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common assumptions.
Individuals in such a community do not (as CLP would have it) choose
their own good; they find a common good as members of a distinct moral
order. Each person seeks to learn and exercise the virtues and achieve the
internal goods of practices, to discover and achieve
telos
(what Aristotle
called
eudamonia,
loosely translated, human well-being), and in this
"education," each finds that "my good as a man [or woman] is one and the
same as the good of those others with whom I am bound up in human com–
munity." Nor can the
search
for the good be an individual enterprise - the
community provides the only legitimate context.
In
Spheres ofjustice,
Walzer, a moderate communitarian, formulated a
system of distributive justice based on shared moral values. Walzer maintains
that each community confers particular meanings and values on goods, and
from these common values, distributive justice derives:
If we understand what a good is, what it means to those for whom it is
a good [i.e., to the members of a certain community], we understand
how, by whom and for what reasons it ought
to
be distributed. All dis–
tributions are just or unjust relative to the social meanings of the
goods at stake.
Walzer casts these shared meanings and values within a pluralistic
framework to create his notion of "complex equality." Since different goods
have different social meanings (and thus, different principles of distribution),
these "spheres" of goods ought to be kept autonomous. Complex equality
arises, then, when a good in one sphere, such as political office, cannot be
"converted" into the good of another sphere, such as entrepreneurial oppor–
tunities.
Walzer's defense of plural social meanings and values leads by implica–
tion to the ideal of plural subcommunities that flourish within a broader, latent
community. Thus, he represents a more moderate communitarian stance
than MacIntyre, who talks of "the pluralism which threatens to submerge us
all." Further, Walzer develops his notion of community against a
"background" of rights, asserting that individuals have the right to "life and
liberty," and other rights "beyond" those. (While he acknowledges certain
rights, Walzer does not make clear whether individuals can choose freely
among the autonomous values of various subcommunities. He seems more
intent upon drawing out the latent meanings of the community as a whole.)
While the notions of shared moral values and of community are firmly
grounded in these works, some critics contend that the status of the individual
is precarious in the communitarian vision. Communitarians do not establish
