Attempts to employ discourse ethics for assessing communication and information technologies have tended to focus on managerial and policy-oriented contexts. These initiatives presuppose institutional resources for organizing sophisticated consultation processes that elicit stakeholder input. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, this paper supplements those initiatives by developing a more widely usable framework for moral inquiry and reflection on problematic cyberpractices. Given the highly idealized character of discourse ethics, a usable framework must answer two questions: How should those who lack organizational (...) power conduct their moral inquiry under non-ideal conditions of discourse? How ought they to understand the moral force of the judgments they reach under such conditions? In response, I develop the heuristic implications of Habermas’s principle of universalization. To render that principle usable for non-ideal discourse, I propose a modification that yields a scalar measure of “dialogically robust” judgments that are responsive to the actual state of discussion. To illustrate the use of these principles, I sketch two case studies, which examine the moral acceptability of violent video gaming and government cyber-surveillance. (shrink)

Most of the epistemological debate on disagreement tries to develop standards that describe which actions or beliefs would be rational under specific circumstances in a controversy. To build things on a firm foundation, much work starts from certain idealizations—for example the assumption that parties in a disagreement share all the evidence that is relevant and are equal with regard to their abilities and dispositions. This contribution, by contrast, focuses on a different question and takes a different route. The question is: (...) What should people actually do who find themselves in deep disagreement with others? And instead of building theory on some “firm foundation,” the paper starts from a specific goal—building consensus by creating new proposals—and asks, first, which actions are suitable to achieve this goal and, second, what are the epistemic conditions of these actions. With regard to the latter, the paper focuses on what has been called framing and reframing in conflict research, and argues that both metaphors need and deserve a suitable epistemological conceptualization. (shrink)

Contributions to stakeholder theory often do not systematically deal with the prioritization of stakeholder interests. An exception to this is Reed’s Habermasianapproach to stakeholder management. Central to Reed’s discursive approach is Habermas’s distinction between morality and ethics. Many authors in business ethics argue that, because of its distinction between morality and ethics, discourse ethics is well suited for dealing with the pluralism that characterizes modern society, but also mention complications with the application of this distinction. This paper taps into the (...) vivid debate in political philosophy on Habermas’s distinction between morality and ethics and, on this basis, further elaborates how stakeholder interests should be prioritized from the point of view of discourse ethics. It thus estimates the consequences of the objections against Habermas’s distinction for a discursive approach to the prioritization of stakeholder interests. The conclusion is that, although Habermas’s distinction is not as neat as it may seem, it is not fundamentally challenged and may be successfully applied in the prioritization of stakeholder interests. (shrink)