The aim of this paper is to propose a model for understanding the relation between substance and procedure in discourse ethics and deliberative democracy capable of answering the common charge that they involve an ‘empty formalism’. The expressive-elaboration model introduced here answers this concern by arguing that the deliberative practical rationality presupposed by discourse ethics and deliberative democracy involves the creation of a practical medium in which certain general basic ideas of solidarity, equality and freedom are expressed and elaborated in (...) the context of widespread moral disagreement. In the course of this paper I propose an elucidation of these ideas and argue for the thesis that they are internally related to the endorsement of deliberative practical rationality. The three basic substantive ideas contribute to the determination of the existence, the form, the topics and intended outcomes, and the effects of the practice of public deliberation. This amounts to an elucidatory defense of deliberative practical rationality by explicating its substantive significance or point. Key Words: critical theory • deliberative democracy • discourse ethics • equality • freedom • Jürgen Habermas • practical reason • John Rawls • solidarity • substance and procedure. (shrink)

Against the view that the physical sciences should be the privileged source of reliable knowledge within the academy in general, and in philosophy in particular, this essay argues that an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge-production, one that includes social and psychological assessment as well as narrative analysis, can better capture the diverse range of human epistemic activities as they occur in their natural settings. Postpositivist epistemologies, including Lorraine Code's social naturalism, Satya Mohanty's and Paula Moya's postpositivist literary and pedagogical projects, and (...) Linda Alcoff's dialogical template for knowledge form the basis of a revised naturalized epistemology that is more accountable to a socially engaged inquiry. This revised naturalism shifts orientation from the idealized setting of the laboratory and its a priori conditions for knowledge to localized settings, where knowledge emerges out of diverse contextualized interpretations of the natural and social world that interlocutors produce as they dialogue with one another. Mayra Montero's neocolonial narrative thematizes the spatial shift of scientific activity, showing how epistemic authority, aligned with North American interests and regional identity, is established, withheld from others, and contested. (shrink)

This article endeavors to draw out and explicate some of the normative tensions that animate the imaginary and practice of solidarity. It begins by examining the account of solidarity set forth in the writings of Jürgen Habermas. It then considers Axel Honneth’s recognition-theoretic conception of the solidaristic attitude. While remaining sympathetic to the left-Hegelian intersubjectivism of Habermas’ discourse-ethic, Honneth seeks to redress the “cognitive-centric” limitations of the latter thinker’s conception of solidarity. In this context, particular emphasis is placed on Honneth’s (...) engagement with the idea of Sittlichkeit, or shared form of ethical life, discussed in Hegel’s early “Jena period” work, as well as in his later Elements of the Philosophy of Right. To Honneth, while these writings can contribute significantly to a recognition-theoretic understanding of solidarity, they must be distinguished from the philosophy of consciousness that circumscribes the famous recognition struggle between master and slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, the paper questions the capacity of Honneth’s approach to criticize ideological forms of solidaristic recognition, offering a qualified defense of Habermas’ contravening perspective. (shrink)

If social critique is to play a role in broad social transformation, then it must be able to engage with the terms that people use to understand their lives. This essay argues that we can find an important model for performing social critique in the quite different work of Jeffrey Stout and Judith Butler. For both, social critique must be immanent and it must make explicit the character of the norms by which people currently live. This model is especially important (...) in a situation where various moral and cultural traditions are confronting one another, and where it is necessary to work towards shared social and political goals. Stout and Butler present a method for achieving one's political goals by engaging with others on terms that they would recognize and seeking to transform the political structures they inhabit. Furthermore, their approaches provide helpful insights for further reflection on the critical possibilities in current ethnographic work. (shrink)

To respond to the charge of context-insensitivity, discourse ethics distinguishes justification discourses, which only require that we consider what is equally good for all, and subsequent application discourses, in which the perspective of concrete others must be adopted. This article argues that, despite its pragmatic attractiveness, the separation of justification and application neglects the co-constitutive role that applicability plays for the meaning of normativity. Norms that do not, in a machine-like fashion, produce their cases, cannot already contain their appropriateness to (...) the cases that nonetheless alone justify the existence of norms in th first place. The higher-order norm of appropriateness that enters normativity with th dependence on applications is one that remains implicit, and impossible to determine in advance. Thus, the justification of a norm is always incomplete for conceptual and not merely empirical reasons, as fallibilism typically has it. (shrink)

How can free and equal people cooperate to solve conflicts and common problems in a rational and legitimate way? In this article I deduce principles for doing so from the requirements of rational communication set out in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. I apply them in defining a process of efficient decision making. What I call ‘communicative design’ denotes the design of a reason giving process in which the practice of proposing and assessing claims with regard to rulemaking and (...) problem solving is undertaken on an equal and autonomous basis. Two sets of prescriptions are given: organisational principles for the composition of groups and argumentative principles for deliberation. However, any procedure aimed at achieving a rational consensus in decision making in organisations has to deal in practice with limitations of time, participation and the information available. Communicative design may not guarantee strictly rational decisions, then, but the procedure it constructs does promise relatively ‘more valid’ decisions than might be expected if another procedure had been adopted. (shrink)

