In this article I argue that Jürgen Habermas’ notion of morality (moral norms) has more in common with Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’ as a ‘ sittlich ’ relation – understood as a socially integrative force – rather than Kant’s supreme principle of personal morality. I show that Habermas and Hegel, each in his own way, make a distinction between morality and ethics. However, I make the case that Habermas’ conception of ‘morality’ incorporates aspects of Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’, (...) while Habermas’ conception of ‘ethical’ – referring to individual and group conceptions of the good life – is a remedy to the shortcomings in Hegel’s overly unified ethical life. I offer an alternative reading of Habermas’ principle of morality, which I suggest should be read as his attempt to provide a binding process to set up the norms that ought to condition a modern political community understood as a civil association. (shrink)

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)

Public deliberation has been defended as a rational and noncoercive way to overcome paradoxical results from democratic voting, by promoting consensus on the available alternatives on the political agenda. Some critics have argued that full consensus is too demanding and inimical to pluralism and have pointed out that single-peakedness, a much less stringent condition, is sufficient to overcome voting paradoxes. According to these accounts, deliberation can induce single-peakedness through the creation of a ‘meta-agreement’, that is, agreement on the dimension according (...) to which the issues at stake are ‘conceptualized’. We argue here that once all the conditions needed for deliberation to bring about single-peakedness through meta-agreement are unpacked and made explicit, meta-agreement turns out to be a highly demanding condition, and one that is very inhospitable to pluralism. (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)

Using the example of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and especially the writings of Sayyid Qutb, this article raises questions about discourse ethics as a mode of conflict resolution. It appears that discourse ethics is only relevant when all parties have already agreed to settle disputes deliberatively and already share the notions of rational deliberation and individual autonomy. This raises questions not only about the capability of discourse ethics to incorporate a deep plurality of worldviews, but also about its capability to successfully (...) solve disputes. When confronting situations where the willingness to deliberate is absent, discourse ethics is left standing empty handed. This, I argue, is due to both the conceptual distinction between communicative action and strategic action, as well as the abstracted nature of Habermas's discourse ethics. (shrink)

This article examines the moral, political and pedagogical tensions that are created from the entanglement of patriotism and human rights, and sketches a response to these tensions in the context of critical education. The article begins with a brief review of different forms of patriotism, especially as those relate to human rights, and explains why some of these forms may be morally or politically valuable. Then, it offers a brief overview of human rights critiques, especially from the perspectives of Foucault, (...) critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, and emphasizes that foundationalist perspectives of human rights need to be constantly contested. The next part of the article discusses how to overcome issues of incompatibility between patriotism and human rights. The final part proposes that a ‘rapprochement’ between patriotism and human rights in the context of critical education has to take into consideration that patriotic feelings (as a form of love for one’s country) constitute a particular form of ‘emotional education’. As such, the teaching of both patriotism and human rights would benefit from the notion of ‘critical pedagogies of emotion’ that interrogates the emotional commitments of patriotism and human rights and the consequences of these commitments. (shrink)

Since its inception, Stakeholder Management Capability (SMC) has constituted a powerful hermeneutic through which business organizations have understood and leveraged stakeholder relationships. On this model, achieving a high level of capability largely depends on managerial ability to effectively bargain with stakeholders and establish solidarity vis-à-vis the successful negotiation, implementation, and execution of "win–win" transactional exchanges. Against this account, it is rightly pointed out that a transactional explanation of stakeholder relationships, regarded by many as the bottom line for stakeholder management, fails (...) to provide managerial direction regarding how to resolve a variety of normative stakeholder claims that resist commoditization. In response to this issue, this paper has two overlapping goals. It seeks to elaborate a discourse theoretical approach to the problem by first drawing out Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and delineating the various types of rational discourse. Second, the paper attempts to present concrete implications for SMC relative to reshaping the contours of rational, process, and transactional analysis in light of central discourse theoretical conclusions. (shrink)

