Brian Orend. Social Theory and Practice. Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2001.
“Perhaps the most problematic feature of my exposition is the use of the plural pronouns: we, our, ourselves, us. That … [we all] share a common morality is the critical assumption …” — Michael Walzer
Does Michael Walzer have a general theory of justice? His renown as a political philosopher, after all, rests on his accomplishments in two fields: distributive justice and just war theory. The stark difference between these two topics has generated separate critical discourses, with very few scholars asking how these two projects might be linked in a broader account of justice in general. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that Walzer has resisted the temptation to write a single, all-encompassing tome that elucidates his general theory, assuming there is one.
The task is made no easier by the fact that Walzer’s thoughts about justice in general actually seem conflictual. There appears to be a pervasive tension between the kind of universality presented in earlier works, like Just and Unjust Wars, and the particularity of later works, like Spheres of Justice. The first book offers a unitary theory of international justice, designed to help us cut through “the fog of war” and see clearly which wars are just and which not. The second book is a work of distributive justice devoted not merely to acknowledging different interpretations of the meaning of social goods but also to advocating that such goods ought to be distributed in accord with the meaning of that good within that particular national culture. For instance, he says that the meaning of health care in the United States entails that it ought to be distributed there on the basis of medical need, as opposed to ability to pay.
Walzer’s universalism is displayed when he writes that “[t]here is … a particular view of the moral world, that seems to me to be the best one … [This best view is] a doctrine of human rights.” He continues: “At every point, the judgments we make … are best accounted for if we regard life and liberty as something like absolute values … “Elsewhere, Walzer refers approvingly to “universal prohibitions … of murder, deception, betrayal, gross cruelty … [which] have been accepted in virtually every human society.” Yet rarely is a human rights theorist also a cultural relativist. How can someone who endorses “absolute values” and “universal prohibitions” also claim that “(t)here is no single set of primary or basic goods conceivable across all moral and material worlds” and that all goods ought to be distributed, in any given community, according only to the meaning of those goods within that community? In summary, how can Walzer in the earlier part of his career have devoted himself to a universal theory of wartime justice, applicable to all nations and heavily reliant on human rights, and later on have devoted himself to a theory of distributive justice that is emphatically relative to the social meanings present in a particular nation, and in which human rights play next to no role? Will future scholars debate the differences between “The Early Walzer” and “The Late Walzer,” much as past scholars have done for Marx, or for the pre- and post-Critical Kant? The answer, I think, is no. For Walzer himself has recently worked at integrating these apparently disparate projects into an essentially unified general theory of justice. The most relevant works are Interpretation and Social Criticism and Thick and Thin.
The central aim of this essay is, drawing on these latter two works, to show that Walzer indeed has one single general theory of justice, consistent both in its method and in its substantive conclusions. I will contend that the key to unlocking the substance of Walzer’s social theory resides in his core commitment to self-determination within a protected space. Equal entitlements to personal and political autonomy are Walzer’s most cherished values. These values not only unify his thinking but also have fascinating religious resonances to them. A subsidiary aim of this paper is to offer some critical comments on the nature and import of Walzer’s general theory, as unified by this core commitment.
The Method of Walzer’s Theory
Walzer describes his philosophical approach as interpretive. Although there are a large number of unique methods in moral and political theory, he suggests we focus our attention on the three most common and important “paths”: discovery, invention, and interpretation.
Neither Discovery Nor Invention
The path of discovery is arguably the most ancient. The image here, as Walzer sees it, is of the philosopher divesting himself of all his attachments and prejudices, scaling the mountain of contemplation, discovering the really real, and returning with the moral truth that will set us free. Religious ethics, with its commitment to divine law, is a clear example. So too is a secular defense of natural law. Discoverers seek The Truth of morality and justice, either through reason or revelation. We do not ourselves invent or construct moral and political principles; rather, we discover them through arduous intellectual inquiry or some kind of divine dispensation. Such principles, in turn, provide us with the objective, authoritative standards by which we ought to shape our lives, both personally and politically. Walzer likens this path of political theory to the executive branch of a modern Western government: the theorist here, like Moses in the Old Testament or Plato’s Philosopher-King, discovers the truth, then strives to proclaim and enforce it throughout his domain.
Though noting discovery’s distinguished pedigree, Walzer does not find it the most compelling method in contemporary normative theory. His foremost objection centers on discovery’s pretense of objectivity. While Walzer concedes that there is such a thing as “stepping back” from one’s own particular commitments and interests, he does not believe that such divestiture can ever achieve the kind of completeness and certainty demanded by discoverers. In contrast to Thomas Nagel’s recent definition of the objective stance as looking at the world from nowhere in particular, Walzer insists that we can only grasp the world from somewhere. We can never escape from our situatedness. We cannot see everything, once and for all, as it “really” is. We are always perceiving from a point of view, straining to interpret what we perceive, and then coming to terms with our emotional and cognitive responses to it. Our inescapable situatedness, our firm rootedness in perspective, means that we can never be sure that we have indeed stumbled across the unadorned truth, which holds across all the perspectives and endures as the timeless standard of ethical conduct. And that leaves unsaid the potent skepticism that can be raised regarding the very existence of this supposedly objective and timeless standard, subsisting somewhere and somehow externally to us, just awaiting our discovery.