This article explores the contribution of the virtue of integrity to the concept of mature care. The virtue of integrity is understood as both a personal and a social virtue. The argument is that the virtue of integrity is a necessary condition for providing mature care. An example from a psychiatric acute ward illustrates that a nurse acting with the virtue of integrity displays clear self‐boundaries and self‐respect as well as respect towards the inherent integrity of the patient. The article (...) also addresses some problems related to lack of the virtue of integrity by discussing the problems connected to detachment and rigidity. (shrink)

The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder’s anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the (...) usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. But a comparison with a central Enlightenment figure like the natural historian Buffon (1708-88) reveals shared anthropological assumptions: human beings are characterized by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Herder’s critique of progress is thus an unstable one: culture [Kultur] as the process through which humanity develops can also be called Enlightenment [Aufklärung]. Herder’s definition of culture is much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilization than is frequently suggested. Herder’s relativism is thus open to question: he holds on to certain universal criteria for transcultural judgements. This reassessment of Herder’s place in Enlightenment anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernization and globalization on the other. (shrink)

In May 2017, yet another South African university became a site of hate speech. Three students chose to display Nazi-inspired posters, which advertised an ‘Anglo-Afrikaner student’ event, under the motto ‘Fight for Stellenbosch’. That the posters provoked the response which it so obviously sought, was evident in the student outrage, and the swift condemnation from university management. Neither the prevalence of hate speech, nor its predictable responses, is new. The central concern of this article is to consider the extent to (...) which tolerance can offer a plausible response to hate speech. The questions which arise, however, are: Does the right to divergent viewpoints hold the same legitimacy as antagonistic ones? When is the boundary between legitimate and hate speech breached? Does a democracy imply the tolerance of all forms of speech? Or, are there limits to the forms of speech that a democracy ought to tolerate? (shrink)

The ‘consensus’ model of public reason, associated with John Rawls’s political liberalism, has been criticised for excluding certain reasons from receiving consideration where the justification of the constitutional essentials is concerned. One limitation of these criticisms is that they typically focus on the exclusion of reasons political liberals are committed to excluding, notably reasons based on religious and comprehensive views. I argue that public reason excludes some reasons, central to the interests of many oppressed groups, that public reason advocates will (...) agree should not be excluded.L’idée de raison publique comme «consensus», associée au libéralisme politique de John Rawls, a été attaquée du fait de sa supposée incapacité à permettre la prise en compte de certaines raisons dans les cas où la substance même de la constitution est en question. Une limitation de ces critiques est qu’elles se concentrent habituellement sur l’exclusion de ces raisons que les libéraux eux-mêmes s’efforcent d’exclure, en particulier des raisons fondées sur des vues globales ou religieuses. Je défends l’idée selon laquelle la raison publique exclut de fait certaines raisons, essentielles aux intérêts de nombreux groupes opprimés, que les tenants de la raison publique eux-mêmes considèreraient ne pas devoir être exclues. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy harbors a recurrent tension between full inclusion and intelligible speech. People with profound cognitive disabilities often signify this tension. While liberal deliberative theorists sacrifice inclusion for intelligibility, this exclusion is unnecessary. Instead, by analyzing deliberative locations that already include people with disabilities, I offer two ways to revise deliberative norms. First, the physical presence of disabled bodies expands the value of publicity in deliberative democracy, demonstrating that the publicity of bodies provokes new conversations similar to rational speech acts. (...) Second, the inclusion of people with profound disabilities necessitates a form of collaborative speech in which individuals make claims collaboratively. Habermas offers an ideal site to pursue this analysis because he recognizes the theoretical tension between inclusion and intelligibility and because his personal testimony reveals important insight into the lived experience of disability. (shrink)

"In this paper I am arguing for hermeneutic responsibility in political judgment, as it can be attributed to Arendt’s work. Political judgment is reflective judgment relying on representation by imagination and therefore only has exemplary validity. Along the line of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy I point out her argument for a different generality in politics than the generality of concepts. This generality of political judgment always refers back to the particular. Only by this reference to the particular, namely (...) to facts and situations of direct interaction, can the spectator, who undertakes the political judgment, create the public realm where action takes place. However, this task attributed to the spectator also implies the task of reshaping the public realm. These acts of giving an account of and reconsidering all over again facts handed over by narration and testimony imply the hermeneutic responsibility to unceasingly retrieve factual truth which is rooted in direct interaction. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, factual truth, reproductive imagination, political judgment, hermeneutic responsibility. ". (shrink)

