Moral Commons and the Liberal Politics of Indifference
Morality and Politics in the Liberal Archipelago
Very short summary: In this essay, I explore a potential tension in Chandran Kukathas’s account of the liberal archipelago, between the idea of morality conceived as a commons and the politics of indifference of the liberal state. While there may not be a logical contradiction between the two ideas, the latter may be difficult to achieve if the former is relevant.
I will be traveling to the U.S. next month, as I’ve been invited to the second edition of the “PPE at the Frontier” workshop organized by colleagues of the University at Buffalo. People there have mounted a quite impressive team around their PPE (for “philosophy, politics, and economics”) program and I’m quite pleased to have the opportunity to engage with them and the other scholars invited for this occasion. It will be the opportunity for me to present a work on the constitutional political economy of polycentric orders. I’ve just finished writing the first draft, and readers are welcome to send comments!
That’s it for personal news. As those of you who will have the curiosity to download it will see, the paper ends with a discussion of polycentricity and anarchy. It reflects on the fact that anarchist or quasi-anarchist accounts of the liberal society tend to ignore (or at least to underestimate) the problem of what I call “cross-jurisdictional externalities,” i.e., externalities that occur between partially autonomous political units. One of the two accounts I discuss (the other is Nozick’s) is Chandran Kukathas’s “liberal archipelago.”[1] In his eponymous book, Kukathas defends a vision of the liberal society where toleration and the freedom to (dis)associate are conceived as the supreme values. This vision is a response to two main competing alternative accounts of the liberal society, Kymlicka’s multicultural liberalism and Rawls’s political liberalism.[2]
Kukathas’s ideal liberal society is one where individuals are formally free to choose with whom they associate but also to leave the community in which they have been living. Kukathas rejects Kymlicka’s claim that the state should, in some cases, actively support some minorities by granting them “differential rights.” He also criticizes the Rawlsian primacy that is given to considerations of justice because it presupposes an underlying consensus on liberal values and principles. As the very expression “liberal archipelago” suggests, Kukathas rather envisions a society where individuals disagree on many issues, including matters of justice, but where they somehow are able to live together by spontaneously settling into open but largely autonomous and independent communities.
As I was rereading parts of the book for my paper, I realized that Kukathas develops two separate ideas in two different chapters that, at least on some readings, may come across as contradictory. They actually may not be, but they are worth confronting. In the chapter on the primacy of the value of toleration, Kukathas develops an interesting quasi-Kantian argument to the effect that toleration provides the required conditions for the exercise of reason:[3]
“[T]here is no authority with any independent access to the truth of the matter. To what or whom, then, can we appeal when asserting or defending our judgments and convictions? The liberal answer has always been that we appeal to a universal audience through an appeal to reason. The appeal to reason means invoking a range of cognitive procedures, strategies, and standards —though none of the procedures or standards are fixed or beyond criticism and revision. This last is of crucial importance because it indicates that our warrant for paying attention to the determinations of reason has nothing to do with settled standards or procedures: reason’s ‘authority’, such as it is, rests on its being implicated in a structure of openness and criticism. Reason has ‘authority’ only in public, and to secure this position is vitally important.” (I emphasize)
Toleration provides the normative framework required for the emergence of a public realm where the use of reason can be freely exercised to confront ideals and values about how to live. It is instructive here to compare with the superficially similar Rawlsian understanding of public reason. For Rawlsians, public reason is the realm of consensus where individuals, who otherwise entertain very different conceptions of the good life, nonetheless agree on how to conduct political deliberation to establish principles of justice. The fundamental Rawlsian postulate is that individuals, provided they are reasonable (i.e., they accept the very premises of public reason), will necessarily share the same views about justice. Quite the contrary, for Kukathas, “relations among communities… involve disputes in the realm of public reason itself.”[4]
Hence, toleration is essential not because it is required to find an agreement through the exercise of public reason. Instead, we need it to establish what I would call a “reasoned disagreement” that simultaneously makes public the reasons that justify the different ways of life that people want to endorse, and effectively permits each of us to live according to these ways of life. Toleration and the public exercise of reason do not aim at establishing a full-fledged agreement on the good or even on the right. Instead, they create the conditions for a convergence of moral views through a modus vivendi, not understood as a balance of interests (as Rawls defines it), but as a public space that organizes the coexistence of different ways of life.[5]
At this stage (and this is something I had overlooked in my previous readings of the book), Kukathas makes an interesting analogy with common-pool resources. Morality is a “commons” in the sense given by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, i.e., a resource that is publicly accessible (it is costly or even impossible to restrict access to specific users) but whose availability and utility depend on how it is used. Here, the commons takes the form of a social order that must be maintained through continuous engagement in the public realm. As for the use of common-pool resources, a “tragedy” is lurking. Individuals may be tempted to free-ride on others’ efforts or restraints. They share an interest in preserving civil life and the condition of peaceful cohabitation, but the temptation is strong not to play one’s part. As Kukathas notes, some communities may simply choose to live in total isolation (e.g., the Amish), but, unless the isolation becomes widespread and systematic, a public realm is needed to maintain the conditions of coexistence.
