Abstract
A persistent motif in Charles Taylor’s oeuvre is the constitutive power of human languages. 1 In his engagement with the meaning-constituting power of language, Taylor invites us to consider whether we can find vocabularies to address the questions troubling us, as inhabitants of Western modernity: vocabularies that are not reductively naturalist and can potentially transform modernity’s “immanent frame” from within. 2 Taylor’s work shows the importance of reflection on meaning creation across a wide range of academic fields. It has also itself created meanings with the potential to transform vocabularies and expand the boundaries of the contemporary imagination (his concept of the “immanent frame” is one good example). In my own writings I have found his idea of “strong evaluation” particularly fruitful.
Taylor views (Western) modern selves as “strong evaluators,” persons who construct their identity in reflective engagement with a range of questions about the good. 3 As strong evaluators we are concerned not only with the question of who we are, but also who we want to be. To ask such questions is to position ourselves reflectively in relation to ideas of the good; “the good” is that which is picked out as comparably higher in a qualitative distinction and hence a “higher good.” 4
I see Taylor’s idea of “strong evaluation” as a productive starting point for re-thinking the concept of autonomy in the wake of Nietzsche, Foucault and the communitarian and feminist critiques of the 1980s and 1990s. 5 For, if developed in certain ways, it can accommodate the self-determining aspect of the concept of autonomy, while avoiding the unwelcome connotations of self-ownership and self-containment it has acquired in the course of Western modernity. My concern with autonomy is part of a broader concern to rethink the relationship between individual human freedom and political authority as it has been construed in liberal-democratic thinking. The concept of strong evaluation helps me to do so. I argue, however, that Taylor’s articulation of this idea requires development in three directions. 6 As it stands one significant shortcoming is its lack of an in-built intersubjective dimension. While Taylor acknowledges the modern self’s formation within webs of social relationships, 7 he does not build intersubjectivity into the very concept of strong evaluation. In addition, his account of the relation between truth and justification calls for further elaboration. His thoughts on the social and political conditions necessary to enable interaction between strong evaluators are also underdeveloped.
In my account, strong evaluators form their identities in engagement with other human subjects, who, too, must be strong evaluators. My argument for this starts with Taylor’s connection between strong evaluation and “higher goods.” However, it adds to this an idea of ethical truth that is dependent on deliberation with others. This enables me to show that strong evaluators can develop fully as such only in interaction with other strong evaluators.
While Taylor often grapples with the question of conflict between rival conceptions of the good, 8 he does not confront the question of how to assess claims to ethical truth. 9 I fill this gap by positing an idea of ethical validity that is at once context-transcending and justification-dependent. My contentions are, first: truth in the ethical sense transcends the justificatory practices of any human community, real or idealized; second: truth in the ethical sense is conceptually tied to social practices of open-ended, inclusive and fair argumentation; for this I offer an argument in terms of a relatively stable set of values shaping human identities in Western modernity. 10 This leads me to conclude – in the spirit of Taylor – that a constellation of ideas connecting truth conceptually to public justification is an important element in the formation of modern selves as strong evaluators and, by extension, autonomous agents.
To accommodate this aspect of strong evaluation, I introduce a second core element into my account of autonomy: rational accountability. By this I mean the human subject’s willingness and ability to take responsibility for her actions, judgments and self-interpretations in the sense of giving an account of them to others, when called upon to do so. Rational accountability is an interpretation of what it means for individual human subjects to be able to call reasons their own; this too is important for the self-determining aspect of autonomy. However, the emphasis shifts from ownership of reasons to responsibility for them: ethical reasons are not owned by individual human subjects, but owed to others. In my conception, moreover, ethical reasons are not guaranteed protection from the critical gaze of others, but rather open in principle to their critical judgments (since there may always be good reasons to refuse to open ethical views to critical interrogation).
In my account, therefore, the development of selves as strong evaluators calls for critical engagement with ideas of the good in interaction with others.
A further important implication of my connection between strong evaluation and rational accountability, together with my assertion that strong evaluation is oriented towards a justification-dependent idea of ethical truth, is that full development of the capacity for strong evaluation requires encounters between selves who recognize each other as strong evaluators. Otherwise, the preconditions for public justification would not be met. The modern ideal of public justification through the exchange of arguments demands that everyone participating in the process of deliberation is given an equal opportunity to contribute to the discussion and that their contributions are treated as equally important. This presupposes that everyone participating is acknowledged as a strong evaluator. I argue, therefore, that strong evaluation requires the kind of institutional framework that is provided only within democratic modernity, where there is formal legal-political recognition of the equal capacity for autonomy of all members of society. In other words, even institutions (such as the family) that are not political in the narrow sense depend for their functioning as autonomy-enabling institutions on the legal-political institutions of democratic modernity, which guarantee formal recognition of the equal capacity for autonomy of all citizens (broadly understood).
A further crucial part of my proposal ties strong evaluation, and, hence, individual autonomy, to active engagement in social life. The identities of modern selves are formed in webs of social relationships within multiple social institutions, understood in a general sense. Examples include schools, families, religious congregations, sports clubs, courts of justice, and parliaments. Social institutions share three features. First, they are human constructions, produced in complex ways by social interactions. Second, their identity is not reducible to the identities of their members. Third, they are incorporations of particular (often plural) ideas of the good. As such their identities are ethically inflected.
In addition to formal recognition, institutions must also substantively recognize their members as strong evaluators. By this I mean recognition of the importance of the substance of their particular ideas of the good. Put differently, institutions must be open to transformation in response to the ethically oriented challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges will be directed at some aspect of the institution’s ethically inflected identity: at its operation, its organization, or its guiding ideas of the good. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction, motivated by a concern to make the institution expressive of the good as its members conceive it. Since these conceptions of the good are often plural and sometimes conflicting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, each member of the institution, insofar as she is a strong evaluator, may see herself as involved in the construction of a common good that shapes the identity of the social institution in question.
In explicitly political contexts construction of the “common good” shapes the ethically inflected identity of an ensemble of legal-political institutions. My processual conception calls, to begin with, for a system of law that is constructed on an on-going basis by the members of the political association and guarantees their equal status as strong evaluators. More generally, it calls for modes of democratic engagement in which political authority is perpetually under construction by citizens and, thus, made by them rather than imposed on them.
Building on Taylor’s account of the modern self, I have sketched a picture of human subjects as strong evaluators, whose ethical identity is constituted in significant measure in interaction with other strong evaluators within social institutions, the ethical identity of which they help to construct. Thus, I see Taylor’s idea of strong evaluation, if suitably developed, as opening up a way of thinking about individual freedom in its relation to political authority that presents a challenge to the dominant liberal-democratic models.