Galun.com - The New Golden Rule

Notes: The New Golden Rule

The notion "that more freedom is better than less...ignores a major sociological observation: movement from a high level of social restriction to a greater measure of choice... at some point becomes onerous for the actors involved and undermines social order upon which liberties are ultimately based...reasons for limitations include the economic and psychological cost of comparing numerous options; the focusing of responsibilities that arise when one forgoes some options...the danger of opening ourselves to new temptations...and the fact that by forgoing some choices, one can signal one's commitment both to other people and to values. Sociologists would add to this list heightened tendencies toward conflict including violence, when there are too few shared moral convictions."
The argument about what constitutes a good society tends to center around two poles - order and liberty. Even when people show some concern for both poles, they tend to argue that the best way to achieve one pole is by attending to the pole they prefer - arguing that more liberty means more order, or that only order can create liberty.
Communitarianism, by comparison, argues that society requires an equilibrium between these two poles, not the maximization of one.
"not every social order makes for a good society. A good society requirs an order that is aligned with the moral commitments of its members. Other forms of social order generate high social and individual costs (such as withdrawal from work, abuse of alcohol and drugs, or a high incidence or psychosomatic illnesses), and lead to numerous attempts to evade, change, or escape such order."
The challenge for those who aspire to a good society is to form and sustain - or, if it has been lost, to regenerate - a social order that is considered legitimate by its members, not merely when it is established but continuously. The new golden rule requires that the tension between one's preferences and one's social commitments be reduced by increasing the realm of duties one affirms as moral responsibilities - not the realm of duties that are forcibly imposed but the realm of responsibilities one believes one should discharge and that one believes one is fairly called upon to assume.
"all forms of social order draw to some extent on coercive means (such as police and jails), 'utilitarian' means (economic incentives generated by public expenditures or subsidies), and normative means (appeals to values, moral education). Societies differe greatly, however, in the mix of means they employ. Totalitarian societies draw heavily on coercive means in ordering a very wide range of behavior; authoritarian societies maintain order in a similar manner, but for a significantly narrower range of behavior. Libertarian societies, which minimize the scope of the social order and seek to draw on the market even for public services... draw heavily on utilitarian means. The order of good communitarian societies relies heavily normative means (education, leadership, consensus, peer pressure, pointing out role models, exhortation, and, above all, the moral voice of communities)."
"For a social order to be able to rely heavily on normative means requires that most members of the society, most of the time, share a commitment to a set of core values, and that most members, most of the time, will abide by the behavoral implications of these values because they believe in them, rather than being forced to comply with them. It is rather self-evident that high levels of violent crime and other forms of antisocial behavior are indications that a large number of police officers, tax auditors, and inspectors also indicates a deficient moral order, even if antisocial order is low.
"The difference in approach to social order by communitarians and social conservatives can be highlighted by spelling out the latter's position. Social conservatives tend to treat social order the way individualists treat autonomy, as the primary social good. They tend not to view autonomy as if it had the same principled, primary standing as order and virtue, a key assumption of the communitarian paradigm of a good society.
"Aside from the status of autonomy, a major difference between social conservatives and communitarians (and among social conservatives) exists in their view regarding the legitimate ways to sustain virtue. While communitarians basically have faith in faith and seek to convince people of the value of their position, relying on the moral voice of the community, education, persuasion, and exhortation, social conservatives are much more inclined to rely on the law to promote values in which they believe. Moreover, while many social conservatives seek to remain within the confines of constitutional democracy - as they seek massive legislation to institute the virtues to which they are committed - strong conservatives, and above all authoritarians and fundamentalists, appeal to what they consider higher laws than those made by "man," and are willing to establish theocracies."
"Another major difference is that although communitarians, at least in terms of the paradigm advanced here, limit the virtues the society favors to a set of core values which legitimating differences on other normative matters, the scope of values social conservatives promote is much more pervasive and unitary. Social conservatives see few areas of behavior which they are willing to leave open to personal and subgroup choice. If the individualists are the virtue-avoiders, strong social conservatives are virtue-monopolizers. What one eats, drinks, and reads are all morally infused.
