Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.Seyla Benhabib

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

“…The flawed assumptions of substitutionalist universalism flow through more recent extensions of modernist moral theory, including Rawls's (1971) 'veil of ignorance' and Kohlberg's (1984) theory of the development of moral judgement, which continue to assume that the soundest form of moral judgement involves the decontextualizing self imaginatively assuming the perspective of what would be acceptable to all others in general (Benhabib, 1992). For Benhabib, however, such judgement neither reflects how moral judgements are made in reality, nor does it provide an adequate model for how most moral situations can be judged.…”

“…The trouble is, this either requires the legislating subject to assume an 'Archimedean' position outside of their own cultural heritage and life history or requires us to make universalizing moral judgements of what is acceptable to all from an admittedly partial perspective. The former entirely misrepresents our embedded and socialized development as subjects, while the latter carries the evident flaw that what a secular, well-off White man, for example, takes to be acceptable to all is likely to be very different to, and possibly at odds with, what a member of a marginalized religious community may construe to be acceptable to all (Benhabib, 1992).…”

W. E. B. Du Bois’s forgotten sociology of morality: Contesting the foundations and informing the future of the sociology of morality

“…That such responsibilities were taken to be indicative features of moral lives anticipates movements towards 'care ethics' that developed in the 1980s. Care ethics argues that Western thought has tended to equate morality with justice and abstract reasoning, meaning that the kind of caring practices that in fact constitute most of our moral behaviour had been overlooked or considered not to be properly moral endeavours (Benhabib, 1992;Gilligan, 1982). The reconceptualising of everyday practices of care in moral terms provided a notable moment in the re-establishment of the sociology of morality.…”

Diversifying the Deliberative Turn: Toward an Agonistic RRI

“…The term deliberative democracy was first used in 1980, and by the end of the 1990s, it was established as "one of the most fashionable ideals in contemporary Western political theory" (Besson and Martí 2006, xiii). It was developed in response to the aggregative model of democracy, in which citizens participate in democratic decisions primarily through voting for representatives in competitions between individually held preferences (Benhabib 1992;Habermas 1984). This aggregative model was criticized for taking preferences as given, lacking an idea of a public, and restricting itself to a "thin and individualistic form of rationality" (Young 2000, 20).…”

“…Arguments over the fundamental differences and potential synergies of deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism can be read as an "allegory of the modern/postmodern condition" (Kapoor 2007, 460) and have been, unsurprisingly, fraught. These debates have played out in democratic theory (Benhabib 1992;Dryzek 2006;Habermas 1984;Mouffe 1993;Young 2001) and moved on to fields such as planning. "Expert-led" planning was challenged by planning seeking to include more citizens in the search for consensus, which has subsequently been challenged by agonistic planning that "support(s) the encounter between different conceptions of reality" (Ba ¨cklund and Ma ¨ntysalo 2010, 343;Bond 2011;Purcell 2009).…”