Cet article examine la place du concept d’impartialité dans les théories délibératives de la démocratie. C’est à partir de certaines critiques féministes que sont discutés deux défis lancés à la théorie délibérative et qui sont étroitement liés : le premier porte essentiellement sur le critère du raisonnable et l’idée d’offre de raisons ; le second concerne les circonstances sociales et politiques contingentes dans lesquelles les perspectives des groupes marginalisés peuvent influencer le jugement des autres citoyens. Certains des changements qui devraient (...) être apportés à la théorie délibérative afin qu’elle puisse tenir compte de ces préoccupations sont ensuite proposés. Finalement, les implications de tels changements pour nos notions plus générales de vertu et de responsabilité de la citoyenneté sont examinées.This article examines the place of the concept of impartiality in theories of deliberative democracy. Drawing on and extending recent feminist critiques of deliberative democracy, it explores two interrelated challenges to deliberative theory, one focused on the standard of reasonableness and the idea of reason-giving and the other on the contingent social and political circumstances under which marginalized-groups perspectives may sway the judgment of other citizens. Finally, some of the changes required of deliberative theory to address these concerns are discussed, and the implications of these changes for our more general notions of the virtues and responsibilities of citizenship are explored. (shrink)

This essay develops the idea that Analytic and Continental orientations to political theory are best comprehended not as mortal enemies, but rather as alternative lenses that, together, allow us to better perceive a broader range of significant aspects of political life than is possible by adhering to only one of these approaches. This claim is fleshed out by an analysis of the communicative action paradigm developed by Jürgen Habermas. If this paradigm is revised somewhat in order to make it less (...) dominated by the ideal of consensuality, it can then be taken to be quite attractive in the way it perceptively deploys these two lenses. (shrink)

This article shows how Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort try to explain the relationship between universality and particularity in modern democratic societies, politics and civil society. It will demonstrate that Habermas defends a substantive kind of universality that is opposed to particular positions and thus to real politics. This article further argues that Lefort’s lesser known theory of negative universality is better at combining a universal and a particular perspective. It claims that where Habermas requires citizens to transform their particular (...) interests, Lefort emphasizes that individual actors should acknowledge their particular position and interests when invoking universal principles. The article further argues that their disagreement leads to a different interpretation of ideology, politics, power, civil society, human rights, popular sovereignty, elections and the state. (shrink)

For many deliberative theorists, the importance of a public exchange of reasons lies in its capacity to improve the quality of democratic decision making. The 1831-1832 debate over abolishing slavery in Virginia in the state’s House of Delegates raises the question of whether it can do so on its own. The bigotry of those opposing the abolition of Virginian slavery was matched only by the prejudice of those advocating for its end. This paper examines James Bohman’s sophisticated defense of deliberative (...) democracy but argues for the value of negative and disclosive experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare the two Global Reporting Initiative reporting standards, G3.1, and the most current version G4.0. We do this through the lens of political corporate social responsibility theory, which describes the broadened understanding of corporate responsibility in a globalized world building on Habermas’ notion of deliberative democracy and ethical discourse. As the regulatory power of nation states is fading, regulatory gaps occur as side effects of transnational business. As a result, corporations are also understood to play a (...) “political role” to fill regulatory gaps and contribute to a global governance system by voluntarily engaging in self-regulation. Such corporate political action, however, is not always legitimate as it suffers from a democratic deficit. Consistent with scholars in the field of political CSR, this paper argues that only by means of communication and discourse can this drawback be avoided. That is why CSR reporting and guidelines for standardizing the disclosed CSR information is key for political CSR. By comparing the GRI standards from a political CSR perspective, one can see whether these often-used reporting guidelines fulfill the communicative requirements and whether they are adequate tools to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. We present results from a theory-derived and criteria-driven comparison of the two guidelines. Indication of the effectiveness of voluntary self-regulation is, for example, important considering the 2014 directive of the European Union to make CSR reporting mandatory. We offer a guideline-based view on current CSR theory as well as CSR reporting practice. We discuss implications for CSR theory, particularly the appropriateness of deliberation in the Habermasian sense, which is the basis of political CSR theory. We do so by introducing the notion of “uncommitted deliberation” with regard to the refined concept of materiality in GRI 4.0, which induces subjectivity and reduces data-driven comparability. Finally, we address the limitations of this research as well as research questions for future studies. (shrink)