Saying that the good society protects autonomy does not mean autonomy "as merely an individual virtue of persons who cherish freedom" but also as "an attribute of a society that provides structured opportunities and legitimation for individual and subgroup expression of their particular values, needs, and preferences."
"Socially constructed autonomy enhances the ability of the society to adapt to change, to be metastable. Providing structured opportunities for individual and subgroup expression balances a tendency of those in power to avoid making needed changes to social formations and public policies following changes in the external environment or in internal societal compositions. For societies to be stable, they must be metstable, that is, to keep the same overarching pattern, they must continue to remake themselves."
"institutionalized autonomy allows a society to take into account that the members of society differ greatly in their capibilities and their specific environmental circumstances. To try to fordce them all to abide by the same rules...sharply undercuts their ability to serve the society, aside from diminishing what they can do for themselves."
When it comes to free speech, civil libertarians reject all limits because of the slippery slope, while social conservatives demand government censorship. The communitarian answer is to rely on informal social mechanisms - the society distincing itself/condemning certain speech - to policing speech. This is better than government control - which tends to be fairly total - because informal controls always have extensive exceptions - outlets that provide a voice for those who feel strongly that they must cross the lines set by the community. Informal mechanisms ensure that while they protect most of us from speech that has no redeeming merit, they also ensure that even this sort of speech has some outlets. Still, much is gained when such speech is treated as tolerable but not respectable or even acceptable, instead of allowing it to become a regular part of daily expression.
The relationship between order and autonomy "is a blending of two basic formations that - up to a point - enhance one another (so that in a society that has more of one, the other grows stronger as a direct result), a symbiotic relationship; but if either element intensifies beyond a given level, it begins to diminish the other: the same two formations become antagonistic. Lacking a better term, I refer to this unusual relationship as inverting symbiosis."
For example, if a social club were formed in a high-rise building, at first both order and autonomy are increased: "As the residents cease to be strangers, come to know one another as people and develop some measure of communal attachments, they will feel less isolated, have a stronger sense of self and a more secure autonomy, and be voluntarily more mindful of their responsibilities, such as parking in the marked spaces and not littering in shared areas."
"However, if the newly founded community continuously increases its expectations of its members, a point will be reached at which the two formations will start to undercut one another. Thus, if the ordering formations grow stronger and stronger, not only will the members' autonomy decline, but the communal bonds will fray as social responsibilities turn into imposed duties and opposition to the community will grow, which in turn will undermine the social order. This is what happens in totalitarian regimes: While initial calls for new social responsibilities are often rather warmly received, as these regimes escalate their demands, alienation grows."
"In contrast, when autonomizing formations grow stronger and stronger they reach a point at which not only will the service to the shared purposes be denied (as happens when privatizing and reduction of the public sector is pushed to extremes) but the autonomy of millions of individuals who depend (in varying degrees) on the community for their basic needs - from protection to schooling - decreases. In the terms used here, at a particular point, the relation in these communities moved from the mutually enhancing zone to the antagonistic zone."
Communitarianism exists today not to threaten autonomy, but because there is today a disequilibrium in which there is far too much autonomy, and not enough social order.
Without order, you get totalitarianism. The real threat to rights isn't order, it is the absence of order.
Four rules to guide communitarian societies to help them avoid excessive order: 1) "a communitarian society does not build up its coercive measures (such as police, jails, and regulation) unless it faces a clear and present danger"; 2) "when communitarian societies are moved to act to counter a clear and present danger, they ought to start by trying to cope with the dangers without resorting to autonomy-restricting measures"; 3) "to the extent that autonomy-curbing measures must be introduced, these ought to be minimally intrusive"; and 4) "communitarian societies work to minimize the autonomy diminishing, often unintended, side effects of measures that must be undertaken for the common good."