Utilitarianism has dominated media ethics for a century. For Mill, individual autonomy and neutrality are the foundations of his On Liberty and System of Logic, as well as his Utilitarianism. These concepts fit naturally with media ethics theory and professional practice in a democratic society. However, the weaknesses in utilitarianism articulated by Ross and others direct us at this stage to a dialogic ethics of duty instead. Habermas's discourse ethics, feminist ethics, and communitarian ethics are examples of duty ethics rooted (...) in the dialogic relation that enable us to start over intellectually. (shrink)

Reviewing "The Ethics of Gender, Feminism and Christian Ethics," and "The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology," the author suggests that Susan Parsons responds to questions postmodernism has posed to both feminism and Christian ethics by using insights gained from various accounts of the moral subject found in feminist philosophy, ethics, and theology. Hesitant to embrace postmodernism's critique of the possibility of ethics, Parsons redefines ethics by establishing a moral point of view within discursive communities. Yet in her brief treatment of (...) Emmanuel Levinas, Parsons does not explore the postmodern option he offers feminists: an understanding of moral responsibility that can be critical of ethics. Parsons also ignores some feminist perspectives in the physical and natural sciences, thereby missing valuable insights of feminists who insist upon the materiality of the body. (shrink)

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that (...) it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser. Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation. (shrink)

This article argues that people have legitimate interests in privacy that deserve legal protection on democratic principles. It describes the right to privacy as a bundle of rights of personal choice, association and expression and shows that, so described, people have legitimate political interests in privacy. These interests reflect the ways that privacy rights can supplement the protection for people's freedom and equality provided by rights of political choice, association and expression, and can help to make sure that these are, (...) genuinely, democratic. Feminists have often been ambivalent about legal protection for privacy, because privacy rights have, so often, protected the coercion and exploitation of women, and made it difficult to politicise personal forms of injustice. However, attention to the differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of politics can enable us to meet these concerns, and to distinguish a democratic justification of privacy rights from the alternatives. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms, as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

This article examines the confluence of extractivism, violence, and their resistance in the context of left governance – specifically the case of Ecuador – through an engagement with the concept of populism. Alongside Bolivia and Venezuela, Ecuador has long been associated with the rise of radical populism and with it an ‘autocratic turn’ in Latin America. Dispensing with overdetermined accounts of populism as either the anti-thesis or essence of democracy, this article proposes a third lens – dual populisms – to (...) better grapple with the neocolonial turn toward intensified natural resource extraction and violence. That this intensification took place in the context of a left-in-power in Ecuador was initially surprising given previous alliances between President Correa’s party and Indigenous and environmental movements, and its rejection of capitalist and neoliberal developmentalism. With the expansion of extractive industries, and its accompanying violence increasingly becoming a global phenomenon, dual populism posits a third position – one that is at once top-down, state centered, and also bottom-up and social movement focused – to better account for the complex dynamics at work within this turn. (shrink)

Medical practitioners have traditionally seen themselves as part of an international community with shared and unifying scientific and ethical goals in the treatment of disease, the promotion of health, and the protection of life. This shared mission is underpinned by explicit acceptance of traditional concepts of medical morality, and by an implied link between individual human rights and the ethics of medical practice long enshrined in a range of World Medical Association (WMA) and other medical codes. These have been powerful (...) instruments exhorting individual practitioners to promote health and to defend universal principles in order to protect their patients and the physician-patient relationship even in the face of authoritarian state coercion and imposed national ideologies and policies. There has been widespread support for this approach and this should be intensified. (shrink)

Discussions focusing on the relation between city and sexuality are rare in social and cultural studies. In this article I argue that the modern city is inherently and inevitably sexualized, and that modern sexuality is largely an urban one. The characteristics of this sexuality are described and discussed in the light of urban life world theory (Simmel, Wirth, Kracauer, Benjamin etc.), sexual constructionist theory, feminist analyses, gay studies and pornography. The particular quality of `sexuality' in urban sexualization is identified along (...) Heideggerian lines as a fundamental ` Gestimmtheit' (`being tuned') of modern being-in-the-world, that is of being-in-the-city. In conclusion, some implications of the intimate relation between city and sexuality are discussed. Thus, theories of everyday life and life world, as well as prevailing idioms of modernist and postmodernist cultural critique, are problematized. Throughout the article, the style and methods of the exposition comment on the problematics concerning the representation of sexuality; and trends towards a `discoursification' of sexuality are criticized. (shrink)

