded a strong antinaturalist rejection of behaviorist analyses of psychological concepts.Footnote 30 Hampshire's emphasis on the psychoanalytical account of dispositions is just one particular application of his view (similar to Berlin's) of a thick conception of personal agency: human activities must be understood historically, not mechanistically. These competing reactions to modernist empiricism—the initiations of it by Carnap and Ayer and the objections to it by Berlin and Hampshire—constitute an important discursive backdrop against which Rawls and Taylor came to espouse such different philosophies of the project of liberal theory and the manner in which each crafted his arguments.
Taylor starts with Aristotle's view that humans are social creatures who cannot realize their full potential outside society, but the neo-Hegelian account of reason he develops at Oxford is so thoroughly historicized and processural that he joins the idea of a multiplicity of goods that need to be combined in a human life with an incommensurably pluralist understanding of goods in the modern world. Rawls's method of justifying abstract principles starts with the Kantian framework of a hypothetical choice-situation among reasonable men but displays a postanalytic reliance on the analogy between scientific and ethical reasoning by attributing the objectivity of scientific beliefs to ethical ones.Footnote 31 Rawls echoed the logical positivists, by way of the American pragmatist tradition, when he explicitly stated the need to separate political philosophy from any metaphysical system.Footnote 32 While his claim fell short of the logical-positivist conclusion that metaphysical systems are without purpose or meaning and so ultimately reduce to nonsense, Rawls nonetheless believed that such comprehensive or metaphysical views are wholly irrelevant for the structure and content of a political conception of justice, since they underdetermine substantive positions in ethics and political philosophy.
II. A Liberal Theory against the Autonomy of Ethics
A Theory of Justice, therefore, represents a momentous attempt by a political philosophy to obviate the need for explicit debate over different conceptions of the good that any rational individual might pursue; that is to say, the attempt to establish “the priority of the right over the good.”Footnote 33 For Rawls, the justification of principles of justice can and should proceed without explicit reference to particular conceptions of what makes a good life, and focus instead on what rational and reasonable individuals in a hypothetical situation of equality might agree to.Footnote 34 This method of justification relies on concepts that are meant to reduce, if not eliminate, the lack of fixity in our intuitions and our interpretations thereof, with concepts such as a “thin conception of the good,” and the idea of “primary goods,” which any rational man is presumed to want, whatever else he wants. Like the most notable social-contract theorists before him, Rawls reformulated the grounds of justification in politics in terms of agreement, consent, and choice, whereby the question of what we ought rationally to will for ourselves is answered by reflecting on an imagined choice between fixed hypothetical alternatives.Footnote 35 The advantage of such a social-contract approach to justification over classical perfectionist or modern utilitarian versions of common-good approaches is the degree to which the former makes it possible in politics to avoid endlessly contestable claims about the good life, human flourishing, or what people's real interests may be. Instead, Rawls focuses on the more modest and tractable judgments about what rational agents would voluntarily agree to under specific conditions.
On Rawls's account, the impossibility of reaching consensus about the good is not, by itself, a reason we should eschew neutrality; to the contrary, if consensus about conceptions of the good were possible, neutrality would not be necessary. What clearly animates Rawls is his moral commitment to the importance of treating persons as free and equal citizens for the sake of mutual recognition across ethical difference.Footnote 36 Consensus about a conception of justice, for Rawls, embodies neutrality simpliciter; and his method is about constraining the satisfaction of certain conceptions of the good by giving them no weight at all, because he views such preferences to be contrary to justice. For Taylor, agreement about justice is impossible precisely because we can never remain entirely neutral about the good, as human reality is so deeply structured by the meanings it bears for the subjects involved. Thus, while for Rawls the only legitimate standpoint for judging the basic structure is one that is neutral between competing conceptions of the good, for Taylor it is inappropriate, or at best incomplete, to think about principles of justice in a manner that aspires to be detached from some conception of the good that supports it.