"There is a strong tendency to assume that the social order in a free society rests on laws and that these are upheld by inspectors, auditors, the police, courts, and prisons. If the billions of actions that take place in society every day had to be supervised to ensure that they are carried out in line with the mores of the society, half the population would have to serve as enforcers. These guardians, in turn, as Plato already pointed out, would need guardians themselves, who would in turn need enforces of their own. The ultimate result is closer to a police state than to a good society."
"In short, for a good society to maintain order, without drifting in the direction of an authoritarian state, most members, maybe as many as 98 percent, most of the time, must abide voluntarily by the mores. Law enforcement can step in to deal with, at most, the remaining 2 percent."
"In a communitarian society (and in quite a few others) values are handed down from generation to generation rather than invented or negotiated. This is the profound implication that a community has an identity, a history, a culture."
To the classical liberal focus on autonomous individuals creating contracts, Etzioni responds that "mores and values cannot be worked out on an ad hoc basis at every turn, nor can they draw on prearranged contracts. If a society tried to follow this course, then half of society would be lawyers drafting contracts (or trying to wriggle out of them). It is not an accident that the most individualist society, American society, is also the one that is most litigious. In effect, for a society to function, it must draw on culture and traditions the shared values they entail. Only these values can provide the normative criteria needed to proceed without constant haggling and to work out differences even when negotiations do take place. Emile Durkheim established this in his well-known observation about the importance of precontractual values and normative commitments that undergird contracts and their observation."
Some argue that we need to restore civility, but "Such notions of a civil order reflect, at best, a rather narrow band of values. They speak to some of the conditions necessary for individuals to come to agreement with one another, but take no position on the normative content of such deliberations and negotiations. To put the matter in more colloquial terms, civility ensures good communication but not the ability to tell right from wrong and to abide by the implications of normative determinations. To argue, as I do, that to have a civic society is insufficient, that a virtuous society requires a core of shared values, is not to dismiss civic order. It is a necessary, but far from a sufficient, element of the social order a good society needs."
"Liberal individualists stress the importance of keeping ultimate values (especially religious ones) out of deliberations (to keep them 'thin' and limited to public matters) to ensure that people will enter them with an open mind. When this valid observation is pushed too far, it leads liberals to join dialogues without strong commitments - only to be reasonable, constructive, and to find a compromise. When they face others who have strong substantive convictions, the result is illustrated by the kind of dialogues President Clinton engaged in during the first two years of his administration. He gave up half his agenda before the give-and-take started, and was quick to fold much of the rest - all to be reasonable. To call attention to the difference between joining a dialogue with strong positions along with the willingness to listen and respond to others, versus joining it mainly out of a commitment to a good process, I will refer to a 'dialogue of convictions' versus a 'dialogue of proceduralists.' For moral dialogue to take hold, to gain traction so to speak, they must be those of convictions, not of proceduralists."
"It would be undemocratic to replace elected representatives with computerized voting... One main reason is the Burkean argument that large groups need two (or more) layers of representation, rather than direct representation, in order to work out dialogue-based public policies. In a layered system, the voters grant their elected representatives 'mandates' - that is, generalized guidance reflecting what voters seek: Get us out of Vietnam; focus on domestic issues; do something about competitiveness. The voters best avoid the specifics. For the system to work, citizens must allow their representatives to engage in give-and-take, within the confines of their mandates, to be able to find a public policy shared with other representatives."
Those "who think of democracy as a voting machine miss an important requirement that is met in town meetings: exposing people to conflicting arguments and making them examine their positions before they vote."
"Communities, critics argue, use their moral voice to oppress people, are authoritarian by nature, and push people to conform." But "Behind many of these criticisms lies an image of old or total communities, which are neither typical of modern society nor necessary for, or even compatible with, a communitarian society. Old communities (traditional villages) were geographically bounded and the only communities of which people were members. In effect, other than escaping into no-man's-land, often bandit territories, individuals had few opportunities for choosing their social attachments. In short, old communities had monopolistic power over their members."
