"So why should government not decide what sort of lives are best for its citizens?

Marxist perfectionism is one example of such a policy, for it prohibits people from making what it views as a bad choice—i.e. choosing to engage in alienated labour. I argued that this policy is unattractive, for it relies on too narrow an account of the good. It identifies our good with a single activity—productive labour—on the grounds that it alone makes us distinctively human...

Why then do liberals oppose state paternalism? Because, they argue no life goes better by being led from the outside according to values the person does not endorse. My life only goes better if I am leading it from the inside, according to my beliefs about value. Praying to God may be a valuable activity, but I have to believe that it is a worthwhile thing to do—that it has some worthwhile point. We can coerce someone into going to church and making the right physical movements, but we will not make her life better that way. It will not work, even if the coerced person is mistaken in her belief that praying to God is a waste of time, becaus a valuable life has to be led from the inside. A perfectionist policy that violates this ‘endorsement constraint’, by trying to bypass or override people’s beliefs about values, is self-defeating (Dworkin 1989: 486—7). It may succeed in getting people to pursue valuable activities, but it does so under conditions in which the activities cease to have value for the individuals involved. If I do not see the point of an activity, then I will gain nothing from it. Hence paternalism creates the very sort of pointless activity that it was designed to prevent.

... This third argument contrasts the communitarian view of practical reasoning as self-discovery with the liberal view of practical reasoning as judgement. For liberals, the question about the good life requires us to make a judgement about what sort of a person we wish to be or become. For communitarians, however, the question requires us to discover who we already are. For communitarians, the relevant question is not ‘What should I be, what sort of life should I lead?’ but 'Who am I?'. The self 'comes by' its ends not ‘by choice’ but 'by discovery', not ‘by choosing that which is already given (this would be unintelligible) but by reflecting on itself and inquiring into its constituent nature, discerning its laws and imperatives, and acknowledging its purposes as its own’ (Sandel 1982: 58)...

But surely it is Sandel here who is violating our deepest self—understandings. For we do not think that this self-discovery replaces or forecloses judgements about how to lead our life. We do not consider ourselves trapped by our present attachments, incapable of judging the worth of the goals we inherited or ourselves chose earlier. We do indeed find ourselves in various relationships, hut we do not always like what we find. No matter how deeply implicated we find ourselves in a social practice, we feel capable of questioning whether the practice is a valuable one—a questioning which is not meaningful on Sandel’s account...

Unfortunately, communitarians rarely distinguish between collective activities and political activities. It is of course true that participation in shared linguistic and cultural practices is what enables individuals to make intelligent decisions about the good life. But why should such participation be organized through the state, rather than through the free association of individuals?... Despite centuries of liberal insistence on the importance of the distinction between state and society, communitarians still seem to assume that whatever is properly social must become the province of the political. They have not confronted the liberal worry that the all-embracing authority and coercive means which characterize the state make it a particularly inappropriate forum for the sort of genuinely shared deliberation and commitment that they desire...

Liberals seek to sustain a just society through the public adoption of principles of justice, without requiring, and indeed precl tiding, the public adoption of certain principles of the good life.

Taylor believes this is sociologically naïve: people will not respect the claims of others unless they are bound by shared conceptions of the good, unless they can identify with a politics of the common good. He describes 'two package solutions emerging out of the mists to the problem of sustaining a viable modern polity in the late twentieth century', which correspond roughly to the communitarian and liberal model, and says there are 'severe doubts' about the long-term viability of the liberal model. By enforcing individual rights and state neutrality, a liberal state precludes the public adoption of principles of the good, but, Taylor asks, ‘Could the increasing stress on righrs as dominant over collective decisions come in the end to undermine the very legitimacy of the democratic order?’ (Taylor 1986: 225).

Why is a shared way of life required to sustain legitimacy? Taylor does not give any clear-cut explanation of the need for a specifically communitarian politics. But one answer that is implicit in communitarian writings lies in a romanticized view of earlier societies in which legitimacy was based on the effective pursuit of shared ends. communitarian imply that we could recover the sense of allegiance that was present in earlier days if we accepted a politics of the common good, and encouraged everyone to participate freely in it. Common examples of such earlier societies are the republican democracies of Ancient Greece or eighteenth-century New England town governments.

