Abstract

This paper considers the character of moral peoplehood, our life as a people, and the rules and principles through which that life is expressed. In so far as those rules and principles take legal form, as determining the ground rules of association and denoting political rights and duties, this moral community is also a jural community. The paper engages with Bernard Williams’s thought with a view to resolving the tension between two conceptions of the constitution that differ in their account of the relationship between norms and time. Williams offers the prospect of a non-Kantian liberalism that grows out of the habits and minds of persons but which does not collapse into relativism. I argue that Williams’s account of moral personhood devotes insufficient attention to the dynamics of moral deliberation, essential to the growth of personhood. I argue that Williams’s account of moral peoplehood is similarly deficient in that it overlooks the role constitutional deliberation plays in constructing the jural community. Plural politics requires accepted ground rules and the sense that we are a unity of plural associates, and this is what constitutional deliberation aims to provide.

Highlights

  • The concept of constitution presupposes the idea of moral peoplehood

  • I suggested earlier that the jural community belongs to the category of associations that take the form of contrastive sense of ‘we’ across time, central to that category being the distinction between those inside the narrative and those outside it, protagonists and others

  • I suggested that the jural community is distinguished by the legal ties that are taken to constitute the association and that carry structuring rules and normative elements, a basic script of rights and duties, from the association’s past through its present into its future

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Summary

Introduction

The concept of constitution presupposes the idea of moral peoplehood. The very idea of organising political life, our life as a people, within the terms of a more or less settled, more or less agreed-upon framework of institutions, practices and rules depends, that is, on the existence of an association of a certain character. The main problem with the argument, as I interpret it, is that it does not really fit what I take to be Williams’s general story about the normative development of political associations, which is genealogical, something that takes place across time.

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