Taylor wants to resurrect the premodern idiom of explicitly addressing the question of what is good for human beings, which in politics amounts to explicit inquiry about the common good, as something inherently social and immanent, and therefore historically contingent. That citizens are unlikely to reach consensus about what is good for humans, let alone what the common good should be in matters of politics, is precisely why, for Taylor, theories of justice need to be about investigating and grasping the meanings that social practices embody for the particular participants, which are likely to be diverse and so will need to be mediated through greater dialogue, open, and more inclusive, public discourse. Taylor shares Rawls's (and indeed Berlin's) commitment to value pluralism and is explicit about the fact that modern societies acknowledge such deep diversity among their citizens that consensus about what the common good should be is unlikely to be ever attainable. Yet he believes that debates about justice will be more fruitful, not if they are divorced from, but rather when they are moved into this register.Footnote 37
Of course, Rawls never opposed theories that try to investigate different conceptions of the good, nor those that aim to promote greater dialogue between citizens about shared conceptions of the good. His claim is simply that we ought not use assessments of the relative merits of different comprehensive doctrines when making decisions about the basic structure of society. He writes that the state should be neutral, “not in the sense that there is an agreed public measure of intrinsic value or satisfaction with respect to which all these conceptions come out equal, but in the sense that they are not evaluated at all from a social standpoint.”Footnote 38 This strategy of outlining the choice of principles from the point of view of rational and reasonable persons with pre-formed interests in “primary goods” elicited immediate communitarian responses about the “encumbered self” and the importance of social ties for identity.Footnote 39
Countless scholars have made careers out of reading Rawls, exploring the nuances of his thought, and applying his principles to all manner of questions; and it is not the goal of this paper to add a coda to the long line of those. But there is a narrative about Rawlsianism after Rawls that makes it possible to lose sight of his motivations to construct the edifice for distributive justice in the first place, making what was once plain to see now worth repeating. From the start, Rawls was deeply concerned with mutual recognition and solidarity. This can be seen in his understanding of self-respect to be something that is dependent upon respect from others. While he understood self-respect as something that can be obtained, to some extent, through family, friends, and voluntary associations in civil society, he was also quite concerned with the issue of the relations between citizens more generally. Self-respect as a citizen depends, for Rawls, on neutrality, that is to say, on not ranking justice-compatible conceptions of the good for public purposes. And he takes the self-respect of citizens to depend on mutual recognition such that we are not willing to make use of morally arbitrary luck to claim a greater share of what we cooperatively make possible together. When the difference principle is satisfied, inequalities benefit everyone in a certain sense, and therefore everyone can feel that their fellow citizens affirm the importance of their well-being.
The reason why distributive justice matters so much to Rawls—why it is so important that inequalities of income and wealth raise the lowest social position, and why, even if everyone does pass or has a real opportunity to pass some threshold of sufficiency, we should bother to care that some have more than others—has to do with Rawls's concern with the recognition and solidarity between citizens that obtain when we see our social institutions as being selected according to the principle of raising the position of the worst off.Footnote 40 Rawls clearly believed in the deeper purpose of the goods that a more just distribution is necessary for securing.
Both Rawls and Taylor take mutual recognition and solidarity amid diversity to be of paramount importance for a liberal theory. Yet their divergent views on modernist empiricism and thus their very different approaches to meaning and the craft of political theory make it easy to lose sight of these underlying moral commitments they share. What Rawls takes to be irrelevant to the goal of promoting mutual recognition when it comes to reforming the major institutions that make up the basic structure of society, Taylor takes to be central to it. For this reason, their shared moral commitments point their theories in opposite directions, but not in the ways this has usually been understood in the aftermath of the liberalism vs. communitarianism debate.