"New communities are often limited in scope and reach. Members of one residential community are often also members of other communities - for example, work, ethnic, or religious ones. As a result community members have multiple sources of attachments, and if one threatens to become overwhelming, individuals will tend to draw more on another community for their attachments. Thus, for instance, if a person finds herself under high moral pressure at work to contribute to the United Way, to give blood, to serve at a soup kitchen for the homeless, and these are lines of action she is not keen to follow, she may end up investing more of her affection, time, and energy in other communities. If a person who has recently been divorced is under severe censure by his church community, he may well spend more time in other communal places. This multicommunity membership protects the individuals from both moral oppression and ostracism; it mutes the moral voice to some extent. It thus allows a community to work out a balance between the moral voice (and hence order) and a fair measure of autonomy. However, incongruity among the values of a person's multiple communities may substantially weaken the moral voice. Hence the importance of the next-level moral community, the community of communities, the shared values of the society at large."
"for a society to be communitarian, much of the social conduct must be 'regulated' by reliance on the moral voice rather than on the law, and the scope of the law itself must be limited largely to that which is supported by the moral voice."
"I cannot stress enough that the moral voice can be made much more compatible with a high level of autonomy - and hence with a good society - than can law enforcement. The main point is that if people ignore the law their wages are garnished, mortgages are foreclosed, and their homes sold out from under them; they are jailed or even executed....In contrast, when one disregards the moral voice one can proceed, although some social costs may be attached. That is, the person's basic autonomy is maintained."
"All this is not to deny that laws and public policies have a place in societal change, including in moral regeneration, but rather that they are not the main factor. Most important, he laws and public policies must reflect the change in values rather than significantly diverge from them. In effect, the more a society relies on the government per se, the more both the moral order and autonomy are diminished, the less communitarian the society becomes. The more a society relies on members' convictions that their community has established a legitimate and just order, and the more they conduct themselves voluntarily in line with the order's values because they themselves subscribe to them, the more communitarian the society. To put it more sharply, the communitarian society is not first and foremost one of law-and-order, but one based on shared moral values that the members affirm. It is a society primarily based on virtues and on laws that embody them"
"welfare liberals and social conservatives still regularly advocate changing major aspects of society of which they disapprove by enacting laws - whether or not there is the needed moral support for the changes entailed. Therefore I see a compelling reason for communitarians to stress that law in a good society is first and foremost the continuation of morality by other means. The law may sometimes lead to societal change to some extent, but if the moral culture (shared values and commitment to them) does not closely follow, the social order will not be voluntarily heeded and the society will be pushed toward the edge of the communitarian pattern - and, ultimately, beyond its limits of tolerance, transforming into an authoritarian society."
"the main issue is not whether we legislate morality, but the distance between the values we affirm as an inclusive community and those expressed in law. Governments can enact laws that ban divorce, as they have done in many Catholic countries, but to the extent that people do not truly share the underlying values (as distinct from paying lip service to them), such laws lead to various kinds of antisocial behavior. For example, many men in Italy live with their mistresses and father children our of wedlock, while pretending to uphold the institution of marriage. Similarly, where abortions are banned, those women who do not share the corollary moral convictions, at least not firmly, turn to back-alley abortions as a result. Earlier prohibitions on the use of contraceptives pushed them under the counter, generating the typical distorted consequences of laws not backed by moiral commitment, but did not prevent their wide use even among Catholics."
"When, then, enact laws at all in a communitarian society? The main roles the law plays here are twofold. First, we saw, it is expressive of the community's values. Second, communitarian law helps maintain the social order by dealing with those who disregard the moral voice. In a perfect communitarian society, their number is small, but one cannot expect it to be zero. Because some people either have no inner moral voice or only a rather weak one, and/or such people are immune to the moral voice of the community, they will try to circumvent the mores if not to violate them outright. If society fails to deal with these violators, people who abide by the society's norms and laws will question the authority of and commitment to the moral order, which will, therefore, slowly decline as more people become violators."