The Soviet press and media system were part of the state institutions. In the mid-1990s, a significant degree of journalistic freedom that had developed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was followed by a pronounced democratic setback, which was a result of the general political development in Russia. Despite this, the findings based on qualitative text analysis of articles in the daily press strongly indicate that, from the dissolution of the Soviet state, readers of the press are being (...) increasingly addressed and positioned as active and knowledgeable citizens. The method for text examination is analysis of semantic roles exploring how agency is represented in the sample text material, which covers the democratically critical time span 1978–2003. The findings imply that, although post-Soviet journalism itself faces considerable difficulties, a firm cultural ground for citizen participation in society has been laid through changes in press language. (shrink)

Monarchy is liberalism’s little secret. Given the number of articles and books appearing every year dealing with liberal democracy as the hallmark of contemporary Western societies, it is astonishing that monarchy is rarely ever mentioned despite the fact that monarchy, and not a republic, is the constitutional form of quite a number of Western liberal states. I argue that considering the political reality of the established monarchies in Europe leads into a dilemma: either contemporary liberalism is not the kind of (...) theory it claims to be or it has to reconsider its central tenets. In conclusion, I show that the dilemma cannot be solved or avoided but needs to be embraced by conceiving liberalism not as a applied moral theory but as a political theory that leaves room for various symbolic self-understandings and acknowledges the crooked timber of historical realities. (shrink)

This paper argues that Michel Foucault explicitly rejected the model of critique by which he is often understood—by both his defenders and detractors. Rather than justifying norms that could be said to represent “the people;” judging institutions, norms, and practices accordingly; and creating programs for others to enact, he theorized and practiced an experimental social criticism in which specific intellectuals help people work through “intolerable” situations by multiplying the ways they can think about and act upon them. As Foucault’s work (...) with the prisons in France shows, one way intellectuals can be part of the experimental transformations social bodies carry out upon themselves is through genealogical work describing the ways problems have come to be identified—and can thus be transformed. This account of criticism undercuts the problem of justifying a standpoint of critique that has plagued philosophers and suggests a few concrete means of better aligning theory and practice. (shrink)

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life.

Normative questions concerning political authority and political obligation are widely seen as central questions of political philosophy. Current global transformations require an innovative response from normative political thinking about these two topics. In light of a concrete example of the supranational forms of authority and obligation that have been and are emerging beyond the national state and beyond the traditional domains of international law, I lay out what has become the standard approach to authority and obligation and indicate why this (...) approach is inadequate in contemporary circumstances. I sketch an alternative approach and suggest how the most promising exemplar of this kind, Habermas’ discourse theory of law and politics, can better deal with the example. Having thus made plausible the advantages of the discourse theory of the alternative approach, I end with an ‘internal’ critique of Habermas’ own recent writings on the global political order. (shrink)

Political action is unpredictable because it unfolds among a plurality of independent actors. This unpredictability generates a fundamental puzzle: If an actor cannot know where her initiative will lead, what motivates and guides her in her doings? The aim of this paper is to develop and defend the solution to the puzzle that we can find in the thought of Hannah Arendt, namely the idea that political action is – or should be – motivated and guided by principles, principles like (...) justice, equality, or honour. Such principles must be distinguished from goals because they do not designate a specific state of affairs, but are general ideas that allow for diverse implementations. I show that this distinction is of great practical importance for the actors involved, since their outlook and their attitude towards others will differ depending on whether they see their activity as aimed at a goal or as guided by a principle. (shrink)