Taylor's writings hit their target in Rawls in a much more fundamental way than the latter's usual liberal and communitarian critics did, as Taylor's social thesis targeted both communitarians who would attack liberals for advancing individualist claims while neglecting the importance of communal requirements and bonds, and liberals who would vilify communitarians for permitting collective matters and interests to override the inviolable rights and freedoms of individuals. Many communitarian critics failed to appreciate how Rawls's thin theory of the good was never intended as a theory of human nature as such, nor as a claim about the ontological priority of the individual over the group.Footnote 41
Rawls's insistence on neutrality never involved the daft notion that a social background to individual preferences does not exist. Rather, Rawls's “person” is a political conception, intended as the only appropriate conception for the limited purpose of deciding on principles of justice for the basic structure of society.Footnote 42 What is striking is how the respective accounts of justice in Rawls and Taylor imply dramatically different conceptions of the self, which, in turn, provide a point of comparison to assess their relative merits. For Rawls, the central concern is primarily with how members of a polity ought to make decisions, given the multiple sources and wide expression of deep disagreement. That is to say, Rawls's main concern is with how we should design, evaluate, and reform common social and political institutions.Footnote 43 The relevant (and the only appropriate) conception of the person, then, is as free and equal, as possessing key moral powers such as the capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good, which persons should be equally free to form and revise. Rawls admits that his conception of the person is normative; he insists that it is not ontological, but applicable to the political sphere alone.
Taylor presents a very different conception of person, which he argues is essential, and thus necessary for a political theory, ultimately challenging Rawls's notion that a narrowly construed conception of personhood for political purposes can fit the bill. Taylor lists several features of human beings without which, despite how damaged they may be in any particular life, a life could not be judged to be human: the possession of a sense of self, a notion of the future and the past, the ability to hold values, adopt life plans, and make choices.Footnote 44 Unlike other living creatures found in nature, these qualities make human beings a distinctive subclass of agents who, because of their own view of things, can respond and be addressed. Together these constitute the essentially human feature of strong evaluation, the quintessential aspect of personhood that separates human beings from inanimate objects and mere animals and, what is more, makes human agency, unlike other forms of agency, essentially moral.Footnote 45
When Taylor first invoked the term “strong evaluation” in 1977 he referred to the capacity that human agents possess to form desires about our desires, that is, the ability to value the desires we have differently, to make qualitative distinctions among them.Footnote 46 The strong evaluator experiences the world through qualitative characterizations of her desires as to their worth, as higher or lower, noble or base, as integrative or fragmented. Her interpretations, moreover, speak to how she sees herself vis-à-vis others. Thus, to characterize desires in strong evaluation is to speak of them in terms of the kinds of quality of life they express and sustain, which are beliefs and desires that can only be gained interpretively against a background of understandings that are socially shared. As an ontological holist, Taylor long emphasized the social preconditions of individual actions, in his focus on the shared underpinnings of language, meanings, and culture. Taylor's conception of personhood as strong evaluation makes interpretation fundamental to identity, and he advances a salient point about the explanatory importance of intersubjectivity—as conditions for social life, for individual identity, and for the affirmation of any good.
Taylor understood that Rawls never denied that the free individual is only possible within a culture of freedom, and has explicitly addressed the dependence of individuals on sociocultural background structures and community.Footnote 47 What Taylor rejects is the possibility of narrowly fixing what counts for personhood so as to establish an ideal standpoint to justify principles for regulating immanent historical, social, and cultural practices. He is also troubled by Rawls's weaker notion of neutrality as a kind of democracy in the assessment of each other's preferences, assuming these are compatible with justice. Taylor's methodological commitments regarding the indispensability of interpretation directly challenge both Rawls's aim of prioritizing the right over the good and the requirement of value neutrality that that entails.Footnote 48
III. Proceduralism, Neutrality, and the Conditions of their Possibility
Rawls's claim that moral theory retains a certain “independence” from further questions of metaphysics, ontology, or semantics deeply imbues all of his ideas about the task of political philosophy including its method and justification. For Taylor, judgment, evaluation, and justification are so inextricably bound up with the good, conceptions of which are only formed through the interplay of interpretation and articulation, and the making of one's identity, that such conceptions are inseparable from the obligations we recognize, advocate, and codify in our institutions. Pursuing a normative ideal of distributive justice by remaining neutral between particular conceptions of the good life not only blinds us to the background cultural meanings that underlie and support valuing (and in so doing, ignores strong evaluation as an essential feature of human agency); it also undermines their very sources and conditions for existence. According to Taylor, to view the deeper issues of human nature and our social condition as irrelevant to the normative discourse of justification is to fail to see how the endorsement of any particular good or a right always involves affirming their worth, usually in reference to some essential capacity for human agency that is interpretively, i.e., socially, derived. So, for instance, he thinks there is a whole Western civilization that makes possible the contemporary Rawlsian viewpoint, a viewpoint that, rather than return recognition and support for that civilization and culture, renders them invisible.