“The Ship of Fools,” Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1500)
This idea of the moral commons must be contrasted with Kukathas’s views about the nature of liberal politics that he develops later in the book.[6] Kukathas argues that the liberal state is committed to a politics of indifference, criticizing the claim that the state should actively engage in a “politics of recognition” that ascribes rights and implements policies by discriminating between individuals based on their social identities:[7]
“In this regard, liberalism is indifferent to the groups of which individuals may be members. Individuals in a liberal society are free to form groups or associations, or to continue their association with groups that they have joined or into which they may have been born. The liberal state should thus take no interest in these interests and attachments —cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, or otherwise— which people might have… Indeed, it is indifferent to particular human affairs or to the particular pursuits of individuals and groups. Liberalism might well be described as the politics of indifference.”
The politics of indifference implies that the use of coercion cannot be justified in light of any characteristic attached to a person’s particular personal and social identities. From the perspective of the liberal state, there are only individuals endowed with fundamental rights, in particular the right to associate with and disassociate from groups of persons. The history of these groups, the goals they pursue, the values and ideals they endorse, all this is irrelevant to motivate the state’s action. For instance, the fact that unless something is done (or not done), the practice of a particular language or religion may disappear is not a reason that can justify state coercion.[8]
Taken together, the notion of moral commons and the politics of indifference may seem in tension. The former points out the required continuous moral engagement in the maintenance of the social order by ensuring all views and ways of life can find a way of expression. The latter requires the liberal state to be indifferent to the fate of any particular moral tradition. If we acknowledge that “the public sphere of civil society does not end at the boundaries of the state,”[9] the tension is somehow lessened. This is, of course, a typical Tocquevillian stance. The engagement with public life goes well beyond state politics. The state is only one of the many associative forms through which individuals can regroup and organize themselves to pursue objectives, values, and ideals that transcend their narrow self-interest. So, in principle at least, there is no contradiction between conceiving morality as a commons and arguing that liberal politics is one of indifference.
In practice, at least in our contemporary societies whose political forms are the nation-state, the practice of politics cannot be so easily detached from the rules of civil society. The state is not composed of individuals who are isolated from the rest of society. They unavoidably carry in politics their beliefs and convictions. True, politics respond to its own principles and norms. But politics also belongs to the domain of public reason. What if, for instance, individuals fail to live up, in their civil lives, to the requirements of maintaining the moral commons? State politics must then presumably step in. But then, that means that complete indifference is impossible. The state has an interest in protecting the social order. For that, it cannot completely disregard the interests and values attached to particular social groups and their history. Appropriately accounting for them is what will preserve the social order and the moral framework within which the exercise of public reason is possible.
In my previous essay, I argued that while there is surely no “romance” in politics, that doesn’t mean its practice is detached from ethical considerations at all. In a way, the politics of indifference is also a romantic conception of politics in its own right. It contends that politics can be detached from particular interests and values, also (and especially) when they are attached to social identities. That may be a valuable ideal, but it is questionable that it can be achieved in our societies.
[1] Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2007). I anticipate that some will object to the characterization of Kukathas’s account as “anarchist.” As we’ll see, Kukathas is not talking of a stateless society. On the other hand, as he doesn’t provide any systematic account of the role and the structure of the state, the liberal society he endorses approximates a quasi-anarchist ideal where, if the state is needed at all, it is to enforce general rules of conduct.
[2] Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
[3] Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, p. 127.
[4] Ibid., p. 128.
[5] Ibid., p. 132.
[6] See especially ibid., pp. 246-54.
[7] Ibid., pp. 249-50.
[8] Also, according to Kukathas, the state has no business ensuring that individuals can effectively exit their communities, for instance by imposing requirements on education.
[9] Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, p. 134.