We were testing the narrative conception of the self

and the idea of obligations of solidarity or membership

that did not flow from consent,

that claimed us for reasons unrelated to a contract or an agreement

or a choice we may have made.

And we were debating among ourselves

whether there are any obligations of this kind

or whether all apparent obligations of solidarity and membership

can be translated into consent or reciprocity

or universal duty that we owe persons qua persons.

And then there were those who defended the idea of loyalty and of patriotism.

So the idea of loyalty and of solidarity and of membership

gathered a certain kind of

intuitive moral force in our discussion.

And then, as we concluded,

we considered what seems to be a pretty powerful counter example to that idea.

Namely, the film of those southern segregationists in the 1950s.

And they talked all about their traditions,

their history, the way in which their identities were bound up

with their life history. Do you remember that?

And what flowed from that history, from that narrative sense of identity

for those southern segregationists?

They said we have to defend our way of life.

Is this a fatal or a decisive objection to the idea

of the narrative conception of the self?

That’s the question we were left with.

What I would like to do today

is to advance an argument and see what you make of it.

And let me tell you what that argument is.

I would like to defend

the narrative conception of the person

as against the voluntarist conception.

I would like to defend

the idea that there are obligations of solidarity or membership.

Then, I want to suggest

that there being such obligations

lends force to the idea, when we turn to justice,

that arguments about justice can’t be detached,

cannot be detached after all, from questions of the good.

But I wanted to distinguish two different ways

in which justice might be tied to the good

and argue for one of them.

Now, the voluntarist conception of the person of Kant and Rawls

we saw was powerful and liberating.

A further appeal is its universal aspiration.

The idea of treating persons as persons

without prejudice, without discrimination,

and I think that’s what led some among us to argue that,

okay, maybe there are obligations of membership but they are always subordinate.

They must always be subordinate

to the duties that we have to human beings as such, the universal duties.

But is that right?

If our encompassing loyalty should always take precedence

over more particular ones,

then the distinction between friends and strangers

should ideally be overcome.

A special concern for the welfare of friends would be a kind of prejudice,

a measure of our distance from universal human concern

But if you look closely at that idea,

what kind of a moral universe, what kind of moral imagination,

would that lead you to?

The enlightenment flows from Montesquieu

gives perhaps the most powerful, and I think,

the ultimately, the most honest account

of where this relentless universalizing tendency

leads the moral imagination.

Here’s how Montesquieu put it.

He said, "A truly virtuous man would come to the aid

of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend."

And then he adds, listen to this,

"If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn't have friends."

But it’s difficult to imagine a world

in which persons were so virtuous that they had no friends,

only a universal disposition to friendliness.

The problem isn’t simply that such a world

would be difficult to bring about, that it's unrealistic.

The deeper problem is that such a world

would be difficult to recognize as a human world.

The love of humanity is a noble sentiment

but most of the time we live our lives by smaller solidarities.

This may reflect certain limits to the bounds of moral sympathy,

but more important, it reflects the fact

that we learn to love humanity, not in general,

but through its particular expressions.

So these are some considerations.

They’re not knock-down arguments,

but moral philosophy can’t offer knock-down arguments,

but considerations, of the kinds that we've been

discussing and arguing about all along.

Well, suppose that’s right.

One way of assessing whether this picture of the person

and of obligation is right, is to see

what are its consequences for justice.

And here is where is confronts a serious problem,

and here we go back to our southern segregationists.

They felt the weight of history.

Do we admire their character, these segregationists,

who wanted to preserve their way of life?

Are we committed to saying,

if we accept the idea of solidarity and membership,

are we committed to saying

that justice is tied to good in the sense that justice means

whatever a particular community or tradition says it means,

including those southern segregationists.

Here it’s important to distinguish two different ways

in which justice can be tied to the good.

One is a relativist way.

That’s the way that says,

to think about rights, to think about justice,

look to the values that happened to prevail

in any given community at any given time.

Don’t judge them by some outside standard,

but instead conceive justice as a matter of being faithful to the shared understandings

of a particular tradition.

But there’s a problem with this way of tying justice to the good.

The problem is that it makes justice wholly conventional.

A product of circumstance,

and this deprives justice of its critical character.

But there is a second way in which

justice can be tied with or bound up with the good.

On a second non-relativist way of linking justice with conceptions of the good,

principles of justice depend for their justification not on the values

that happened to prevail at any given moment in a certain place,

but instead on the moral worth or the intrinsic good of the ends rights serve.

On this non-relativist view the case for recognizing a right

depends on showing that it

honors or advances some important human good.

The second way of tying justice to the good

is not strictly speaking, communitarian,

if by communitarian you mean,

just giving over to a particular community the definition of justice.

Now, what I would like to suggest

that of these two different ways of linking justice to the good,

the first is insufficient.

Because the first leaves justice the creature of convention.

It doesn't give us enough

moral resources to respond to those southern segregationists

who invoke their way of life, their traditions,

their way of doing things.

But if justice is bound up with the good in a non-relativist way,

there is a big challenge, a big question to answer.

How can we reason about the good?

What about the fact that people hold different conceptions of the good?

Different ideas about the purposes of key social institutions.

Different ideas about what social goods and human goods

are worthy of honor and recognition.

We live in a pluralist society, people disagree about the good.

That’s one of the incentives to try to find principles of justice

and rights that don’t depend

on any particular ends or purposes or goods.

So is there a way to reason about the good?

Before addressing that question,

I want to address a slightly easier question.

Is it necessary, is it unavoidable, when arguing about justice

to argue about the good?

And my answer to that question is yes, it’s unavoidable.

It's necessary.

So for the remainder of today, I want to take up...

I want to try to advance that claim,

that reasoning about the good, about purposes, and ends,

is an unavoidable feature of arguing about justice,

it’s necessary.

Let me see if I can establish that.

And for that I’d like for us to begin a discussion of same sex marriage.

Now, same sex marriage draws on, implicateds,

deeply contested and controversial ideas,

morally and religiously.

And so there’s a powerful incentive

to embrace a conception of justice or of rights

that doesn’t require the society as a whole to pass judgment,