To many, Taylor's arguments about strong evaluation and the historical-cum-social conditions of meaning seemed to place him among the usual communitarian critics who rejected the atomistic underpinnings of liberal individualism. Yet, as much as Taylor insisted on selves as always interpretively situated in meaningful social, historical, and cultural contexts, he has always maintained that one's position on the ontological level need not determine one's position on the level of advocacy, even though it informs, supports, or provides context for the latter. While Taylor's social thesis advanced a strong ontological claim of a socially embedded, holist understanding of agency and selfhood—on the basis of which he rebukes theories that facilely advance the primacy of individual rights and the priority of the right over the good—he is no more in blanket support of the collectivist idea that we ought to privilege community life and collective goods over individual subjects, on what moral stand or public policy one ought to adopt.Footnote 49 His aim, rather, was to show how the affirmation of any good, even individual rights, always points beyond itself to social relations that make it possible for it to be affirmed as a good in the first place.Footnote 50
Taylor's challenge to Rawls is that by remaining silent on its own sources and background assumptions, such procedural attempts to justify substantive moral principles are not only unable to narrate their own appeal, but are also liable to misconstrue the very individual goods in question, and effectively leave out or misunderstand other goods that are intersubjective in nature, such as duties, responsibilities, or allegiances. On this score, even Rawls's numerous mentions of “the social bases of self-respect,” which he refers to as “perhaps the most important social primary good,”Footnote 51 appears to suffer a kind of distortion by his methodological framework. While the difference principle was meant to allocate primary goods unconditionally, the problem remains with Rawls's basic conception of self-respect as a social primary good that is subject to distribution.Footnote 52 The relationship between this primary good and the others, for instance, is unclear and Rawls never explains how exactly this particular primary good is to be distributed by his two principles.
To answer Taylor's objection, close readers of Rawls would quickly point out that from the very start, Rawls offered the idea of reflective equilibrium as exactly the kind of mechanism that a postfoundational understanding of reason would seem to require for a theory of justice, however ideal. Reflective equilibrium clearly constitutes an important interpretive moment in the theory, as Rawls clearly intended the best account of justice to be one that allows for some mediation and adjustment between general principles and practical judgments. Nevertheless, reflective equilibrium is but one feature in the machinery, one piece of an overarching system, which Rawls built with the structure of a formal theory that readers could adhere to as they fix and fortify their arguments against possible objections. In contrast, Taylor calls for better explaining the judgments that in part define his readers, which is simultaneously to make them open to interpretation and therefore subject to change.
As early as 1976, in an essay that was not published until 1985, referencing Rawls, Taylor wrote, “to try to make a society more distributively just is to try to make it conform more to the constitutive understandings shared in its membership. To try to make a society absolutely just, or bring it closer to absolute justice, or some other good, may well be to subvert and destroy the constitutive understandings.”Footnote 53 For many of Rawls's critics, not least of them Taylor, no single unique model of just distribution can suffice to answer the complexity of different goods needing to be distributed in any actual society, within groups of different kinds and sizes, not to mention the many contemporary demands for justice that reach beyond the state to international society.Footnote 54
We might be tempted to say that Taylor was simply repeating Walzer's idea that reflections on justice need to start within a particular framework of a specific society. Indeed, Taylor endorsed Walzer's emphasis on the importance of understanding plural values in terms of how subjects within particular frameworks articulate and live by them. What is distinctive about Taylor's alternative, however, is the way in which his arguments shift the focus of normative justification away from the burdens of transcendental moral argument, out of the domain of moral philosophy, and closer to the philosophy of social sciences where the chief aim of inquiry is proper social explanation. Taylor himself has written on transcendental arguments, which proceed from a given reality to the conditions of its possibility, and his divergence from Rawls lies in his particular conception of interpretation, which makes articulation partly constitutive of meaning, in contradistinction to Rawls's, which treats conceptions of the good as ready to hand.