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on political judgment by proposing that the faculty of judgment is essential for responsibly coping with the undeniable fact of distant suffering and the controversial duty of humanitarian intervention. To achieve this end, Mahmood Mamdani’s text ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ will be mobilized for a constructive dialogue about which specific conception of political judgment is at stake when we debate a situation like Darfur today. The main claim is (...) that political judgment in times of acute crisis requires the members of the public sphere to strike a precarious balance between two contradictory impulses: the deliberative impulse to enlarge the pool of particular standpoints, and the decisionist impulse to finally bring the conversation to a halt and adopt a normative stance. The theoretical framework for this balanced view of the faculty of judgment will be articulated through a hybridization of Hannah Arendt’s notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’ and Jacques Derrida’s concept of an ‘aporetic decision’. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida start with a common assumption in their analyses of the law and the economy - the foundational paradox of social institutions. But then autopoiesis and deconstruction move into opposite directions. Luhmann pursues the question of how de-paradoxification constructs the immanence of social institutions and builds a world of autopoietic social systems. By contrast, Derrida's thought aims at the transcendence of social institutions through their re-paradoxification. However, there is a hidden supplementarity of autopoiesis and deconstruction which (...) makes it worthwhile to relate the theories to each other. Derrida's distinction of writing/speech is necessarily blind toward Luhmann's distinction of consciousness/communication, but is, at the same time, continuously provoked by it. On another level, the opposite happens. Luhmann's autopoiesis is permanently irritated by Derrida's différance but is at the same time unable to conceptualize it. This complementary blindness of their distinctions directrices is a permanent source of mutual irritation which requires a reformulation of the social and of the possibility of justice. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of critique in Habermasian thought. Given that the concept of critique is a central theoretical category in the work of the Frankfurt School, it comes as a surprise that little in the way of a systematic account which sheds light on the multifaceted meanings of the concept of critique in Habermas's oeuvre can be found in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the various meanings (...) that Habermas attributes to the concept of critique in 10 key thematic areas of his writings: (1) the public sphere, (2) knowledge, (3) language, (4) morality, (5) ethics, (6) evolution, (7) legitimation, (8) democracy, (9) religion, and (10) modernity. On the basis of a detailed analysis of Habermas's multifaceted concerns with the nature and function of critique, the study seeks to demonstrate that the concept of critique can be considered not only as a constitutive element but also as a normative cornerstone of Habermasian thought. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on some of the limitations of Habermas's conception of critique, arguing that in order to be truly critical in the Habermasian sense we need to turn the subject of critique into an object of critique. (shrink)

In this article we frame a set of important issues in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education in terms of three broad headings: methods, models, and morality. Under the heading of methods we suggest that the need for synthesis across scientific and practical disciplines entails the pursuit of usable knowledge via a catalytic symbiosis between theory, research, and practice. Under the heading of models the goal of producing usable knowledge should shape the construction of theories that provide comprehensive (...) accounts of human learning and development spanning multiple levels of analysis. Under the heading of morality usable knowledge must be put to good use: Its application and dissemination ought to be infused with moral considerations gleaned from dialogue among all those potentially affected. Generally, the field should be shaped not only by its constituent scientific disciplines but also by its applications to education and learning. Thus we argue for the adoption of a kind of pragmatism that would be best actualized by building research-school collaborations between researchers and practitioners. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we need to analyze ‘religious violence’ in the ‘post-secular context’ in a twofold way: rather than simply viewing it in terms of mere irrationality, senselessness, atavism, or monstrosity – terms which, as we witness today on an immense scale, are strongly endorsed by the contemporary theater of cruelty committed in the name of religion – we also need to understand it in terms of an ‘originary supplement’ of ‘disengaged reason’. In order to confront its (...) specificity beyond traditional explanations of violence, I propose an integrated phenomenological account of religion that traces the phenomenality of religion in terms of a correlation between the originary givenness of transcendence and capable man’s creative capacities to respond to it. Following Ricœur, I discuss ‘religious violence’ in terms of a monopolizing appropriation of the originary source of givenness that conflates man’s freedom to poetically respond to the appeal of the foundational with the surreptitiously claimed sovereignty to make it happen in a practical transfiguration of the everyday. (shrink)

Abstract Bentham favored a free press as an instrument of public control of the state, in the interest of the general happiness. Kant favored free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of autonomous rationality. But a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Benthamite or Kantian goals. Such goals lead to a personal right to communicate rather than to a corporate right to press freedom.