But these historical examples ignore an important fact. Early New England town governments may have had a great deal of legitimacy amongst their members in virtue of the effective pursuit of their shared ends. But that is at least partly because women, atheists, Indians, and the propertyless were all excluded from membership. Had they been allowed membershup they would not have been impressed by the pursuit of what was often a racist and sexist 'common good'. The way in which legitimacy was ensured amongst all members was to exclude some from memhership.

Contemporary communitarians are not advocating that legitimacy be secured by denying membership to those groups in the community who have not historically participated in shaping the 'common way of life'. Communitarians believe that there are certain communal practices that everyone can endorse as the basis for a politics of the common good. But whit are these practices? communitarians often write as if the historical exclusion of certain groups from various social practices was just arbitrary, so that we can now include them and proceed forward. But the exclusion of women, for example, was not arbitrary. It was done for a reason—namely, that the ends being pursued were sexist, defined by men to serve their interests. Demanding that women arcept an identity that men have defined for them is not a promising way to increase their sense of allegiance. We cannot avoid this problem by saying with Sandel that women’s identities are constituted by existing roles. That is simply false: women can and have rejected those roles, which in many ways operate to deny their separate identity. That was also true in eighteenth-century New England, but legitimacy there was preserved by excluding women from membership. We must find some other way of securing legitimacy, one that does not continue to define excluded groups in terms of an identity that others created for them.

Sandel and Taylor say that there are shared ends that can serve as the basis for a politics of the common good which will be legitimate for all groups in society. But they give no examples of such ends— and surely part of the reason is that there are none. They say that these shared ends are to be found in our historical practices, but they do not mention that those practices were defined by a small section of society—propertied white men—to serve the interests of propertied white men. These practices are gender-coded, race-coded, and class-coded, even when women, blacks, and workers are legally allowed to participate in them. Attempts to promote these kinds of ends reduce legitimacy, and further exclude marginalized groups. Indeed, just such a loss of legitimacy seems to be occurring amongst many elements of American society —blacks, gays, single mothers, non—Christians—as the right wing tries to implement its agenda based on the Christian, patriarchal family. Many communitarians undoubtedly dislike the Moral Majority's view of the common good, hut the problem of the exclusion of historically marginalized groups is endemic to the communitarian project. As Hirsch notes, ‘any “renewal” or strengthening of community sentiment will accomplish nothing for these groups’. On the contrary, our historical sentiments and traditions are ‘part of the problem, not part of the solution’ Hirsch 1986: 424).

Consider one of the few concrete examples of communitarian politics that Sandel offers—the regulation of pornography. Sandel argues that such regulation by a local community is permissible ‘on the grounds that pornography offends its way of life’ (Sandel 1984b: 17)... The problem with Sandel's view can be seen by considering the regulation of homosexuality. Homosexuality is ‘offensive to the way of life’ of many Americans. Indeed, measured by any plausible standard, more people are offended by homosexuality than by pornography. Would Sandel therefore allow local communities to criminalize homosexual relations, or the public affirmation of homosexuality? If not, what distinguishes it from pornography?... On his argument, members of marginalized groups must adjust their personalities and practices so as to be inoffensive to the dominant values of the community. Nothing in Sandels argument gives members of marginalized groups the power to reject the identity that others have historically defined for them...

Communitarians like to say that political theory should pay more attention to the history of each culture. But it is remarkable how rarely communitarians themselves undertake such an examination of our culture. They wish to use the ends and practices of our cultural tradition as the basis for a politics of the common good, but they do not mention that these pracrices were defined by a small segment of the population. If we look at the history of our society, surely liberal neutrality has the great advantage of its potential inclusiveness, its denial that subordinated groups must fit in to the ‘way of life’ that has been defined by the dominant groups. Communitarians simply ignore this danger and the history which makes it so difficult to avoid...

The fact is that we do not know what either liberal neutrality or the communitarian common good requires in multi-nation states. This is perhaps the most glaring example of how the communitarians' emphasis on the social thesis has become detached from any actual examination of the connections between the individual, culture, and the state."

--- Will Kymlicka (1990) Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction - Communitarianism