What justice requires, for Taylor, cannot be known without first grasping the qualitative discriminations that citizens of a polity make to have a sense of what their perceptions of the good are. Grasping what standards are authoritative in a given polity requires interpreting the shared qualitative distinctions that are recognized in that society and properly articulating the multiplicity of goods and values that underlie people's ethical choices, leanings, and intuitions.Footnote 55 Since strong evaluators interpret themselves against the backdrop of how they understand others and how others understand them, self-interpretations are constituted by the articulations agents come to accept of themselves. Therefore, unless it is already interpreted as part of the cultural norms and practices that give such reasons currency and moral weight, no general, philosophically abstract reason can be obligation conferring.
Built into Taylor's entire outlook is a conception of the purpose of political theory, as with all of the human sciences, to employ hermeneutics to offer “best” accounts of our practices. The foremost task of political theory is to make sense of the virtue terms that are applied to social and individual visions of the good, which are embedded in the kinds of social interchange and common institutions and purposes that exist specifically in the society where the term is current, that is, ideas about how things can go well or badly between people in the specific context where it makes sense to speak of that value. Where there is articulacy, moreover, there will be a plurality of visions, and what gets interpreted is always malleable by the interpretation and so inherently subject to change. Since articulation is, in part, our interpretive attempt at formulating the experiences we have and our relationship to those experiences so formulated, it makes its “object” something different from what it was before.Footnote 56
Like Taylor, Rawls also sees the aim of political theory to offer a kind of “best” account, but the two have fundamentally different ideas of what constitutes bestness. While what makes Rawls's account of justice “procedural” shifts slightly from his early to his later works, Rawls consistently sought to recapture the systematic, reason-based aims of modern political philosophy, albeit with a deflated account of reason.Footnote 57 His chief aim in his initial statement was to develop an ideal concept of justice, an archetypical model, against which alternative conceptions and actual societies might be measured and evaluated. A Theory of Justice clearly hinges on procedural justification: on the idea that agreement on ordering principles for a just society was possible through the architecture of the original position (complete with its conception of personhood, rationality, and reasonableness requirements). While the later Rawls is widely thought to address many of the criticisms his earlier work generated, in that revisions of justice as fairness pay greater attention to the various conditions for human dignity and are explicit about its own historical location in the context of twentieth-century liberal democratic practices, Political Liberalism nevertheless expands on its procedural ambitions.Footnote 58 Justice as fairness is later presented as a purely political doctrine (not a comprehensive liberalism), which makes it applicable to a wide variety of worldviews and moral positions, but the revised theory further amplifies the idea of the priority of the right over the good in its aims to specify, as Donald Moon has pointed out, “a procedure to determine the principles of justice that all members of a society can find acceptable, in spite of subscribing to different comprehensive moral and philosophical views.”Footnote 59
Taylor's reaction against empiricism in its numerous guises finds its target in Rawls's method from his early through his later works—against, respectively, the idea of an a priori moral standpoint, and the requirement to be democratic between values before and without examination of the cultural meanings behind them, respectively. The later Rawls and Taylor continue to differ markedly on what conditions are required for securing mutual recognition and democratic solidarity. Rawls thinks recognition and solidarity can be gained through the forging of a public status, based on core ideas of free and equal citizenship. In contrast, Taylor thinks they always require a deeper mutual understanding of the (diverse) sources of one another's identities. Not unlike Stuart Hampshire's assessment of the achievement of Rawls's later works,Footnote 60 Taylor is doubtful that political liberalism, supposedly not itself a comprehensive morality, can manage to avoid direct conflict with many comprehensive moralities that are likely to flourish in a modern democracy. For instance, Taylor's interpretive basis for the view that politics should incorporate and foster expansive discussion about the good is at odds with Rawls's requirement to condition and minimize what voices legitimately fall under public reason, what we might reasonably expect everyone to agree to. Although Rawls is not opposed to such deliberations as a matter of public discussion, when it comes to making a decision about policy, he thinks the best approach is one of public reason. Taylor's view of the interpretive nature of selfhood calls into question the notion that certain core ideas can be readily available for public reason, disconnected from the (often perfectionist) doctrines that initially generated them. Taylor shows that without attending to their historic and interpretive links these core ideas are inert or inarticulate, which makes him much less sanguine about the plausibility of public reason as a means to mutual recognition and solidarity.