The path of invention, Walzer says, is a twentieth-century construction built over the romantic yet ruined foundations of the path of discovery. Invention seeks to provide what discovery, by appealing either to God or to nature, could not: “a universal corrective for all the different social moralities.” The path of invention, unlike the path of discovery, is not committed to the idea that The Truth exists, waiting only to be unearthed. Invention acknowledges that we have no choice but to construct our own principles for living together, for deciding how we should treat each other. Waiting for the discovery of the truth is, inventors would say, like waiting for Godot, that is, for someone or something destined never to arrive. Since we must decide on how to act, and how to shape our common institutions, we cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the truth to make its presence felt: we have to get down to the business of proposing, and then negotiating, the principles of social cooperation. Invention is analogous to the legislative branch of government, constructing for us the general guidelines that we find most accommodating. The most formidable expression of the path of invention, Walzer believes, is John Rawls’s famous theory of justice.
Rawls’s renowned method invites us to consider ourselves as self-interested rational agents, coming together to negotiate the terms of social cooperation in the original position behind the veil of ignorance. The original position refers to the pre-political situation when all agents come together to bargain, as prudent and self-interested parties, on the rules that will shape basic social institutions, in particular government. All such agents are, by stipulation, behind a veil of ignorance, which deprives them of information that Rawls believes would poison the bargaining session and generate slanted, unfair results. The agents are to negotiate on principles of justice not knowing what their social standing, gender, race, intelligence, natural endowments, religion, income, or partisan political attachments will be once the veil is lifted and they find themselves in society. Rawls believes that such agents would agree on two core principles of justice according to which social institutions should be shaped: the liberty principle, allowing for the maximum amount of freedom for each that is compatible with the same degree of liberty for all; and the difference principle, allowing only social inequalities that benefit all, including especially the least advantaged members of society, and that occur in a context of equality of opportunity.
Walzer’s response to Rawls’s influential invention begins by claiming that “(m)en and women behind the veil of ignorance … will, perhaps, find a modus vivendi—not a way of life but a way of living. But even if this is the only possible modus vivendi for these people in these conditions, it does not follow that it is a universally valuable arrangement.” In other words, Walzer objects to what some have called Rawls’s excessive abstraction, insisting that Rawls’s principles lack the complexity and richness of a full-blown moral culture. Walzer asks rhetorically: “Why should newly invented principles govern the lives of people who already share a moral culture and speak a natural language?”
Walzer suggests that Rawls’s invention invites us to see ourselves much like refugees, each from different countries, newly arrived in an unknown land and stuck in temporary lodgings, like a decrepit hotel by the airport, as we await processing through immigration. We don’t know where we stand or what will happen to us next; indeed, we don’t even know exactly who our fellow refugees are, what values they have, and so on. All of us, in the hotel, need to come up with some basic principles of social cooperation, comprehensible to all, that will serve everyone’s fundamental interests. At the very least, we all want to survive until our refugee claims are processed by the local authorities. Walzer argues that Rawls’s core principles of justice may well serve people caught in such circumstances, but is skeptical of any broader application for them. For the first and foremost goal of the refugees in the hotel, Walzer points out, is to make it out of there and become functioning members of their new society. Once there, they’ll require moral and political principles infinitely more complex and subtle than those on offer by Rawls.
Walzer’s objection may be rooted in what some have called “the problem of defection” for Rawls: granted that Rawlsian agents in the original position may well settle on his two principles of justice, what is to prevent them from defecting from these principles once the veil is lifted and they find out about their full-blown commitments and interests? Walzer’s point boils down to the claim that we simply are not Rawlsian agents living in the original position: most of us are not at all like refugees holed up in a hotel by the airport. More precisely, Rawlsian agents are not enough like us—the original position is not enough like our world—for the principles of justice that Rawls constructs to be The Solution to our moral and political perplexities.
The key difference between the two methods involves Walzer’s previous insistence that we always perceive the world from some particular point of view. One cannot overemphasize the importance of this core premise for Walzer’s political philosophy: it means that, for him, morality and politics are always rooted somewhere. Moral and political life is always experienced in particular places and times, through the medium of different concrete actions, institutions, and languages. We experience moral and political life in terms of the values we have here and now, and in terms of how these commitments compete or cohere with those of others. Reading Rawls, one might get the impression that it is possible to think about morality and politics from no particular point of view, or at least from one authoritative point of view, for instance, that of the most prudent and rational agent. Such rootlessness, such lack of point of view, is something Walzer rejects utterly. It’s not for creatures like us, he suggests, since we are rooted and perspectival, historical and concrete. For Walzer, Rawls’s invention is an arid and surreal abstraction, which Walzer seeks to capture by likening it to the controlled and contrived circumstances refugees must endure while having their claims processed. But a hotel is not a home, and ultimately we must look for more than Rawlsian reasoning to provide us with satisfaction in our moral and political lives.
Where should we look for such satisfaction? Which place is most like home? Walzer’s ultimate answer is that we should look to the very moral and political cultures we already inhabit. We should look to our own countries, to the familiar places and people we are already attached to. In a sense, for Walzer we’re already home: it’s just that we don’t know it, or that most political philosophers have done their best to disguise that fact or lead us away from it. We have already left the hotel by the airport and have put down roots in a particular community. That’s why we don’t need a way of merely living—that is, a modus vivendi—but a fully-fledged way of life. We need look no further than the ways of life in our own communities for our ultimate source of moral and political guidance in the modern world.
