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Michael Sandel63 critiqued the prevailing form of liberalism which is indebted for much of its philosophical foundation to Kant. He described this deontological liberalism, as follows:

ÒÕDeontological liberalismÕ is above all a theory about justice, and in particular about the primacy of justice among moral and political ideals. Its core thesis can be stated as follows: society, being composed of a plurality of persons, each with his own aims, interests, and conceptions of the good, is best arranged when it is governed by principles which do not themselves presuppose any particular conception of the good; what justifies these regulative principles above all is not that they maximise the social welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they conform to the concept of right, a moral category given prior to the good and independent of itÓ. (p1).

Liberal theories give priority to the rights of the individual above those of society. The individualists tend to distinguish between who one is and the values one has. Rawls24 attempted to make this distinction in his description of the original position and the veil of ignorance in which participants are supposed to be ignorant of any information about their beliefs, norms, class, status, etc. Sandel63 argued that the liberal vision of the individual as the autonomous chooser of his or her own purposes presupposes that the chooser is sufficiently sovereign over, and therefore distanced from them.

Communitarians believe that this conception of the self is illogical. A self that is as open- ended as the liberal conception requires would not be so much free as identity-less. Only a

thickly constituted self, shaped in its very being by traditions, attachments, and more or less irrevocable moral commitments can actually make choices that count. Individualists fail to recognise that membership of a community is not necessarily voluntary, and that the social attachments which determine the self are not necessarily chosen ones.

4.6.2 MacIntyreÕs Narrative approach

Alasdair MacIntyre64, particularly in his book After Virtue, challenged the perceived ills of modernity, including modern moral philosophy and political theory. He believed that it was difficult to envisage each human life as whole because:

ÒThe social obstacles derived from the way modernity partitions human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behaviour. So work is divided from leisure, private life from public, the corporate from the personal. So both childhood and old age have been wrenched away from the rest of human life and made over into different realms. And all these separations have been achieved so that it is the distinctiveness of each and not the unity of the life of the individual who passes through those parts in terms of which we are taught to think and feel.Ó64 (p204)

Philosophical obstacles also arise, with a tendency to think atomistically about human action and to analyses complex actions and transactions in terms of simple components. The unity of a human life becomes invisible if a sharp separation is made either between the individual

and the roles that he or she plays, or between the different roles that an individual has, so their life appears as little more than a series of unconnected episodes. MacIntyre64 gave the example of a man digging the garden and someone asking what is he doing? The answer could equally be digging; gardening; taking exercise; preparing for winter; or pleasing his wife. Some of these answers characterise the agentÕs intentions and others unintended consequences which he may or not be aware of. An action is always an episode in a possible story. And prior information is required about this manÕs behaviour is required to understand how these different correct answers related to one another.

MacIntyre64 argued that one understands a personÕs life only by looking at his/her actions within a story, a narrative. In the example of the gardener, MacIntyre64 places the activity both within an annual cycle of domestic activity i.e. of maintaining household-cum-garden

but also as an episode within a narrative history of his marriage: two histories that happen to intersect.

Each personÕs narrative converges with the narratives of other people, who in turn become part of each otherÕs narrative. The community (family, tribe, neighbourhood) sets up the form and structure for these narratives. Thus, MacIntyre64 restricted his analysis of community to the family, the tribe and the neighbourhood. According to MacIntyre the modern state exhibits a confusion of values, lacking a shared understanding of the content of values and common moral beliefs, which are necessary for a community to be genuine cohesive unit:

ÒIn a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the communityÕs good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that goodÓ 64( p232).

MacIntyre64 recognised a role of fables and stories in teaching children right from wrong and

just deserts. However, MacIntyre was embarked on a philosophical rather than purely a sociological enterprise nor an understanding of child development:

ÒMan is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ÔWhat am I to do? If I can answer the prior question ÔOf what stories do I find myself a part?Õ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters Ð roles into which we have been drafted Ð and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how other respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed.Ó 64 (p216)

A narrative concept of selfhood has two requirements. Firstly, a person is what they may

justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story thatfrom their birth to their death. They are the subject of a history that is their own and no one elseÕs, with its own peculiar meaning. Here, Macintyre refers to the work of Derek Parfit65 and others on the meaning of personal identity. However, it is MacIntyreÕs other aspect of narrative selfhood that is of more relevance to communitarian thinking. MacIntyre proposed that ÒI am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question64 (p218). I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives. Moreover this asking for and giving accounts itself plays an important part in constituting narratives. Asking you what you did and why, saying what I did and why, pondering the differences between your account of what I did and

my account of what I did, and vice versa, these are essential constituents of all but the very simplest and barest of narratives.

The question of interest for MacIntyre was ÒIn what does the unity of an individual life consist?Ó 64 Thus his analysis of a life in terms of narrative, led him to answer the answer that ÒIts unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single lifeÓ 64 (p218). Hence to ask what is the good for me? is to ask how best I might live out unity and bring it to completion. Or to ask what is the good for man? Is to ask what all answers to the question what is the good for me? for all men (and women) must have in common. MacIntyre emphasized that it is Òthe systematic asking of these two questions and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as word which provide the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative questÓ 64 (p219). These iterative and nested questions were also identified by Sandel who suggested that when an individual attempts to define their personal moral code they ask who am I?how am I situated? and what is to my benefit? as well as establishing what is good for the community?, because, as Sandel pointed out, we are Òpartly defined by the communities we inhabitÓ and are therefore Òimplicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities.Ó 66

MacIntyre concluded that Òthe good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man isÓ 64 (p219). However he recognised that it was not possible to seek for the Ògood or exercise the virtues only qua individual. This is partly because what it is to live the good life concretely varies from circumstance even when it is one and the same conception of the good life and one and the same set of virtues which are being embodied in a human lifeÓ 64 (p220). MacIntyre64 suggested that what is good for an Athenian general would not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun nor a seventeenth-century farmer.