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas articulates a system of rights, including human rights, within the democratic constitutional state. For Habermas, while human rights, like other subjective rights have moral content, they do not structurally belong to a moral system; nor should they be grounded in one. Instead, human rights belong to a positive and coercive legal order upon which individuals can make actionable legal claims. Habermas extends this argument to include international human rights, which are realised within the context (...) of a cosmopolitan legal order. The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of law as a mechanism for securing human rights protection. I argue that positive law does make a material difference to securing individual human rights and to cultivating and augmenting a general rights culture both nationally and globally. I suggest that Habermas' model of law presents the most viable way of negotiating the tensions that human rights discourse gives rise to: the tensions between morality and law, between legality and politics, and between the national and international contexts of human rights protection. (shrink)

Advocates of ?deliberative democracy? want citizens to actively participate in serious dialogue over political issues, not merely go to the polls every few years. Unfortunately, these ideals don't take into account widespread political ignorance and irrationality. Most voters neither attain the level of knowledge needed to make deliberative democracy work, nor do they rationally evaluate the political information they do possess. The vast size and complexity of modern government make it unlikely that most citizens can ever reach the levels of (...) knowledge and rationality required by deliberative democracy, even if they were better informed than they are at present. (shrink)

The republican political tradition, which originated in Ancient Rome and picked up by several early-modern thinkers, has been revived in the last couple of decades following the seminal works of historian Quentin Skinner and political theorist Philip Pettit. Although educational questions do not normally occupy the center stage in republican theory, various theorists working within this framework have already highlighted the significance of education for any functioning republic. Looking at educational questions through the lens of freedom as non-domination has already (...) yielded important insights to discussions of political education. However, consideration of the existing republican educational discourse in light of the wide range of issues discussed in Pettit’s recent works reveals that it suffers from two major lacunae. First, it does not take into consideration the distinction between democracy and social justice that has become central to Pettit’s republicanism. Thus, the current discussion focuses almost exclusively on education for democratic citizenship and hardly touches upon social justice. Second, the current literature thinks mainly in terms of educating future citizens, rather than conceiving of students also as political agents in the present, and of school itself as a site of non-domination. This paper aims at filling these voids, and it will therefore be oriented along two intersecting axes: the one between democracy and justice, and the other between future citizenship in the state and present citizenship at school. The resulting four categories will organize the discussion: future citizens and democracy; future citizens and social justice; present citizens and democracy; present citizens and social justice. This will not only enable us to draw a clearer line between the civic republican and liberal educational theories, but also make civic republican education a viable alternative to current educational approaches. (shrink)

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s bold and provocative proposal to institutionalize civil disobedience. First, I argue that the proposal follows from Arendt’s peculiar interpretation of this mode of protest. She sees it as an unexpected yet welcome echo of the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the foundation of the American republic. In seeking to bring civil disobedience into government, she aims to embed this spirit within the very institutional fabric of the polity. Second, I suggest that we have strong reasons to (...) take the proposal seriously as an account of how the constitutional state should respond to dissenting minorities. The call to institutionalize civil disobedience can be defended as an approach that is different to — and ultimately more appealing than — familiar liberal and democratic perspectives on this issue. (shrink)

In this article, I assess Jürgen Habermas’s defence of civil disobedience as ’the guardian of legitimacy’ in democratic societies. I suggest that, despite its appeal, the defence as it stands is incomplete. The problem relates to his account of the justification of this mode of protest. Although Habermas wants to defend civil disobedience as a response to inadequacies in deliberative democratic procedures, he does not provide us with a clear and compelling account of these inadequacies. In order to provide such (...) an account, I examine the various ways in which the illegitimate circulation of social power can distort democratic processes. Civil disobedience can be seen as a legitimate response to inequalities in social power, a defence that builds on the strengths of Habermas’s approach while transcending its limitations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]. (shrink)