Some readers, at this point, may wonder about the lack of charity with which Walzer treats discoverers and inventors. There is indeed an air of caricature here, and surely a failure to respond fully to what have often been formidable and complex normative doctrines. Consider, as an example, Walzer’s failure to acknowledge Rawls’s treatment of the defection issue. Rawls argues that since his principles of justice were generated in a free and fair fashion by agents relevantly like us in being self-interested and rational, it follows that those of us on this side of the veil should still be moved by the terms of the original contract. For Rawls, the abstraction of his method is an advantage, a way to help distance ourselves from particular prejudices which, when left unchecked, often produce unfairness and discrimination in the various communities we inhabit. Abstraction helps us to understand what we all share in common, universally and not just in terms of our family, friends, and fellow citizens. Furthermore, Rawls is the first to admit that his theory of justice is not designed to answer everyone’s questions about the full range of moral and political choices we are confronted with in life. Rawls’s principles are explicitly designed to guide the shaping of the most basic social institutions, especially government: no more, no less. They are principles designed to ensure a baseline level of fair treatment for everyone by basic social institutions. Does this fact of focus on how social institutions treat persons suffice to undermine our reasons for finding Rawls’s principles persuasive? Since Rawls can’t give us everything, does it follow we shouldn’t take anything from him? In my view, Walzer’s engagement with Rawls’s theory is neither searching nor sustained, and it seeks through metaphorical suggestion rather than sharp argumentation to establish two main criticisms of Rawls: that Rawls’s method of rational choice by prudent persons under ideal and hypothetical conditions is too abstract to be useful in actual political circumstances; and that Rawls does not pay enough attention to the importance of actual communities in people’s lives.
Walzer continues his appraisal of the three philosophical paths by contending that “neither discovery nor invention is necessary because we already possess what they pretend to provide … We do not have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We do not have to invent it because it has already been invented.” Walzer playfully pokes fun at Nagel’s “discovery of an objective moral principle: that we should not be indifferent to the suffering of other people.” “I acknowledge the principle,” Walzer declares, “but miss the excitement of revelation. I knew that already.” Furthermore, both discovery and invention are themselves subject to the twists and turns of the third path: the need for interpretation. Walzer offers “(a) simple maxim: every discovery and invention … requires interpretation.” As evidence, he offers age-old disputes over Biblical exegesis and natural law, as well as current disputes over the exact meaning of Rawls’s difference principle. Discoverers and inventors cannot escape from the need to interpret what has purportedly been discovered or invented: we must therefore acknowledge that the act or procedure of interpretation is at least primary, and perhaps even the only game in town.
Interpretation
“(T)here is no other starting point for moral speculation,” Walzer declares, “(w)e have to start from where we are.” The starting point of moral and political theory must be reflection upon actually existing moral and political beliefs. But this is only the starting point: the most apt method of moral and political inquiry is to come up with the best interpretation of existing moral and political commitments. Walzer likens the path of interpretation to the judicial branch of government: “(m)oral argument … closely resembles the work of a lawyer or judge who struggles to find meaning in a morass of conflicting laws and precedents.” But why should theorists start with this morass of actual belief? “(W)hy,” Walzer asks rhetorically, “is this existing morality authoritative—this morality that just is, the product of time, accident, external force, political compromise, fallible and particular intentions?” He offers four answers. The first is that the moral codes offered by discoverers and inventors tend to be “remarkably similar” to beliefs already present in actual moral and political culture. Second, the process of interpretation gives “the best understanding” of the experience of moral argument. Third, the paths of discovery and invention are “efforts at escape” from the realities of our existence. Finally, interpretation “provides us with everything we need to live a moral life, including the capacity for reflection and criticism.”
In support of the first claim, Walzer points out that many of those often thought of as philosophical revolutionaries, like Kant or Bentham, stress how their moral systems concur with the existing beliefs of the common man. Walzer admits that some moral and political ideas have, in the course of history, seemed to strike with the force of discovery or invention. He cites Marxism, the principle of utility, and “the rights of man.” But he strives to show that all these concepts drew on the history of ideas in their own way. Indeed, he suggests that genuine and utter newness would condemn an idea to oblivion: outside a tradition of discourse, it would be incomprehensible to those to whom it was addressed. That kind of conceptual novelty would be greeted by nothing more than sheer perplexity. Walzer, with perhaps a hint of sarcasm in his voice, informs us that “very rarely are we actually called upon to invent new moral principles.” He concludes:
Insofar as we can recognize moral progress, it has less to do with the discovery or invention of new principles than with the inclusion under the old principles of previously excluded men and women. And that is more a matter of (workmanlike) social criticism and political struggle than of (paradigm-shifting) philosophical speculation.
Against Walzer’s second argument in favor of the path of interpretation, it might be suggested that interpretation does not provide the best sense of the actual experience of moral argument. For the central appeal in actual argument is, a la the path of discovery, to the truth of the matter. The concern is not so much with the meaning of the terms as it is with determining the right thing to do. The point of moral argument in real life is to guide choices and action, not merely to come to an understanding of the full and precise meaning of moral terms. Real moral argument is concerned with choice and action, with praise and blame, not with pedantic fights over semantic rights.
Walzer’s response is to prod us into further thought about these claims. What are we doing when we dispute over the right thing to do? What are we doing when we argue over which action to perform, who to praise or blame? His contention is that, in all these things, we are inescapably involved in an argument over the meaning of moral values. And not merely “meaning” in the narrow sense of first unpacking all the parts contained within the whole of whatever value we are arguing about, and then understanding what they refer to. We are also arguing over whether the value in question is worthy of being recognized as a value at all, about its proper weight and scope in our general system of values, about whether it is consistent with other values we hold, and so on. In the final analysis, he says, moral discourse is about nothing less than “the meaning of our way of life.”