"Many liberals often ignore this point when they do not take into account that some criminals cannot be reached by the moral voice and must be incarcerated, and often kept in jail for rather long periods. This issue is particularly evident when one deals with psychopaths and with sex offenders, the latter having a very high recidivism rate. The proportion of basically incorrigible criminals, though, is small. Social conservatives are mistaken to the extent that they assume that public authorities can be used to restore social order. What is needed is moral regeneration and some law enforcement."
"Public policies can nourish communities by ensuring that the state does not take over activities that provide opportunities for communities to act. The point individualists make about the ill effects of the government's excessive intervention in the marketplace applies to communities as well. In many societies, especially Western Europe, in which the welfare state has taken over many missions communities undertook in earlier ages, communities have weakened. Hence, some functions must be returned to communities if they are to be regenerated."
"In the United States, a decline in government services has led to a significant increase in community activities. For instance, in New York City, following the reduction in government services, the number of organized community groups increased from 3,500 in 1977 to 8,000 in 1995."
"In most cases communities cover only part of the mission rather than replacing the state or the private sector. However, such increases in community activation suffice to reduce public costs (and the alienation high public costs generate). Also, community services (whether they are completely voluntary or draw in part on donations or on public funds) are more tailored to individual needs, more humane, and less subject to false claims. Moreover, community activation strengthens the web of interpersonal bonds that are one of the two core elements of communities. These bonds, in turn, have been shown to lead to stronger, healthier, and happier lives."
"The view of human nature that is most compatible with communitarian thinking is a dynamic (developmental) view. It holds that people are indeed born basically savage, as the social conservatives would have it, but can become much more virtuous, although never as virtuous as individualists or welfare liberals envision."
"the extent of human virtue depends on three conditions: first, on the internalization - rather than merely or mainly reinforcement -- of values, on making them an integral part of self; second, on the evolution or development of social formations needed to undergird the given values; and, third, on reducing the inevitable contradiction between full order and full autonomy by making the main social formation more responsive to human nature."
"infants are born physically human, but are psychologically, socially, and morally animal-like. Although people have the potential to become virtuous, they have no innate or built-in values...Infants are born only with human potential, one that is not self-realizing. They must be made human [by society]."
"Internalization refers to the process through which children incorporate values into their evolving inner self, until these values become their own, become an integral part of their selves, help shape their preferences...Children and adults sometimes comply - that is, adhere to what values call for - out of exterior motives, our of fear of punishment or the yen for rewarwds. However, one observes significant differences between complying behavior that reflects internalization and complying behavior that is a response to environmental pressures. If compliance reflects social pressure, people will abide as long as the penalties or rewards exceed what they would gain if they ignored them and violated the mores - or only as long as their behavior is visible and they cannot conceal it. Moreover, as long as values as external, the maximum incentive is to seem compliant but do what one pleases, conduct that allows one to avoid punishment or collect rewards and still, for example, smoke on the sly, malinger, and abuse one's children."
"even when external compliance works well, when it generates full compliance rather than deceptive conformity, its costs are high because of the required measure of supervision and policing and the steady stream of rewards and punishments. And such compliance without internalization generates alienation, because the person is made to stay a course he or she does not truly seek to follow. Alienation, in turn, especially when high, has various ill consequences, from fostering psychosomatic illness to rebellion. In contrast, if values are truly internalized, compliance is high, its costs are low, and it engenders a positive sense of affirmation. In turn, people are ennobled when they live up to their values, which further sustain their commitments."
"The term 'peer pressure' is particularly unfortunate in this context and reflects and unwitting individualistic bias. It implies that whatever peers foster is experienced by an ego as an external - and a negative - force, as pressure. Such peer pressure does take place, but to focus exclusively on pressures is to ignore that peers can help one another to reach higher levels of accomplishment, delight, complement, and enrich one another. The term 'peer (mutual) fostering' should find its place right next to 'peer pressure.'"
The moral infrastructure is made of four elements, "arranged like Chinese nesting boxes, one within the other, and in a sociological progression." The family plants values, launching the moral sense, schools add additional moral values, and then communities and the community of communities (society at large) reinforce them.
