COMMUNITARIANISM ADVANTAGES 71

SOCIAL JUSTICE

COMMUNITARIANISM PROMOTES SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH RECIPROCITY, PROTECTION, AND RESPONSIBILITY

INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITARIAN POLICY STUDIES, 2000; The Communitarian Platform,

At the heart of the communitarian understanding of social justice is the idea of reciprocity: each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its members. Justice requires responsible individuals in a responsive community.

Members of the community have a responsibility, to the greatest extent possible, to provide for themselves and their families: honorable work contributes to the commonwealth and to the community's ability to fulfill its essential tasks. Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others. This does not mean heroic self- sacrifice; it means the constant self-awareness that no one of us is an island unaffected by the fate of others.

For its part, the community is responsible for protecting each of us against catastrophe, natural or man-made; for ensuring the basic needs of all who genuinely cannot provide for themselves; for appropriately recognizing the distinctive contributions of individuals to the community; and for safeguarding a zone within which individuals may define their own lives through free exchange and choice. . . .

IN COMMUNITARIANISM SOCIAL JUSTICE IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE

In this essay I seek to reaffirm, and to clarify if I can, the communitarian commitment to social justice. I shall try to do so by showing how our understanding of community makes social justice a moral imperative.

Communitarians look to the experience of community for moral guidance and promise. In doing so we should draw on the whole of that experience, the dangers and deficits of community as well as the benefits and ideals. We should take account of egoism as well as altruism; and we should recognize that some forms of altruism may limit the reach of community and tarnish its ideals.

Our chief prescription–the main lesson we draw for the United States today–is the need for enhanced responsibility. As we observe the weakening of institutions, the blurred line between liberty and license, the widespread preference for short-run gains, we see the need for more extensive responsibility in every aspect of personal experience and social life.

COMMUNITARIANS SUPPORT SOCIAL JUSTICE AS AN IMPORTANT WAY TO BUILD COMMUNITY, NOT OUT OF COMPASSION OR BENEVOLENCE

Let us not confuse responsibility with compassion. The communitarian ethos is not mainly about sympathy or benevolence. It is about meeting our obligations as responsible parents, children, citizens, officials, and economic actors. These obligations are eased by love, and supported by love, but they arise and persist even where love is absent or hard to sustain. At bottom, responsibilities arise from social involvements or commitments. Our lives touch others in many ways, for good or ill, and we are accountable for the consequences–accountable to ourselves as well as to others. Accountability and obligation give a tough-minded spin to concepts of community and responsibility. They also point us toward social justice as a foundation of community, and as a communitarian imperative.

COMMUNITARIANISM STRESSES INCLUSION AS AN ELEMENT IN SEEKING SOCIAL JUSTICE

In a thriving community people want to be treated as members; and they aspire to full membership. Therefore inclusion is a major principle of social justice. The most important ways of being included–of participating in community–flow from the basic continuities of life: procreation, child-rearing, kinship, friendship, and work. Religion and politics are distorted if those continuities are weak, or absent, or if they are excessively demanding. The underlying truth is that community brings people together, not as manipulated or mobilized "masses," but in ways that sustain the wholeness and soundness of personal life.