"To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice"
About this Quote
Palmer’s sentence is doing more than summarizing communitarian theory; it’s staging a pressure test for liberalism. The key move is in the verb “constituted.” If personhood is built out of “particular obligations” - family, faith, nation, community - then the self isn’t a free agent who later opts into duties. The self arrives already entangled. That framing quietly downgrades consent from moral trump card to afterthought.
The line “To repeat” signals he’s in the middle of an argument, likely answering an opponent who keeps sliding back to choice as the baseline. Repetition becomes rhetorical insistence: stop pretending obligations are contracts. And “cannot be a matter of choice” is intentionally categorical. Not “often aren’t,” not “shouldn’t always be.” “Cannot.” Palmer is capturing the communitarian claim at its most uncompromising, which suggests he may be setting it up for critique - communitarianism as a philosophy that risks hardening social inheritance into moral destiny.
Subtext: if obligations are non-optional, then dissent looks like betrayal rather than disagreement. The politics that follow are predictable: heavier emphasis on tradition, social cohesion, and “responsibility,” lighter emphasis on exit rights, autonomy, and individual revision of inherited roles. Put in contemporary terms, it’s the philosophical backbone of arguments that tell you you don’t get to “choose” your way out of being a son, a citizen, a member of a moral community.
The context is a long-running late-20th-century debate (Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor versus liberal individualists) about whether the self is prior to its ends, or authored by them. Palmer’s phrasing distills the communitarian wager - and hints at its danger.
The line “To repeat” signals he’s in the middle of an argument, likely answering an opponent who keeps sliding back to choice as the baseline. Repetition becomes rhetorical insistence: stop pretending obligations are contracts. And “cannot be a matter of choice” is intentionally categorical. Not “often aren’t,” not “shouldn’t always be.” “Cannot.” Palmer is capturing the communitarian claim at its most uncompromising, which suggests he may be setting it up for critique - communitarianism as a philosophy that risks hardening social inheritance into moral destiny.
Subtext: if obligations are non-optional, then dissent looks like betrayal rather than disagreement. The politics that follow are predictable: heavier emphasis on tradition, social cohesion, and “responsibility,” lighter emphasis on exit rights, autonomy, and individual revision of inherited roles. Put in contemporary terms, it’s the philosophical backbone of arguments that tell you you don’t get to “choose” your way out of being a son, a citizen, a member of a moral community.
The context is a long-running late-20th-century debate (Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor versus liberal individualists) about whether the self is prior to its ends, or authored by them. Palmer’s phrasing distills the communitarian wager - and hints at its danger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Tom
Add to List
