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Just Talk?*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
One of the most prominent themes of recent political philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, has been the challenge which the cultural and moral diversity of modern Western societies poses for traditional liberal theories of justice. Given that these theories, in their classical formulations, either ignored the issue of social heterogeneity, or operated on the tacit assumption that the societies to which they would be applied were essentially homogeneous, what changes should a new appreciation of diversity impose upon both the content and the pattern of justification of theories of justice? Philosophers have been far from unanimous in their answers to this basic question. Some, like Will Kymlicka, have argued that recognizably liberal, autonomy-based justificatory arguments should lead us to change our view of liberalism's content, in that it should now incorporate collective rights to the traditional repertoire of individual rights. Others, like Iris Young, have argued that a real recognition of “difference” should lead to the wholesale abandonment of the liberal framework. Still others have argued that it is the manner in which liberalism goes about justifying normative principles that ought to be rethought, given the “fact of pluralism.” The disagreements on moral and political issues which are constitutive of modern societies have led some to argue that we can no longer hope to justify substantive principles deductively on the basis of general moral propositions taken as axiomatic. Authors who follow this line have argued that, in order not to tread on the moral or cultural toes of a diverse citizenry, liberal justification must ultimately reduce to the outcome of certain deliberative procedures. In radically plural societies, justified norms of social interactions are those to which people in conversation with one another would agree.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Winter 1998 , pp. 107 - 116
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1998
References
Notes
1 See Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, and Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
2 See Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
3 See, for example, Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mouffe, Chantal, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, edited by Mouffe, C. (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar.
4 A similar point has been made about calls for a renewed sense of active citizenship among political philosophers by Kymlicka, Will and Norman, Wayne, in “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” in Ethics, 104, 2 (January 1994): 368CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 On the role which informal deliberation taking place in civil society might be seen to play in the overall task of justification, see my “Natural Law and Public Reason in Kant's Political Philosophy,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 26, 3 (1996)Google Scholar.
6 In his most recent formulation of this point, Rawls writes of “two stages in the exposition of justice as fairness.” For a critical overview of Rawls's complex methodology of political justification, see my “The Justification of Political Liberalism,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 75, 3–4 (September-December 1994)Google Scholar.
7 See, for example, p. 8, in which he includes the division of resources among the problems which a conversational view of justice governed by the norm of civility is meant to address.
8 Note that there is much equivocation on this point on Kingwell's part. Thus, on p. 222, he writes that the “relevance criteria” which a social commitment to civility involves “are those that indicate which topics of discussion are appropriately addressed in a public, political dialogue” (emphasis added).