Despite the increasing attention devoted to the theme of political judgment, the question of how to theorize judgment as specifically democratic remains elusive. This article shows the promise of Spinoza for approaching such a vexing issue. Through a combined reading of his major political and metaphysical texts, I develop a new concept of political judgment that I call ‘citizen jurisprudence’. Citizen jurisprudence is at once a right and a power that is internally related to the ‘power of the people’. Put (...) another way, citizen jurisprudence is the figure and effect of democracy understood in an expansive sense: not solely as a state form but as an activity of equally free individuals determining the sense and the scope of common affairs. An account of this concept simultaneously nuances Spinoza’s current profile as a political thinker and contributes to efforts within contemporary political theory to recuperate the radical potential of judgment as a mode of democratic agency. (shrink)

I draw on Security Council Resolution 1674 to demonstrate that the political assumptions Jacques Derrida holds in his politically-oriented texts are inconsistent with the assumptions of his linguistic texts, and that Jürgen Habermas's political theory is consistent with the political implications of his approach to language. Habermasian pragmatism offers a critical theory of society and discourse of modernity that touches on the same themes of politics and meaning as Derrida and other deconstructionists, but is more coherent, consistent, and explanatorily persuasive.

This paper provides a critical analysis of Martin Loughlin's pure theory of public law as developed in his more recent work. I argue that the pure theory makes a series of errors and rests on a set of assumptions that make it inappropriate to provide the legal framework for any social‐democratic polity. Specifically, the theory concedes too much latitude to the functional needs of the state and organised politics, and pays too little deference to processes of political opinion and will (...) formation in civil society. As such, it only succeeds in establishing law's connection to the public realm, at the cost of effacing its internal relationship to the rule of law and democracy. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by (...) a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life. (shrink)

How should sociologists use the word theory? Gabriel Abend’s recent insistence that this question should be tackled politically raises two important issues: Is sociology political? And if so, what normative implications follow for its organization? Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony, I argue that Abend’s proposal that semantic questions about theory can be addressed separately from ontological, evaluative, and teleological ones is untenable. Disagreements about the latter are constitutive, not merely supplementary to the meaning (...) of theory. Against Abend’s deliberative-democratically oriented vision, I propose an agonistic politics of theory. In doing so, I consider both the internal inconsistencies of deliberativism and the practical advantages and sociological relevance of agonism. (shrink)

Democratically inspired critics identify a number of problems with the contemporaryidentification of survey research and public opinion. Surveys are said tonormalize or rationalize opinion, to promote state or corporate rather thandemocratic interests, to constrain authentic forms of participation, and to forcean individualized conception of public opinion. Some of these criticisms arerelatively easily answered by survey researchers. But the criticisms contain acomplaint that survey researchers have largely failed to address: that surveyresearch discourages the public, visible, and face-to-face generation of opinion.Public opinion (...) researchers who use surveys paradoxically seek the opinions ofcitizens in private, nonpolitical situations. But nothing inherent in the methodsof survey research requires this private focus. The author argues that by reframingthe survey's unit of analysis and considering alternatives to standard,national samples in political surveys, new democratic possibilities within surveyresearch may be found. (shrink)

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’, making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the (...) traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement. (shrink)

The debate about global distributive justice is characterized by an often stark opposition between universalistic approaches, advocating an egalitarian global redistribution of wealth (Beitz, Pogge, Barry, Tan), and particularistic positions, aiming to justify a restriction of redistribution to the domestic community (D. Miller, R. Miller, Blake, Nagel, Rawls). I argue that an approach starting from the deliberative model of democracy (Habermas) can overcome this opposition. On the one hand, the increasingly global scope of economic interactions implies that the range of (...) individuals concerned with the redistribution of wealth should also be increasingly universal. On the other hand, the need for democratic deliberation refers to the fact that demands of justice should be contextual and should take into account the particular circumstances, needs and values of the people concerned. Both concerns can be realized simultaneously only within a multi-layered democratic system in which redistribution is a concern at the domestic, the international and the global level. (shrink)

