Towards an Ethics of Community: Negotiations of Difference in a Pluralist Society

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Towards an Ethics of Community is the fruit of an interdisciplinary
research project on pluralism carried out at the Institute for Christian
Studies (ICS) in Toronto and funded in part by a three-year grant from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The nine
participants who contributed to this volume are current or former ICS
faculty and graduate students in philosophy, education, women’s
studies, theology and aesthetics. “The modern dilemma was centre and
margin; the pluralist dilemma is centres and margins,” writes Olthuis.
“The dominant issue on every level ... is the negotiation of covenants
which honour difference as they avoid paralysing fragmentation or
anarchic splintering.” This volume seeks to explore that issue.

Any of the 10 major chapters could be read as an independent piece, and
many readers will be tempted to do so with the chapters (3 through 9)
that deal with some of the hot-button topics of the moment: ideology in
education, feminism, homosexuality, family relationships and values,
female genital mutilation, Native self-government. However, such a
selective reading would ignore the value of seeing the project as a
whole, and would miss the most challenging of the papers, Hendrik
Hart’s “Consequences of Liberalism: Ideological Domination in
Rorty’s Private/Public Split.”

Hart’s paper confronts a philosophical cornerstone of our current
liberal society—the privatization of that which motivates people and
shapes their values, whether it is called worldview, religion,
metaphysics, or ideology. “False privatization of commitments leads to
false neutralization of public opinion.” As a result, we fail to
notice that “deepest commitments kept private are like the prejudices
rationalism once claimed it did not have: they do their public work in
secret.” Only by giving public voice to private commitments can
motivations be openly stated, challenged, and debated, and differences
truly honored in a democratic society. After all, “the public is
entitled to know what deeply moves people in arriving at the positions
they hold,” particularly when those positions are proposed for
adoption as public policy.