IV. Rival Approaches and the Burdens of Interpretation
Modern pluralism, for Taylor, means that specific societies and polities make possible particular human goods and the realization of particular human potentialities. Like Berlin, Taylor urges political theorists to resist the “Procrustean” attempts to confine and reduce thinking about complex problems to a single, restrictive approach or solution.Footnote 61 To this day Taylor continues to attack both the kind of thinking about politics that proceeds as if “the socio-historical world comes simply packaged” and those that are oblivious to political realities, dwelling instead in “a dissociated world of self-enclosed theory.”Footnote 62 This openness to learning and modification while possessing a basis for confidence, commitment, and even conviction has led both supporters and detractors to read Taylor as a proponent of “weak ontology.”Footnote 63 For Taylor, clarifying the ontological question restructures the advocacy debate in important ways, but because answers to ontological questions do not automatically determine answers to questions of advocacy, they cannot settle any crucial moral or political controversy, not before what is at stake is experienced, interpreted, and articulated from the subjective views of its participants.Footnote 64 Taylor's practical epistemology and dialogic conception of policy formation dictates that the best interpretation is determined through comparative assessments between rival interpretations, which makes any “final” interpretation provisional by nature, only until a better one comes along.
Rather than decide the debate between liberals and communitarians so conceived, Taylor's view reconceptualized the stakes in the conflict and shifted the burden onto proceduralists to justify why ontological considerations should be bracketed for purposes of justification. Taylor's arguments about the deeper conditions of interpretation in many ways shifted the debate itself from one about the just distribution of individual and/or collective goods to one about the place of identity, difference, and multiculturalism in liberal theory. Thus, while the liberal theories of Rawls and Taylor are both clearly motivated by strong commitments to the importance of civic friendship and mutual recognition among free and equal persons, these commitments continued to get animated in their theories in remarkably different ways.
With increasing numbers of minority groups demanding recognition for their cultural or religious differences, and myriad groups claiming the right to participate in public life without compromising their identities, the issue of whether and to what extent we ought to demand that citizens within a democracy bracket their religious and philosophical views to deliberate in the language of public reason alone becomes all the more onerous.Footnote 65 The fact of multiculturalism requires traditional liberal theories to address how people might live together in difference in a democratic regime under conditions of fairness and equality, and to what extent democratic participation necessitates a model of liberal toleration that requires citizens to conform to a single standard. At issue, however, is how to respond to a diversity of conceptions of the good within a political society in which membership is never fully voluntary for all. If we think that the fact of dominant institutions being biased in favor of a majority culture cannot be helped, and in any case would be bad to eliminate, then we would want to make certain accommodations for special rights for minorities. This is an argument that can be made within the confines of public reason. However, we might not think that the fact that dominant institutions are favored by a majority is a problem, if we think that everyone should have the right to participate, deliberate, organize, and vote based on their own comprehensive doctrines. This means of course that without a principle of public reason, dominant institutions will be animated by, and in turn support, a specific majority culture. So, at the same time we reject public reason, we would have to accept that it is legitimate for the majority to vote on the basis of its own conception of the good, with nothing to keep this from being exclusionary.
