—Clarence Jenson Network, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1976

—J. M. Keynes

From Plato onward, western moral and political philosophy has been dominated by a monist impulse manifest in a search for the best way of life, the best form of government, the perfect society, the highest human faculty, the highest or the best religion, the single most reliable way to acquire knowledge of the world, and so on. In ethics it has taken the form of moral monism or the view that one way of life can be rationally shown to be the highest or truly human. This view has commanded the allegiance of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Mill, Marx, and others. Because monism despises neglected human faculties, virtues, and ways of life and has been a source of much violence and oppression, we cannot hope to provide a coherent theory of human liberation and freedom without developing a coherent theory of moral and cultural pluralism. Although moral monism was challenged from the very beginning by the Sophists, the skeptics, and others, a systematic critique of it was not mounted until the eighteenth century by such writers as Vico, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Herder, and others, who stressed the inevitability and even the desirability of cultural diversity.

This is the judgement passed by Professor Bhikhu Parekh in his 1994 essay “Decolonizing Liberalism.” His deference to John Stuart Mill is shown in his making Mill not one of the exceptions, but rather the central object of attack. It would seem indeed that if the charges can be made good against Mill they will hold against nineteenth-century liberalism in general, and perhaps in some degree against twenty-first-century liberalism.

Simple piety moves me to offer some defence of Mill's own good judgement, particularly in relation to India. But, in dealing with a phenomenon like liberalism, we need always to maintain a distinction which tends to blur. Doctrines and assertions are one thing. Historical movements and trends in a society are another.

Immanuel Kant was an early and influential theorist on race. What place a theory of race could have within his system is, however, far from clear. Empirical knowledge about human diversity seems not to be the kind of thing that may find its way into morally acceptable maxims. Kant's understanding of the a priori nature of the moral seems to prevent any account or theory of human difference from leading to prejudice or discrimination. On the other hand, Kant defends race it-self as an a priori concept, and the specific content of his anthropology seems to justify the exclusion of non-whites from moral concern in a new and dangerous way.

The notion of time seems to be politically quite neutral, merely a concept of something that exists in much the same way that the weather exists. We can, of course, adopt different attitudes to the weather, but there does not seem to be any great political relevance in those attitudes. Yet when one thinks about the nature of time it is clear that attitudes to it are important socially. If one experiences time as a container that inexorably directs our lives in particular ways, because we are in it, we shall place little reliance on our individual efforts to accomplish anything that runs contrary to what is often called the “river of time.” What are often called pre-modem attitudes to time are taken to be characterized in this way, where agents were ultimately pessimistic of their ability to do anything really different. In the words of Kohelet in the Bible, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes1:9). That is taken to mean that there is pattern to what takes place in our world, and that pattern is beyond the power of human beings to alter.

The history of Western liberal capitalist society, viewed from the perspective of the growth of democracy, is contradictory. Although the idea of negative liberty at the basis of democracies of the liberal type secured citizens against arbitrary encroachments from the state, at the same time, by securing the rights of property first and foremost, it exposed those same citizens to the more insidious and all-determining undemocratic forces of the capitalist market. The history of liberal democracy thus created the conditions for the flourishing of genuine individuality in a democratic polity at the same time as it undermined those conditions by subjecting all need fulfillment (through which individuality is developed) to market forces. Until the fragmentation of radical movements occasioned by the upheavals of the 1960s, radical theory and practice was minimally unified around the critique of the contradiction between democracy and market forces at the core of liberal society. The fundamental principle of this critique stated that democratic society could flourish if and only if need satisfaction was freed from its subordination to money demand.

Contending views of social justice often confront each other over claims about basic rights. In this paper I will begin with a familiar dispute of this kind, the crux of which proves to be the distribution of economic benefits and burdens. I will argue that it is is indeed illuminating to consider basic rights, and important in particular to examine an especially fundamental set of rights, namely, those that attach to the moral relationships that define the moral community. The blocking of these rights is a moral concern in itself and also often underlies more obvious social and economic inequalities. By considering this set of rights, we can uncover an unsuspected kind of justice which makes moral demands independently of a concern for distributive justice.

There is a longstanding and influential tradition of claiming that the duties of justice are solely “negative” duties. On this view the concerns of justice are concerns about “negative rights” of an especially basic kind, usually subsumed under the heading of “individual freedom.” Justice consists in our “not interfering with” these basic negative rights.

We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed.

— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock

To begin, what I hope will be a surprise: in what follows, I will not be talking (much) about sex and its societal vicissitudes. A surprise because the linkage of Freud's name with the theme ‘civilization and oppression’ will immediately suggest to many a discussion of Freud's theories in Civilization and Its Discontents. It is there that Freud famously argues that civilization, necessary for security in the fulfilment of basic sexual instincts, is made possible only by the restriction of expression of those very same instincts. Worse, the erotic impulse that drives individuals together into community can achieve this limited (“aim-inhibited” — i.e., anti-incestuous, monandrous, monogamous, heterosexual, family-oriented) satisfaction only if the other set of basic human instincts — toward aggression — is also severely inhibited. Civilization's frustration of sexuality is experienced in individuals as neurosis, and its repression of instinctual aggression is achieved by turning the instinct inward, back on its source, in the form of guilt, anxiety, an excoriating conscience, a punishing super-ego.

Philosophers have regarded memory of the events of one's own past, which I will call experiential memory, as importantly personal and have written with conviction about the value of personal memory. Annette Baier writes: “Out of a large range of acts, attitudes, and postures … intending and remembering have a central role to play in any adequate philosophy of mind …. Both intentions and memories are, in a special way, personal.” Mary Warnock writes that while all creatures learn from experience and thus have memory, “[h]umans have another capacity which is to reflect on their lives and histories. This is the kind of memory that must be thought of as mental, not physical, for it must be experienced, and experienced privately within the mind of each one of us. I cannot have your memory.”

In a tradition of theorizing about memory deriving from Locke, we value experiential memory as fundamental to developing a sense of self as unified and continuous and to developing moral capacities for accountability and self-knowledge. What I find particularly interesting in Warnock's description of memory is the forceful linking of value to uniqueness through reference to what cannot be shared.