Understood in this frame of reference, it is clear that, by “meaning,” Walzer refers to something deep and penetrating indeed. Meaning is not at all exhausted by conceptual analysis or stipulative definitions. Meaning refers to how we understand the universe and our place in it, how we imbue our choices with purpose, how we relate to each other, how we create lives we find worthwhile. It is meaning in this robust sense that must be the ultimate object of all moral and political debate, and Walzer believes that the community is the prime provider of such meaning, or at least the principal arena in which such a search for meaning takes place. It is, above all, our rootedness in our own communities that infuses our lives with import and significance. Thus, frequent appeals to “the truth” or “the right thing to do” in actual debate are for Walzer essentially rhetorical devices, designed to impress upon other people the superiority of one’s interpretation of what it means to be moral and just. But it is the interpretation itself—the conception of meaning, robustly understood—that contains all the content and substance. And so it must be the proper object of moral and political inquiry.
By suggesting in his third argument that discovery and invention are “efforts at escape,” Walzer implies that these paths are animated by “the hope of finding some external and universal standard with which to judge moral existence.” But Walzer insists that this hope is neither necessary nor realistic. For we already have plausible principles internal to our moral and political discourse. We already have a richly textured existence as moral and political beings. We cannot ever divest ourselves of it completely, so as to stare “moral reality” straight in the face, nor should we want to. For this existence is, for lack of a better term, our home. It is where we always have been, and where we always will be, regardless of how we prefer to dress it up. One is reminded here of Martha Nussbaum’s interesting remark that often the longing for transcendence—for external validation of our beliefs—is animated in part by a shame of being human, as if principles devised by fallible creatures like ourselves somehow fail to be good enough. But, Walzer would ask, who else can we turn to if not ourselves?
Walzer might go even further and suggest that what discoverers and inventors are really trying to escape from is not only the limits of human finitude itself, but also more narrowly the limits of their own personal membership in particular, contingent, fallible, and even peculiar communities and cultures. Discovery and invention presuppose a mythology of the heroic and rugged individual, the isolated and exceptional genius who tames nature, or is spoken to by God, or splits the atom, or invents the airplane. As romantic as such mythology might be, it also ignores the fact that such exceptional individuals draw on a history of prior discovery and invention, and are as a rule heavily reliant on the supportive work of a whole community of staffers, assistants, researchers, publicists, financiers, family and friends, and so on. There is, in the end, no escape in this life from human sociability and some kind of membership in, or at least connection to, a concrete cultural community.
Walzer’s defense of the fourth proposition in favor of interpretation is the most problematic, yet crucially important. He wants to claim that interpretation provides us with everything we need in moral and political life. Critics of Walzer’s hermeneutic approach suggest that, to the contrary, interpretation does not provide us with the critical resources necessary for moral and political progress. Interpretation, it is suggested, is intrinsically conservative, since we can only interpret what already exists. Furthermore, interpretation ignores the reality of how “shared interpretations” have come to be that way. In particular, it ignores the role that coercion has played in spreading “shared ways of life.” To what extent should we remain faithful to principles internal to our discourse if these were generated by questionable means? Why should I treat the values prevailing in my community with such deference and respect if I know that the majority have come to believe in them as a result of a manipulative, exploitative, and ultimately blood-soaked sequence of events? Interpretation also confronts a closure problem: how can we ever know that we have reached “the best interpretation” of the principles of our moral and political discourse, which would enable us to make consistent choices? The interminableness of interpretation grinds against the imperatives of choice and action.
Walzer is acutely sensitive to the accusation that his interpretive approach to justice is insufficiently critical. At first he feigns puzzlement over this challenge, pointing out that if one reads his works, all of which employ the interpretive method, one can see clearly that his intent is “nothing if not critical.” Spheres of Justice, in particular, is a stinging attack on the status quo of distributive justice in America, especially with regard to money’s status as the dominant good, allowing wealthy people to enjoy disproportionate shares of other social goods, like power, legal justice, fame, and so on. He is especially critical of the power of money in America to buy better health care, arguing that this is at odds with the shared meaning of health as a good that ought to be distributed on the basis of medical need.
The other problem Walzer has with this accusation is that it either misunderstands the nature of social criticism, or fails to see how “immanent critique” can be a potent challenge to the status quo, or both. While acknowledging that effective social criticism requires both emotional and intellectual distance from the object being criticized, Walzer insists that the distance required need not—indeed, cannot—be tantamount to detachment. It need not because the most successful social critics have never been utterly external to the set of social arrangements they criticize. More commonly, such critics have been marginalized within, and thus “ambiguously connected” to, their societies. And distance cannot equal detachment because the latter is but a myth created by the objectivist’s longing for a transcendence, for a guarantee of correctness, that will never come. Walzer concludes that “criticism depends less on true … statements about the world than on evocative … renderings of a common idea.” Social criticism is inescapably “an inside job.” The sources of social criticism are not detachment and objectivity, rather, they are marginality and opposition to the establishment within a social system. “It is not connection,” Walzer comments, “but authority and domination from which we must distance ourselves.”
Social criticism, as Walzer sees it, involves a search for the core values within moral and political discourse, an inquiry into the best interpretation available. This interpretation will be coherent and comprehensive. It will be recognized, by the participants within the discourse, as the most compelling account of their own “socially constructed idealism.” Criticism will thus take its most familiar form as pointing out a failure of persons and institutions to remain faithful to their own ideals. Walzer repeatedly asserts that exposure of hypocrisy is the oldest, and probably most effective, form of social criticism. Pointing out that persons and institutions are betraying their own deepest values is a much more biting form of criticism than denouncing them for failing to live up to some discovered or invented moral code, packaged as representing the objective truth on the matter.