Rawls's shift to Political Liberalism and Taylor's more recent statements on particular issues of political concern such as human rights, secularism, and the burdens that may be placed on states appear to exhibit considerable movement from each side towards the other. Rawls's revisions of justice as fairness and his willingness to engage the deeper issue of human dignity display a considerable move towards Taylor. It is also notable that in recent years Taylor has shown some affinity for Rawls's idea of an “overlapping consensus” for trying to achieve political compromise in diverse societies and for trying to attain an unforced global consensus on human rights.Footnote 66 However, Taylor's endorsement of this Rawlsian feature for ensuring equal regard for different conceptions of the good should not be understood to signal broader agreement about the way the project of liberal theorizing should be conceived, nor about the way the particular idea of an overlapping consensus is endorsed. It remains too minimal an approach to democratic belonging and solidarity to satisfy Taylor's injunction for a more full-bodied debate about the good.Footnote 67
On Taylor's view, there are specific zones in public discourse where state neutrality is appropriate, and in such contexts an overlapping consensus will provide a necessary and useful starting point. In the long run, however, and in public discourse more generally, where citizen-to-citizen deliberation is concerned, a far more robust mutual understanding between citizens through comparison and contrast of qualitative characterizations will be required for a consensus wherein members with different cultural backgrounds aim to reach beyond mere overlap to better grasp the others' views of society, selfhood, and significance. Taylor has repeatedly invoked Gadamer's idea of the “fusion of horizons” according to which cross-cultural differences are mediated by the engagement itself.Footnote 68 To answer the normative question of what should be done, Taylor refers us to investigate directly the intersubjective meanings embedded in the social practices of particular societies. Given that normative standards are immanent, since such standards can only operate interpretively, not only will they be plural but they will also be deeply historicist, meaning that their course will not be able to be charted nor fixed in advance outside of their particular context of socially embedded contexts of meaning.Footnote 69 The fact that in normative discussion we cannot bypass the deeper interpretive backdrop of people's identities means also that they should not be bracketed in collective decision-making. Taylor admonishes readers to grapple with the need in democratic societies for all citizens to feel a part of the democratic “we.”Footnote 70 And properly acknowledging how modern societies embody and endorse diversity, he thinks, requires a hermeneutic approach better to facilitate mutual recognition and incorporate a fuller spectrum of diverse perspectives within political discourse—even and especially when strong disagreement and discord suggests no apparent common ground.
When we juxtapose the conceptions of liberal values and of the scope and burdens of interpretation that Rawls and Taylor each hold, an important story emerges about how we might think about moral pluralism and the aims of political theory. Taylor's political theory is rooted in his particular view of the essential moral ontology of human agency. Contrary to what some detractors have claimed, his notion of a distinctively human capacity for strong evaluation need not entail strong moral realist implications that depend on esoteric, metaphysical, presuppositions.Footnote 71 Rather, Taylor's concern with “the good” is best understood as calling attention to how conceptions of value and ideas about the good always and already thoroughly pervade social practices because of the interpretive nature of human agency. Taylor's hermeneutic strategy has to do with inquiring into the matrices of intersubjective meanings that create the specific social and political realities that are embodied in social practices, which he terms “social imaginaries.”Footnote 72 Taylor's view is that however desirable the norm (e.g., of public reason) might be, it remains feckless without a deeper form of citizenship based on mutual recognition forged through dialogue.
If we grant Taylor that our considered convictions always require some particular historical narrative to be made sense of, it becomes problematic to then demand their systematization into a generic framework of goods that can be governed by the priority of right and public reason. Rawls persistently clings to the possibility of ordering our core ideas into a coherent theory against the merely ad hoc intuitionism he denounces. He operates with the meaning of equal treatment of persons as about securing the space for all reasonable religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines against the background of a consistent affirmation of the aim of neutrality across their differences. This is because Rawls was fairly optimistic that recognition could work within the scope of voluntary associations united by common philosophies. Among citizens generally, divided as they are not only by competing ethnic or cultural claims, but also by religious differences that involve competing and contradictory truth claims, justificatory neutrality appears the only feasible answer. Thus, his moral claim is that we can have a meaningful and lasting relationship of civic friendship and solidarity only by trying to maintain such a separation through justificatory neutrality between competing reasonable comprehensive doctrines.