To strengthen the family, Eztioni argues for: teaching conflict resolution in schools, premarital counseling, socioeconomic policies to aid parenting (like child care leave, flex time, etc.), delayed divorces (enforcing a cooling-off period), and measures to enhance society's recognition (and therefore support for) the family.
"There is no way to teach history, geography, English literature, not to mention social studies and civics, in a value-neutral fashion. And even if this could somehow be achieved, it would send a strong moral message: that being 'objective' and thus detached or relativistic about these matters is the morally superior way to be. There is no values-free education. Schools differ only in that some are self-aware, frank, and accountable about the values they transmit, while others are confused, are unaware of their normative agenda, or deliberately disregard the values of the communities of which they are part as they promote values the teachers favor. And communitarians maintain that one can identify a broad-based set of values that communities do share."
To strengthen schools, Etzioni suggests policies that will support self-discipline and empathy: no social promotion; limiting students' legal recourse against schools (there should not be an adversarial relationship, because the school is essentially standing in for the parent); schools can search lockers or enforce dress codes; longer school years; and changing sports to emphasize respect for the rules and referees (rather than winning at all costs).
"The incontestable fact about human nature is that the good and virtuous character of those who have acquired it tends to degrade. If left to their own devices, going throu8gh the routine of life, individuals gradually lose much of their commitment to values - unless these are continuously reinforced. A major sociological function of the community, as a building block of the moral infrastructure, is to reinforce the character of individuals."
Communitarians reject both the demands of absolute assimilation and unchecked diversity as a manner for dealing with a heterogeneous society. The former policy is "a case of strong oversteering. There is no compelling sociological reason to assimilate Americans into one indistinguishable blend, to apply, as James Bryce put it, the great American solvent that removes all traces of previous color..." People who advocate the latter, however, "embrace this orientation speak of 'diversity' without any qualifiers or additions. To the extent they discuss a shared framework at all, they reject it. The voices of unqualified diversity tend to view the existing framework as one that reflects traditional white, male, or European-American values. These advocates of diversity tend to ignore the question of whether diversity needs to know any bounds, left alone what the content of such bonds might be."
Communitarians think of a heterogeneous society as a "community of communities." This community of communities will be based on a "thick social framework" of core elements that all the communities agree to.
Core Element #1 is "Democracy as a Value (Not Only a Procedure)." "The basic reason is that if democracy is viewed merely as an arrangement or procedure, it may be abandoned when it comes into significant conflict with a major interest group or the values of one of the major contesting subgroups. Democracy, in this sense, is akin to a contract, the compliance with which is ultimately based on precontractual commitments to abide by contracts (as the fear of enforcement by itself often does not suffice to hold parties to contracts, the parties will find ways to circumvent or violate contracts when strong inducements arise). Similarly, democracy holds best if it has the rank of substantive value rather than only an instrumental standing."
Core Element #2 is the Constitution, because it defines where a community can define its own values, and where society at large (the community of communities) has agreed that shared values take precedence.
Core Element #3 is "Layered Loyalties" - "To maintain the proper equilibrium between the particularly constituting communities and the overarching framing community, layered loyalty must be fostered. This entails nurturing a split loyality, divided between commitment to one's immediate community and to the more encompassing community, and according priority to the overarching one on key select matters. This functional need is best served when members of any one community view themselves as part of an immediate community as well as of more encompassing wholes (containing communities other than one's own)." This is necessary to avoid excessive balkanization or tribalism within a society, which if taken too far can tear apart the whole society into its component communities.
Core Element #4 is to respect other traditions and cultures - which is obviously necessary to maintain the community of communities.
Core Element #5 is limiting identity politics - "a political culture that stresses differences and downplays commonalities. One particularly common form this has taken is defining people as if they had only one social status, as if they were members of only one community rather than multiple and overlapping and interlaced communities...This monolithic orientation plays down the fact that each person has multiple statuses ...And it plays down the fact that all are members of one society. This orientation, reflected in 'identity politics,' is reinforced when group differences are depicted as total and other groups are depicted as the enemy. Instead, group differences must be seen as differences among members of the same community that can and need to be worked out while maintaining the community, even if it needs to be deeply recast in the process."