Walzer’s hermeneutic method is thus both descriptive and prescriptive—descriptive in the sense that its starting point is a (rich, searching) description of actual moral and political beliefs, yet prescriptive in that it enables social criticism. In describing a culture’s “socially constructed idealism,” one holds up a normative standard by which people and institutions may—by their own principles—be judged, resulting in either praise or blame. The key presuppositions here, which one must assume Walzer holds, are that people and institutions ought to remain faithful to their own deepest commitments and that this norm is itself internal to moral and political discourse. To fail to keep one’s own deepest commitments is wrong. When unconscious, such failure constitutes ignorance; when conscious, it constitutes hypocrisy, bad faith, betrayal.
How exactly are we justified in holding particular people responsible for being true to the socially constructed idealism prevalent in their culture? As Georgia Warnke asks, is there not something about the hermeneutic approach to justice that is at odds with individual autonomy and responsibility? Walzer might respond by stressing the fact that all acts of individual moral choice are, inescapably, structured by some cultural tradition, and so it is incorrect to speak of a sharp split between individual and social values. But Warnke could press the point and wonder how we know whether individuals, or institutions for that matter, do in fact hold certain principles as the deepest expression of their socially constructed idealism. By what right can we conclude that the principles in question are, in fact, theirs, by which we can judge them on their own terms? Walzer’s response, it seems, is that we know it through their endorsement of the best interpretation of those principles, provided that such endorsement is not the product of “radical coercion.”
Walzer, after much critical prodding, concedes that interpretations that have come to be shared through means of “radical coercion” have no normative purchase on our attention. But this limiting principle, he insists, is not some external standard employed as a kind of objective check on the extremities of intersubjective discourse. The ban on radical coercion is itself a principle internal to that discourse. We did not deduce the ban on radical coercion from objective principles, any more than we invented it through the set-up of Rawls’s original position. The ban on employing violence to coerce agreement during a normative argument is something already present in our discourse. It is something we feel to be unfair, harmful, at odds with the spirit of discourse, and irrelevant to genuine argumentation. We suspect that those who resort to coercion during moral debate do so because they lack the capacity to make persuasive and powerful interpretations of what we should do. It should be noted, however, that Walzer does not define radical coercion, though violence presumably must fall under its rubric. His single explicit example of radical coercion is slavery. But is radical coercion understood solely in terms of violence and slavery, or is some other conception permitted? Would an understanding inculcated through systemic ideological programming, or fear, be the product of radical coercion and thus illegitimate? What about an understanding endorsed because of a gross lack of positive liberty, such as access to elementary education?
We now see that any interpretation endorsed as a result of radical coercion cannot, for Walzer, count as part of the best interpretation of our socially constructed idealism. Even if we could get clearer on Walzer’s definition of radical coercion, we would still be left with the largest question: how exactly do we know when we have come up with the “best” interpretation?
The Best Interpretation
It is obvious that we need a best interpretation: Walzer does not believe that one person’s interpretation of moral discourse is as good as another’s. Idiosyncratic readings fail to persuade. Furthermore, we need one best interpretation so as to prioritize and commend our choices and actions. We need a consistent and action-guiding set of imperatives. But, of the various persuasive readings that compete for our attention and commitment, which should we single out as the “best” one to guide our choices, as the one that definitively captures our own “socially constructed idealism”?
Walzer, unfortunately, is rather elusive about the exact answer to this question, preferring in his work to show, instead of to say, what he means by the “best” interpretation. Spheres of Justice is thus offered as a compelling interpretation of the meaning of distributive justice in the United States. Likewise, Just and Unjust Wars is offered as the most compelling interpretation of the international ethics of war and peace. When pressed, however, Walzer does offer a few criteria. The best reading of our moral discourse, for instance, cannot be gleaned from a public opinion survey; Walzer believes the best reading differs in quality from all its rivals. The best reading is the most “powerful and persuasive.” But to whom? Walzer distinguishes between what he calls “the interpretive community” and “the community of experience.” The former is the set of expert social commentators who devote their professional lives to moral and political discourse. The latter is much more inclusive, encompassing all who grasp the terms of moral and political discourse. The community of experience includes all who comprehend and employ the basic vocabulary of the discourse in question. At one point, Walzer seems to privilege the perspective of the interpretive community: “No discovery or invention can end the argument; no `proof’ takes precedence over the (temporary) majority of sages.” But it is clear that, for him, the best interpretation must also be recognized by the broader community of experience, which of course includes the interpretive community. While we might expect that the interpretation that stands out as the best will be produced somewhere in the community of experts, if it fails to jibe with the community of experience, then it will not survive the scrutiny of judgment. For “we are all interpreters of the morality we share.”
What counts as evidence that the participants in the discourse have “endorsed” the principles one contends is the best interpretation? How do we know they “recognize” the interpretation as the best expression of their socially constructed idealism? Walzer, we saw, denies majoritarian preference amongst the community of experience. Is it, then, majoritarian preference among the expert participants in the discourse? Does actual preference matter at all, or is it more a matter of what the participants would find most compelling, if they fulfilled certain criteria? It seems, at first, that it cannot be the latter, since it has obvious affinities with the invented kind of procedure employed by Rawls. Essentially, Rawls suggests that we find most authoritative those principles of justice that prudent, self-interested rational agents would agree to in the context of a free and fair bargaining session. Yet Walzer’s disclaimers about radical coercion cloud the picture: those whose vote matters in determining what counts as the best interpretation must not have been subjected to radical coercion. They must, at the least, fulfill that one evaluative criterion.