Political liberals argue that the classical conception of autonomy must be discarded because it is sectarian and metaphysical. This article rejects that a commitment to autonomy necessarily leads to sectarianism and questions the notion that respect for persons is separable from the commitment to autonomy. It defends a Kantian approach to autonomy, as belonging to the standpoint of practical reason, and argues that in this approach autonomy is a norm regulating how we should treat each other as opposed to a (...) good to be promoted. This approach also avoids the metaphysical idea of autonomy as self-origination of binding principles. (shrink)

What is the relationship between morals and politics? What is the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy? Defenders of political moralism postulate moral aims or constraints for politics, and hence they see political philosophy as a chapter of moral philosophy. Contrastingly, advocates of political realism describe politics as an independent endeavor aiming at providing order and security, and conceive of political philosophy as an autonomous discipline. This article claims that political moralism and political realism share the mistake of assuming (...) that politics has substantial, permanent goals or constraints. After criticizing political substantialism, the article explains the main ingredients of its alternative, political minimalism: the idea that politics, understood as collective instrumental rationality, aims at providing adequate means for the accomplishment of people's goals, whatever these are; and the conception of the relationship between morality and politics as one of “reciprocal containment.” Finally, it addresses some foreseeable criticisms of political minimalism. (shrink)

In recent years, the public sphere, which represents a realm in civil society where people can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns important to them, has become a key area for research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, however, Marxist theory has yet to advance a theoretical account of the most abstract and simple ideological properties of the capitalist public sphere as these appear under universal commodity relationships. The paper therefore tentatively seeks to develop such (...) an account. Specifically, the paper theoretically derives a peculiar public sphere under capitalism, which is mediated between at least two commodity owners who also possess distinctive personalities driven by desires to own commodities. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations and their contradictions. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss what motivated reasoning research tells us about the prospects for deliberative democracy. In section I, I introduce the results of several political psychology studies examining the problematic affective and cognitive processing of political information by individuals in nondeliberative, experimental environments. This is useful because these studies are often neglected in political philosophy literature. Section II has three stages. First, I sketch how the study results from section I question the practical viability of deliberative democracy. Second, (...) I briefly present the results of three empirical studies of political deliberation that can be interpreted to counter the findings of the studies in section I. Third, I show why this is a misinterpretation and that the study results from section I mean that it is implausible that sites of political deliberation would naturally emerge from the wide public sphere and coalesce into institutionalized forms of the practice such that deliberative democracy can satisfy its raison d’être. Finally, in section III, I conclude that viable conceptions of deliberative democracy should be limited to narrower aims. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that conventional reasoning on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is based on the assumption of a liberal market economy in the context of a nation state. I build on the study of Scherer and Palazzo (Acad Manage Rev 32(4):1096-1120, 2007), developing a number of criteria to identify elements of liberal philosophy in the ongoing CSR debate. I discuss their occurrence in the CSR literature in detail and reflect on the implications, taking into account the emerging political (...) reading of the firm. I conclude that the apolitical framework in the mainstream CSR literature has to be overcome since it does not reflect recent changes in the socio-economic conditions for economic actors in a globalizing world. (shrink)

This paper examines two issues related to research of certified fair trade goods. The first is the question of how agendas for fair trade research should be developed. The second issue is the existence of major gaps in the fair trade literature, including the study of the particular features of fair trade practice in individual northern countries. In taking up the first of these issues, the paper proposes that normative analysis should provide the basis for developing research agendas. Such an (...) approach is important to ensure that the necessary types of questions to make normative judgments and policy decisions are posed and that biases that tend to favor mainstreaming practices in the generation of knowledge are minimized. The paper addresses the second research issue by examining the development of research agendas at the level of individual countries, using Canada as a case. (shrink)