Abstract

In the Socially Responsive Self, Larry May aims “to defend a progressive communitarian conception of social and moral theory that cuts a path between the extremes of the atomism of liberalism and the collectivism of communitarianism”. He seeks to save an ethics of pluralism from itself. On the one hand, liberal ethical theory has stressed the fantasy of the autonomous moral self; yet the pluralism that liberalism protects and the conflicts concerning the good that liberalism induces are not only beneficial but necessary for the moral self to flourish. On the other hand, the communitarians possess the valid insight that the self is socially constructed; but, at the same time, they call for a moral homogeneity that threatens to suffocate the human spirit. Hence, May coins his perspective a “liberationist” or “progressive” communitarian ethics, in order to oppose it to the most harmful tendencies of both liberalism and communitarianism.