This raises a very deep question about Walzer’s method of interpretation, and may help explain the verbal hostility he displays against Rawls’s method: is interpretation really different in kind from invention? Does Walzer protest too much when he objects to Rawls? Consider that the two methods are both socially constructed doctrines, in the sense that there is no commitment to the idea of an objective normative truth just waiting for us to uncover it, as the discoverer would have it. Both insist that we have to rely on our own resources and agreements to shape the terms of social cooperation. Both methods are modern doctrines that have to be explained to the people and each enables social criticism in its own way, as Walzer nimbly demonstrates. And interpretation cannot escape from the need to privilege one kind of best interpretation, so as to exclude obscure and partisan readings and to provide an effective guide to action. In short, isn’t it true that the best interpretation is a kind of invention? After all, Walzer himself admits that it doesn’t just stare us in the face. The best interpretation is a sophisticated and deliberate reading of communal values that has to be put together, probably by a gifted expert, out of the old parts, privileging some and discarding others. Also like an invention, it has to be sold to the buying public, in that it must win their endorsement, though what counts as such endorsement is something Walzer, to the great disappointment of Warnke, appears not to disclose fully.
Walzer suggests that such endorsement is had when the participants “recognize themselves” in the terms of the reading, and presumably, if one wants to add in a charitable fashion to Walzer’s oblique remarks, when the participants also take some kind of action on the basis of such “recognition,” to make their commitment real. The participants may not always adhere to the precise terms of the best reading, but they praise and blame in accord with such terms, and make some kind of deliberate effort to structure their social institutions so that they respect such terms. Thus, we “know” that the participants endorse such principles as their own when, without being subjected to radical coercion, they identify with the principles, praise and blame in accord with them, and try to act consistently with them and to shape social institutions accordingly.
The best interpretation, Walzer stresses, will not be permanent. We do not have one Rosetta Stone of interpretation that will stand as the timeless “decoder” of our moral discourse. The world changes rapidly, and sometimes our moral valuations will follow it. New technology, new events, new experiences, new people: all provide fresh fodder for our interpretative skills. All push the envelope of our moral meanings. There will be no end to the process of interpretation, only temporary stopping points of consensual judgment. Ronald Dworkin has suggested, in opposition to Walzer, that without a correct moral theory (either discovered or invented), we will never agree on which interpretation is best. Walzer disagrees. The best interpretation—at a particular moment—will be the one that makes the most sense to the community of experience; members of that community will freely recognize themselves in its terms. The best reading will cohere most with other elements of that community’s discourse; and it will describe and order the core principles of that community’s discourse. The best reading will make moral discourse “the most fully understood”; it will study “the pattern of the whole,” “reaching for its deepest masons.” Above all, the best interpretation will be the account that participants in the discourse freely agree constitutes the fullest and most persuasive expression of their own socially constructed idealism.
Where precisely does this leave us with regard to recognizing the best interpretation of our shared, existing moral commitments? It leaves us in roughly demarcated territory. The best interpretation cannot be the product of radical coercion. It must be logically consistent and take broad account of other commitments in the culture. It must offer an ordered set of values by which people and institutions can make important moral and political choices. Even though the best interpretation will probably be offered by a member of the interpretive community, all members of the community of experience must be able to recognize themselves in it. Whether they actually endorse it or not seems a separate issue, but the actual consent of the majority of experts might suffice to diagnose it, at least in outline and for the time being. Then the world will change in important ways and we will be forced to begin the hermeneutic process anew. In general, the best interpretation will speak better than all its competitors to the identity and self-understanding of the community in question, and evidence of commitment to its norms can be found by examining what gets most widely and deeply praised and blamed in that community, how the individual members strive to act, how they justify their actions, and especially how they try to structure such basic social institutions as government.
The Content of Walzer’s Theory
Walzer believes that the best interpretation of justice in general must acknowledge that we are all committed to both thin and thick norms of conduct. The thin general theory of justice is, in his words, “minimal and universal.” Significantly, he hastens to add: “I should say almost universal, just to protect myself against the odd anthropological example….” This thin theory of justice is rudimentary and “largely negative,” consisting of prohibitions against “the grossest injustices,” like “murder, deception, betrayal, gross cruelty,” “radical coercion,” “brutal repression,” and “torture, oppression and tyranny.” It also enshrines human rights to life and liberty, with correlative duties of non-violation. Though the language of human rights is Western in origin, Walzer comments confidently that “I assume that it is translatable” and thus that nearly identical concepts and values are at play in non-Western cultures too. He even refers, in terms jarring for a conventionalist, to these elemental prohibitions as “moral facts,” “immediately available to our understanding.” This “minimal and universal moral code … regulates our conduct with all humanity.” Just war theory falls under the purview of this thin theory of minimal morality.
Walzer emphasizes that the thin theory of minimal morality is universal only in the sense of the scope of those who endorse it. It is not the objective truth of morality, either discovered or invented; rather, it is nothing more (nor less) than that core set of values that we find reiterated in every substantive moral and political code. Thin morality is universal only in the sense of being “reiteratively particularist,” “the sum of [common] recognitions,” that set of “overlapping outcomes” shared by diverse moral codes. Thin morality, in short, consists of those basic moral rules that everyone believes in. We all endorse the thin norms as part of our socially constructed idealism. The thin code is not externally imposed; rather, our interpretive skills lead us to the conclusion that it is immanent in every actual moral system.
