The following is an essay that I wrote several years ago and never published. I have divided the essay into four posts that will run over the next couple of days. Academics regularlly present unpublished papers at workshops where they get feedback and criticism. I want to experiment with a blog-based version of the same thing in which folks offer thoughts and criticism of the essay as they read it. Enjoy!
Recent years have seen a blossoming of serious philosophical examination of Mormon theology. Writing in the 1950s, the sociologist Thomas Oâ€™Dea disparaged Mormonism as a do-it-yourself theology that offered little intellectual rigor or theoretical insight. It is certainly true that Mormonism has yet to achieve anything like the theoretical sophistication that one sees in the philosophical elaboration of traditional Christianity, and there are reasons for believing that such a comprehensive elaboration may not even be possible within Mormonism. Yet a small but increasing number of Mormon and non-Mormon academics are coming to realize that Mormonism does offer rewards to those interested in philosophical theology.
Despite this flowering of interest in philosophical Mormon theology, there has been very little effort to use these insights in other areas of theoretical interest, such as political philosophy. This essay seeks to begin filling that gap by offering an example of how one might use the philosophical discussion of Mormon theology to frame and understand a central issue in contemporary political theory. Much of the debate in American political philosophy in the closing years of the twentieth century revolved around the competing claims of liberalism and communitarianism. This debate can be framed quite well within the context of Mormonism. For Mormons, I will argue that the choice between liberalism and communitarianism can be framed as a conflict between the ontology and the teleology of their theology.
Liberalism is a term that has been so often misused that it is perhaps better not to attempt to attempt to rescue it. However, there is too much history behind the word and it is too philosophically useful to be abandoned at this late date. Philosophically (as opposed to popularly or journalistically) liberalism refers to the political philosophy that had its genesis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the work of thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Liberalism sees human beings as autonomous, rights bearing individuals. In this philosophy, the chief aim of politics is to protect the liberty of each citizen to pursue their own vision of the good life and to minimize the reach of collective coercion. Thus in a liberal polity the good is subservient to the right, the political community is seen as nothing more than the aggregation of individuals, and the ultimate unit of political value is the individual. The two recent thinkers most powerfully associated with liberal philosophy in the United States have been John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and they nicely illustrate the differences in an approach that can be taken within liberalism. One of Rawlsâ€™s central projects is to articulate a vision of distributive justice based on the foundation of individualism and the philosophy of right. In contrast, Nozickâ€™s primary project is to defend the desirability of a minimalist state based on an absolutist conception of individual rights. Despite these rather radical differences, both thinkers are firmly within the liberal tradition.
One of the most powerful justifications offered for liberalism was that given by John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century. Millâ€™s justification for liberalism rested on utilitarianism. Mill argued that a regime that maximized the amount of personal liberty consistent with like liberty for others would on the whole maximize the total utility to society. In an era that was becoming increasingly skeptical of metaphysical claims — Jeremy Bentham famously prefigured the age by calling natural rights â€œnonsense on stiltsâ€ — Millâ€™s formulation of liberalism became very popular. By the middle of the twentieth century the consensus in Anglo-American political philosophy was that utilitarianism could, if properly articulated, provide a full justification for liberal polity and effectively guide political decision-making. However, in the decades following World War II, the faith in utilitarianism faltered a variety of reasons. In its place many liberal thinkers, most notably John Rawls, turned to a Kantian ethics to justify liberalism on the basis of a deontological notion of individual rights. More recently, the utilitarian justification for liberalism has enjoyed a renaissance in the work of Richard Posner and others in the law and economics movement.
The postwar years also saw a more powerful challenge to liberalism, especially as liberal political thinkers turned to increasingly Kantian justifications for liberalism. This challenge came from a spectrum of communitarian thinkers such as Michael Oakshott, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre. A leading philosopher in this group is Michael Sandel. According to Sandel, liberalism requires that the principle of justice â€“ of right â€“ function as an â€œArchimedean pointâ€ prior to any other political or social value. However, Sandel argues that arguments offered in favor of justice by liberals cannot support so primary a position for justice. At the limit of justice, Sandel argues, we are inevitably confronted with the question of the good. Liberalism thus rests on a philosophically unsustainable ambition: the hegemony of justice without reference to the good. Hannah Arendt offered a critique of liberalism from a somewhat different position. Arendtâ€™s philosophy is an attempt to recapture the ancient ideal of the public or the political. With Aristotle, she argues that it is only in the political or public arena that human beings become free and fully human. Contrary to liberalism, Arendt argues that freedom is constituted by the political rather than vice versa as in contractarian philosophies.
These critics of liberalism share a common commitment to a more robust notion of the political community than one finds in liberalism. An example of this reaction to liberalism can be seen in the civic republican movement that gathered force in American legal theory during the late 1980s and 1990s. Rather than conceptualizing politics as a process of protecting rights and liberty, these theorists looked to a robust notion of the public good and the priority of the community in constituting the individual. This emphasis on the primacy character of the community led them to argue that illiberal policies â€“ such as the suppression of pornography â€“ were justified if they resulted from, and served to preserve, the fundamental character of a community as defined by a politically virtuous and civically involved citizenry.
This is a conflict that can be viewed through the lens of Mormon theology and philosophy. The issues of individuality, community, and their relationship at play in the debate between liberalism and its critics are also acted out within Mormonism. This opens up two possibilities. The first is that Mormons with an interest in these issues have a way of analyzing them that does not require an intellectual divorce of their religious selves from the rest of their reason. The second is that those interested in the debate can see it refracted through a new prism. While not guaranteeing useful insights, seeing familiar issues played out in an unfamiliar language and landscape always offers the possibility of new insights.