The other two core elements are the "Megalogue" (society-wide discussion of moral issues to come to consensus between communities on the core values of the society), and the practice of reconciliation between communities.
Etzioni suggests policies that will promot societal bonds and shared values - not to abolish differences through assimilation, but to reinforce the framework that keeps the pieces together: restoring shared symbolic activities and enhancing commitment to them (like July 4); supporting public media (like PBS) as an important arena for unity-building as well as for megalogues; a limited, shared, society-wide curriculum for schools; a national service policy; etc.
"If one accepts that communities cannot serve as the ultimate arbiters of their values, it does not follow that one must replace intra-community normative procedures, processes, and criteria with unviersal rights that individuals bear and which effectively serve to make communities morally irrelevant. Communitarians can contextualize the community by framing the values it affirms within a higher order of legitimacy. That is, a community's particular normative commitments will take precedence so long as they do not violate another set of normative criteria, to which the said commitments are additionally accountable. For instance, a community's values may be judged as legitimate if they are supported by majority voting or because they carry the imprint of consensus-building within the given community - but only so long as they do not violate the next order of normative criteria."
"I canmnot stress enough between the concept of framing, whether by a constitution or by overarching social values ensconced in some other way, as compared to normative preempting. To frame a set of values means that the values that are being framed have a higher standing (or "trump") others, as long as their reach remains within given normative boundaries, that within this context the particular values are sufficiently accounted for. By contrast, preemption occurs when one set of 'universal' laws or values replaces other, often local, laws, customs, and traditions. This distinction is, in part, reflected in such legal and institutional concepts as the difference between Roman law and case law, the unitary state and federalism, and universalism and subsidiarity. (The layered communitarian position, previously introduced, is a normative expression of the framed, and not the preemptive, conception applied to the issues raised by diversity.)"
"...the United Nations Charter, international law, and various declarations - in which the globalists find the values they seek to build on - are not widely affirmed. This is largely the case becasue of the ways these documents have been formulated. Typically, they are neither the reflection of a truly democratic process in the international bodies or in the countries represented in them, nor do they reflect the result of a worldwide moral dialogue. Indeed, it often seems that various pronouncements of international bodies are tolerated by many nations precisely because it is known that these resolutions have little legal, political, or normative standing."
"The weakness of global claims for human rights cannot be overcome in a definitive way merely by redrafting the United Nations Charter, or by changing the voting patterns in the General Assembly, or by other such institutional reforms. Before we can expect to see global mores that have the compelling power of those of various societies, the citizens of the world will have to engage in worldwide moral dialogues. Technological developments have made such global megalogues possible. Indeed, there has been some progress in this direction, especially in matters concerning individual rights, the treatment of children, and above all the environment...But a worldwide community of communities, one that has core values that crown the edifice of normative accountability, is largely a gleam in the eyes of a small number of visionaries."
"To help nourish moral dialogues, communitarians need to favor moving in the opposite direction from the one cultural relativists have followed. Communitarians need to support the raising of moral voices cross-culturally, especially when they truly reflect the people of a society that is raising them. This is necessary in order to advance the articulation of a core - rather than a thing list - of globally shared values."
"Rather than muting the cross-cultural moral voice, as the cultural relativists do, all societies should respect the right of others to lay moral claims on them just as they are entitled to lay claims on other societies. Thus, the West should realize that it is well within its legitimate, world-community-building role when it criticizes China for its violation of human rights. And China should be viewed as equally legitimate when it criticizes American society for its neglect of filial duties."
In the communitarian view, values are valid if: 1) They are democratically reached by consensus in a community; 2) they comport with the values of the community of communities; and 3) they are morally compelling in and of themselves (this, of course, is somewhat vauge).