Minimal morality is “embedded” in maximal morality, which is not universal in scope but rather is radically particularist. Maximal morality is not shared with all humanity; it is utterly relative to one’s cultural surroundings. Distributive justice is Walzer’s foremost example of maximal morality, for it deals with the distribution of social goods—like food, wealth, employment, health care, and education—and the meaning of such goods varies from culture to culture, and sharply so. All discourse surrounding distributive justice, Walzer asserts, “will be idiomatic in its language, particularist in its cultural reference … historically dependent and factually detailed.”
Walzer believes it crucial to note that the world’s many maximal moralities cannot be deduced from the one thin theory they all share. Minimal morality is “not the foundation” of all the maximal moralities, rather, it is “only a piece” of them. Furthermore, it is not as though maximal moralities developed historically out of the one thin theory shared originally by our primordial ancestors. It is not as though minimal morality is more essentially human, or natural, or authoritative, simply because it is more universal in scope. Being more widely shared does not make it more true or real.
Walzer is adamant that morality always confronts us first in the maximal sense, and that the minimal sense can only be arrived at through interpretation and the search for commonalities amongst the world’s many maximal doctrines. If anything, it is maximalism that is the most natural, for that is how we first learn and experience normative phenomena: from within the confines of a particular moral and political culture. Morality is always, first and foremost, maximal: thick, robust, resonant, culturally particular, close to home. Minimal morality, Walzer says, comes to the fore only during times of crisis. The spur for thin morality’s “liberation from its embedding” in maximal morality—the reason for its occasional assertion of itself as most in need of attention—is not a common culture shared by all humanity; rather, it is the presence of a common enemy, like a tyrannical government launching an aggressive war.
Walzer does believe, importantly, that thin morality constitutes a check on thick morality. For instance, any government that violates the dictates of thin morality can only be seen as deficient and unjust. Appeal to thick cultural particularities cannot justify violations of the thin moral code. Appealing to local customs and traditions can never outweigh appeals to be free from torture and gross cruelty. Once more, this is not because the thin code stands as the objective litmus test, disclosed to us by reason or revelation; rather, it is because of the elemental meaning of the thin code already embedded in every thick one. That meaning contains the information that, for all of us, no grosser injustices exist than violations of the thin prohibitions on murder, tyranny, coercion, oppression, cruelty, and so on. Minimal morality is “morality close to the bone” and as such is simple, universal, and intensely held. Maximal morality, by contrast, is a richly articulated cultural code, complicated, qualified, and full of such subtle nuance that non-participants in the culture can find difficulty grasping it, much less endorsing it. Maximal morality has to be “read, rendered, construed, glossed, elucidated.”
Reflecting critically on Walzer’s contentions, we might ask: Is minimal morality really more intensely held than maximal morality? After all, by Walzer’s own admission, people identify first in the ordinary course of their lives with the thick morality of their own culture. Home is where the heart is. Furthermore, it is not implausible to suggest that during times of crisis, the socially constructed idealism of many people is to attend to the thin moral code only vis-a-vis their fellow citizens, and not necessarily with regard to outsiders, especially if those others brought on the crisis, as in the case of war. Do all maximal moralities truly contain the thin one, and is it anything other than convenient that the content of the thin morality turns out by Walzer’s lights so brightly, so happily?
On the one hand, there is no denying that the thin norms as Walzer describes them appear very broadly endorsed indeed, at least in general outline. This is surely related to the fundamental interests that rational human beings see well protected by norms forbidding torture, murder, and tyranny. Such fundamental interests seem to revolve around an elemental need for security: protection of one’s life and limb, freedom from domination at the hands of another. Each of us has obvious and vital interests in having reliable security. Such seems a necessary condition, in general, for the pursuit of whatever else we might personally find desirable in life. At the same time, we note Walzer’s reluctance to declare such fundamental interests universally tree or advantageous.
We might also wonder whether the thin norms are so abstractly put by him that they leave considerable space for different interpretations of the same phenomena. Granted that nobody is going to explicitly endorse “murder,” “torture,” and “gross cruelty,” can Walzer simply leave it there without acknowledging residual ambiguity with regard to how people—even interpretive experts—understand such activity? For instance, is the death penalty gross cruelty, or abortion murder? What about breeding and slaughtering animals for human consumption? Or torturing a terrorist to gain needed information about his confederates? Think now of such thin prohibitions on “tyranny,” “betrayal,” and “oppression” and whether there is a globally shared, socially constructed idealism disclosing their content. Walzer refers quite breezily, almost off-handedly, to the content of minimal morality, presumably owing to his view that we all know more or less what he is referring to. But do we really? Is the “more or less” enough to provide firm guidance in difficult situations, such as wartime?
Here is where the methods of discovery and invention may show up that of interpretation, even on Walzer’s own terms. While his critics probably overstate their case with regard to interpretation being insufficiently critical, they may be able to claim that they can better guarantee universality. They might ask: are we genuinely assured by Walzer’s quick declarations that his thin norms are actually shared by everyone, at least at the level of socially constructed idealism? Or are we more assured by the substantive universality of such non-interpretive norms as Rawls’s principles of justice, or Kant’s categorical imperative, or perhaps even the principle of utility? An uncharitable discoverer or inventor might observe that interpretation may disclose a universally shared thin moral vocabulary but not so clearly a universally shared understanding of what that vocabulary refers to. The universally shared core, as described by Walzer, may turn out to be not only thin but hollow.
