Private Individuality Conception

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Private individuality conceptions offer a different account of the privileged class of common interests. According to these views, members of a political community have a relational obligation to care about their common interest in being able to lead lives as private individuals. Citizens each have an interest in being able to shape their lives through their own private choices about what activities to pursue and what associations to form. Choices are “private” in the relevant sense when citizens are not required to consult with anyone in making these choices and they are not required to reach a decision through any form of shared deliberation.[15] Among the philosophers who endorse this kind of view are many important thinkers in the liberal …show more content…

On Rawls’s view, members of a political community have a relational obligation to care for the interests attached to the “position of equal citizenship” which all citizens share (1971 [1999: 82–83]). These interests are (a) the interest in a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties and (b) the interest in a fair opportunity to reach the more attractive positions in society. Rawls uses the term “the common good” to refer to the sum total of social conditions that answer to the interests attached to the position of equal citizenship (1971 [1999: 217]). Understood in this way, the common good consists, inter alia, of: a legal order that provides citizens with the liberty of expression, the liberty of conscience and the other liberal freedoms; a democratic system of government that provides citizens with political liberties, such as the liberty to vote, hold office and participate in collective rule-making; a system of courts to enforce the rule of law; as well as police protection and national defense to protect the basic liberties. The common good also consists of legal protections for free choice of occupation; mass media mechanisms that gather and disperse information about job possibilities; a transportation system to give people access to work; and a system of education (whether public or private) that ensures conditions in which people with similar talents and motivations have similar prospects, regardless of their class or family

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