Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona

Interactive universalism, the concrete other and discourse ethics: A sociological dialogue with Seyla Benhabib’s theories of morality

“…The implausibility of the idealized structures of discourse being adhered to becomes still more evident in discourse surrounding contentious political discussions, including discussions about rights, education, climate change and so on that Benhabib seems to have in mind when discussing discourse ethics. Such discussions, particularly when had with people who disagree with us, have been shown to provoke strong emotional and defensive responses at the outset, which then shape the course of the conversation, meaning that people are generally unlikely to respect the position or meaningfully listen to the argument of someone coming from a different moral perspective (Albert & Raymond, 2019; Eveland Jr. et al, 2020). Benhabib (1992, p. 31) uses the example that the rules of discourse suppose that if we ‘argued about a particular moral judgement (“it was wrong not to help refugees and to let them die on the wide sea”) […] we could in principle come to a reasonable agreement [which] must be arrived at under conditions that correspond to our ideas of fair debate’.…”