Reflections on Walzer’s Core Commitments
We now see that the link between Walzer’s work on distributive justice and just war theory is at least twofold: formal, since Walzer’s treatment of both topics demands that we take a conventionalist, interpretative approach; and material, since Walzer’s substantive principles in both topics are very similar, focusing on individuals and political communities having their own protected space for making free choices in accordance with their own conception of what is good and valuable in life.
The idea of protected space—more specifically, of self-determination within a protected space—is absolutely central to Walzer’s political thinking. Violation of such space is, in his mind, the very height of injustice. This leads him to say, in his account of distributive justice, that if possession of one social good, like money, allows one to purchase disproportionate shares of another social good, like health care, without regard to the meaning of that latter good, then “the autonomy of distributive spheres” has been violated. A kind of distributive aggression has occurred, a violation of the very meaning that we place on who should get what good, how much of it, and in accordance with what principle. For Walzer, every social good should be distributed in accordance with its unique meaning in that culture. So, since the meaning of health care in most Western societies leads us to the idea that it ought to be distributed on the basis of medical need, it follows that a Western society that allows for money to determine the distribution of health care violates its own very meaning, permitting the violation of a sphere of activity whose autonomy it should protect. On the international level, Walzer favors protected spaces for all nations who have created, developed, and nurtured a shared way of life through time, a way of life that is widely participated in and at least minimally just, in the sense of respecting individual human rights to life and liberty. For all nations, Walzer believes, there should be states, or at least reliable state protection worked out through complex accommodations. Hence the critical importance of borders between states, the violent crossing of which constitutes aggression, for him the only genuine crime that states can commit against each other. Walzer, most graphically, likens interstate aggression to an armed robber breaking into one’s home, one of the clearest and most dangerous cases of violating self-determination within a protected space. Aggression is so serious that, for Walzer, it even justifies war, provided certain other conditions are also met.
It is interesting to reflect on the deepest reasons behind Walzer’s core norm of there being protected spaces within which people are free to make their own choices and pursue their own conception of meaning in life. Some reasons might be linked to Walzer’s own life experiences and political affiliations. In terms of his life experiences, Walzer’s intellectual career has flourished as a result of his pursuing his own research interests under the protection of things like academic tenure, which affords him both security and autonomy. In terms of his political affiliations, America has always thought of itself, going back to its Pilgrim founders in the early 1600s, as a City on a Hill, a separate, superior, and shining exemplar for the rest of humanity. America defines itself as an oasis of freedom and moral rectitude, separated from the perceived corruptions and limitations of the Old World not only by miles of ocean but also by a different conception of political association, which itself places great value on individual self-determination. For very different reasons, Israel also embodies the value of self-determination within a protected space. For centuries spread out over Europe, the Middle East, and the New World, the Jewish diaspora finally succeeded in establishing the state of Israel after World War II, convincing the victorious Western powers that one of the horrifying conclusions to be drawn from that brutal conflict was that they could not count on the protection of a state that was not their own. Thus the West aided in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. For the past fifty years, Israelis have struggled mightily, and sometimes controversially, to carve out for themselves a protected space in this world wherein they are free to pursue their own vision of a meaningful life.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the religious overtones to the idea of a protected space, and if I failed to point out that in his recent writings, Walzer has increasingly availed himself of religious references and language. There is a clear consonance of imagery between the picture of a protected space in general and spaces of religious significance, like a church or synagogue: both are places of refuge from a rough-and-tumble world, oases of privacy that are vested with meaning and symbolic significance, sanctuaries of which one has a long memory. Both are institutions with traditional practices and rhythmic activities designed to settle and comfort, as well as to lift one’s mind to a more resonant plane. They are places to pray individually as well as to worship in community with familiar, well-meaning faces. The allusion need not stop at religious institutions, for there is also a clear connection here to the central religious idea of people’s own souls, their ultimate private space and source of meaning and guidance in life. This soul, in religious terms the most precious thing about us, is the one space each of us must protect absolutely; and not only from “invasion” by corrupting external influences but also from the internal temptation to betray one’s own deepest commitments, whether out of contemptible weakness or out of a simple yet searing hypocrisy. The false self, the betrayed self, the corrupted soul: Walzer draws on a very rich tradition of imagery and motif referring to the need for a protected space of one’s own, in which one can be true to oneself.
It is not mere autobiography, however, that drives Walzer’s political theory. Substantive philosophical commitments are also present. There is, for example, obvious reliance on the value of autonomy in Walzer: both persons and peoples should be autonomous within their own proper spheres. More specifically, it is the value of the equal right of all to enjoy autonomy that looms large as the most abiding of Walzer’s principles. One of his most moving comments about this value, this core commitment to universal self-determination within a protected space, runs as follows: “We act immorally when we deny to other people … the right to act autonomously and the right to form attachments in accordance with a particular understanding of the good life.”
Summary
Despite appearances, Michael Walzer has a general theory of justice. The method of this general theory is hermeneutic, mandating that we best interpret our existing beliefs and commitments. Walzer is quick to dismiss rival methods and faces residual unclarity about how exactly we recognize the “best” interpretation we need. The content of Walzer’s general theory is split into thin and thick accounts. Thin justice is universally shared, composed of prohibitions on murder, torture, and gross cruelty. It is embedded in all thick moralities, which are culturally relative. Walzer believes, controversially, that the substance of the thin code is both universally shared and easily grasped. The best interpretation, so to speak, of Walzer’s own general theory will note the importance it places on protected personal and political spaces, and mention that the equal right of all to enjoy autonomy is centrally present throughout all Walzer’s work. This right draws sustenance not only from Walzer’s personal experiences and political views, but perhaps also from deep religious commitments that imbue his social theory and practice.