In Search Of Civic Virtue

As an outstanding representative of communitarianism, Michael Sandel deeply doubts the new liberal claim that the right is prior to the good, and the free-to-choose self involved. Sandel asserts that the community has played an important constitutive role in the self formulation. Because different versions of the good accepted by people are embedded into individuals deeply and affect their opinions on all sorts of issues, including the issue of justice, the right is not prior to the good, which means the right cannot be justified while it is independent of the good. Based on the encumbered self, Sandel developed his criticism on the Rwalsian liberalism. Because of having accepted the Rwalsian liberalism as the public philosophy, the modern American government insists a neural frame whose goal is to protect the right of the individual. However, this politics that lacks substantial moral engagement has eventually led to a poor public life. Therefore, Sandel claims to bring the moral deserve as well as the right into the consideration of justice. By virtue of referring to the way of Aristotelian teleology and catching the vivid cases in American public life, Sandel provides people who are bound by the version of justice that the good is uniform with a formulation that who deserves what, meaning justice should consider moral difference appropriately in order to treat different issues in different ways, as a possible outlet.As a result, Sandel calls for civic virtue. He suggests referring to the civic virtue involved in Aristotelian classical republic, and admires Tocqueville’s tradition in American practice that lots of associations help to cultivate civic virtue. However, because of being a general link between politics and morality, the community Sandel hopes to renew has slid form the social one to the republic one which implies a special morality, while Sandel’s political philosophy is not enough to support this conclusion. Moreover, the essential claim of the republic community that the common good is universal has completely deviated from Sandel’s original intention that moral difference deserves respect. Sandel’s hesitation between communitarianism and republicanism has eventually brought about a decline that justice is falling from the best that depends on pluralism down to the second-best that views pluralism as defect to make up in order to make the common good come true.