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PARTISAN REVIEW
within
society, the moral foundations ofa common good. For communitarians,
the shared moral values, "virtues," and traditions ofthe community, rather
than the rational choices of abstract individuals, are the bedrock of moral–
philosophic discourse. They see persons as "implicated" or "embedded," or as
"citizens" who share a set of moral values by virtue oftheir membership in a
community. According to Sandel:
... if we are partly defined by the communities we inhabit, then we
must also be implicated in the common purposes and ends character–
istic of those communities.
And according to MacIntyre:
... we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular
social identity... . I am a member of this or that guild or profession ...
I belong
to ...
this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for
me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles... .
Moreover, this notion of common good has a dynamic element: com–
munitarians see the community and individuals as working toward a
telos,
a
common purpose or goal, not fulfilled in society today.
Because CLP affirm a plurality of individual ends, as Isaiah Berlin says,
"equally ultimate," they look to a theory of
procedural
justice, such as
Rawls's, to adjudicative frameworks that do not presuppose a particular con–
ception of the good. On the other hand, because of their concern with com–
munity and the common good, communitarians tend to focus on systems or
institutions, substantive entities that embody their moral values. Two leading
communitarians, Alisdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer, highlight the com–
munitarian approach - and point toward the need for developing a principled
basis for individual rights.
In
After Virtue,
MacIntyre articulated a "strong" communitarian vision
ofa moral community, premised on the idea that the moral foundations of
modern society are incoherent, fragmented; he contended that "we have–
very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and
practical, of morality." His conception of the exemplary moral community
derives from the Aristotelian tradition of civic virtue, where persons are un–
derstood to achieve a
telos
by exercising virtues (particular "acquired human
qualities") to attain the intrinsic goods of "practices" - complex and coherent,
"socially established," shared activities in "arts, sciences, games, politics ... the
making and sustaining of family life...." Communities that function through
this involved scheme find their moral basis in "shared understandings," in