On Taylor's view, this meaning of equal treatment will be inadequate without a more robust conception of democratic solidarity because the core ideas that constitute identity draw from and remain tied to very different sources and render them irreducibly plural, and therefore resistant to systematization. Beyond infeasibility, Taylor also finds the kind of social interchange that gets fostered by public reason alone to be undesirable. For Taylor, the task of political theory is to understand the plurality of conceptions of the good in any given society, and to find ways to foster dialogic policy-formation, and to open the public sphere up to how multiple members of actual communities experience a concrete problem at hand.Footnote 73
Conclusion
As several commentators have already noted, Taylor's arguments are best understood as efforts to theorize liberal values and their presuppositions, and to deepen our understanding of what sustains them as well as their history.Footnote 74 Taylor certainly has explored the long and diverse history of liberal ideas through canonical and less canonical figures, with the aim of narrating the roots of the modern and contemporary intellectual milieu in the West. But the argument of this paper is precisely to show how the norms and values he advocates have more to do with how norms and values—liberal or otherwise—might be theorized and defended in the present, an account that is distinct enough to have several rivals, but chief among them being the mode found in the legacy of modernist empiricism in Rawls and continued by many Rawlsians.Footnote 75
In the tradition of Berlin and Hampshire, Taylor's mode of liberal theory strongly opposes what is commonly thought of as “analytic” liberal theory. With a decentered understanding of the rise of analysis, Taylor's views, then, appear to encourage both a continuation of as well as a challenge to the liberal tradition. As a challenge, he shows why it is misguided to strive to establish normative ethics from an ideal starting point outside of historical, social, and cultural practices. His wager is that we cannot separate the political principles, norms, and values we affirm—be it the moral neutrality of the state or the liberal ideal of the freedom of the individual to form and pursue one's own conception of the good—from the background conditions necessary to affirm those goods, such as the social institutions, cultural ethos, intersubjective meanings about the good, and ideas about selfhood, that make something of value in the first place. Taylor's arguments also spur the continuation of the liberal tradition in that rather than repudiate the liberal ideals of freedom, equality, and individual autonomy, his ontological claims about human agency and strong evaluation are about better developing the liberal promise of treating all citizens as free and equal.
Each of the multiple theses Taylor has advanced—his synthesis of ideas from continental philosophy with approaches from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, his attack on the formalism of much of modern moral philosophy, his critique of the proceduralism of rights-based thinking, and his analysis of identity politics and the need to take self-interpretations into account in the explanation of behavior—denotes a concern to make sense of the multiplicity of actually or potentially conflicting standpoints that are informed by different and often rival accounts of goods, which may, in turn, be given by different and possibly conflicting judgments about them. Taylor has fundamentally taken issue with the modernist empiricist project to systematize our moral intuitions into regulative structures that can serve as a normative guide and to recast the entire problem of modern ethical pluralism in terms of tractable, reasonable disagreements among parties we can neutralize as minimally committed to mutual cooperation.
Excavating the particulars of divergent responses to modernist empiricism so as to read Taylor and Rawls as rivals for the right reasons might seem like a pedantic endeavor, of interest only to the smallest cadre of intellectual historians. Yet while the importance of Rawls even beyond the Anglophone world has been aptly demonstrated by the vast secondary literature on his writings, it is notable how little of it has been contextually informed until quite recently. With the requisite passage of time that enables critical historical reflection readers can hope to see more analysis and assessments of Rawls's place in history. Proper discussion of Rawls in context, however, will also have to include examination of how he converges with and diverges from Taylor, since the differences and similarities between their liberal theories have long been underappreciated; and their views, even when misconstrued, have routinely been taken for granted.Footnote 76
The substantive difference between Rawls and Taylor is typically characterized as a confrontation between liberal and communitarian values. Yet this paper has shown that there has been far greater convergence on the norms they each advocate than has been acknowledged, while a more fundamental disagreement over method and approaches to justification divides them at bottom and continues to go largely unnoticed. Comparing Rawls and Taylor in this way, and resisting their caricature, requires examining their provenance and emergence in historical context, and particularly how many of their views are rooted in an earlier debate about the promise of political philosophy in the wake of analysis.Footnote 77 Without a deeper understanding of the stakes between them and the ways in which Rawls and Taylor creatively adopted ideas from within a postanalytic context, we severely limit the extent to which we can debate fruitfully the relative merits of their contributions. What is more, careful examination of the postanalytic contributions of Rawls and Taylor to theorizing civic and humanist values allows us to generate important resources for thinking about the very powers and limits of political theory, the kind of justification of political power and principles it can offer, its ability to reconcile and/or criticize existing social and political conditions, and the extent to which political theory can structure and guide political practice.