. In this paper the nature and the role of Rawls's idea of a “free public reason” are examined with an emphasis on the divide between the private and the public spheres, a divide which is the hallmark of a liberal democracy. Criticisms from both the so‐called Continental tradition and the Communitarian opponents to liberalism insist on the ineffectiveness of such a conception, on its inability to establish a political consensus on democracy. But it would be a mistake to see (...) a contractarian theory of justice, such as Rawls's justice as fairness, as grounding the social contract in a public use of reason. Such a contract would indeed be susceptible to endless conflicts and renegotiations and would never achieve consensus. Therefore, a distinction must be made between the values of justice that are present in and through the “original” contractual position and the that regulate the public sphere and guarantee its stability. (shrink)

Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement. We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provides a (...) different sort of baseline for understanding how obedience to arbitrary requirements could, in principle, be rational. (shrink)

The challenges posed by postmodern and poststructural theories profoundly disrupt the certainties of feminist and nursing research, yet at the same time offer possibilities for developing new epistemologies. While there are an increasing number of accounts discussing the theoretical implications of these ideas for nursing research, I wish to discuss the practical and the methodological implications of using postmodern feminist theories within empirical research. In particular, I identify the challenges I encountered through an examination of specific aspects of the research (...) process and through examples drawn from empirical research. I conclude that using postmodern feminist theories requires a continuous engagement with, and interrogation of, the modern epistemological and ontological assumptions of qualitative, feminist nursing research and, in so doing, presents the possibility for nurse scholars to begin to develop a ‘passionately interested’ methodological approach to nursing inquiry. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 5, Page 703-725, June 2022. In this article, I argue that Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction faces limitations when it comes to analysing newly emerging and contested political practices. As rational reconstruction aims to criticize existing practices by determining their normative meaning as reflected in the participants’ idealizing presuppositions, it reaches its limits where emerging and contested practices make it impossible to identify a shared self-understanding and a single participants’ perspective. Using the example (...) of membership politics, I argue that this is often the case where nationally constituted forms of politics become controversial or are fundamentally questioned. Building on the work of Benhabib and Fraser, I develop an alternative reconstructive method of plural reconstruction, which modifies the basic premises of rational reconstruction, adjusting it to emerging and contested political contexts. (shrink)

It is often argued that Michael Walzer’s theory of social criticism, which underpins his theory of justice, is not much of a theory at all, but rather an impressionistic collection of historical anecdotes. Contrary to this perception, I argue that Walzer’s method can be accurately described as a version of John Rawls’ well-known method of wide reflective equilibrium. Through a systematic comparison it can be shown that the two methods are strikingly similar. This implies that, far from the critics’ claim, (...) Walzer’s method can be described as a philosophically sophisticated method. This also adds credibility to Walzer’s views on politics and justice. (shrink)

This essay attempts to confront one of the major problems associated with multiculturalism, namely the hostile divisiveness stemming from newly articulated constructs of difference. Synthesizing hermeneutic concepts derived from Gadamer and Rorty, I develop an approach called xenologica which, unlike the problematic universalism associated with the Enlightenment, values difference but, at the same time, promotes mutual recognition, tolerance and solidarity. Xenologica, for illustrative purposes, is applied to one of the most contentious domains of difference, race, with the aim of overcoming (...) some of the theoretical and practical limitations of classic antiracism. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to preserve the central tenets of a global moral theory called “the capabilities approach” as defended by Martha Nussbaum, but to do so in a way that better realizes its own goals of identifying gender injustices and gaining cross-cultural support by providing an alternative defense of it. Capabilities assess an individual’s well-being based on what she is able to do (actions) and who she is able to be (states of existence). Nussbaum grounds her theory in the intuitive (...) idea that each and every person is worthy of equal respect and dignity. The problem with grounding a theory in a version of intuitionism is that it runs the risk of authoritarian moral reasoning. I argue Nussbaum, in fact, is the final arbiter who decides which intuitions are mistaken, which are not, and how to interpret what people say to fit into her own framework. This method of justifying capabilities is most problematic in cases of social inequality whereby dominant group members do not feel they need to check their intuitions against non-dominant group members, and even if they did, they are not forced to take the non-dominant group’s intuitions seriously. I find capabilities as a global moral theory to be very promising, and I agree with Nussbaum that a list of capabilities is beneficial for identifying people who are not able to live a truly dignified human life. However, I am also sympathetic to the criticism of defending capabilities using a version of intuitionism. So, I offer an alternative method of justifying the capabilities rooted in the discourse ethics tradition. This method seeks all persons that are affected by the outcome to freely and equally share their opinion. This avoids the charge of authoritarian moral reasoning, because (1) it seeks perspectives other than simply one’s own, but unlike traditional ethics, it (2) pays special attention to the ways in which power relations shape dialogue. Ultimately, I hope to have preserved the central tenets of the capabilities approach while better realizing Nussbaum’s commitment to defending a theory that is gender sensitive and has gained cross-cultural support. (shrink)