A substantivist construal of discourse ethics

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (3):405 – 437 (2005)
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Abstract

This paper presents a substantivist construal of discourse ethics, which claims that we should see our engagement in public deliberation as expressing and elaborating a substantive commitment to basic moral ideas of solidarity, equality, and freedom. This view is different from Habermas's standard formalist defence of discourse ethics, which attempts to derive the principle of discursive moral justification from primarily non-moral presuppositions of rational argumentation as such. After explicating the difference between the substantivist and the formalist construal, I defend the former by showing that it is not only intuitively compelling, but also particularly well equipped for addressing four important objections recently levelled against discourse ethics and its political applications. I conclude by pointing out some consequences of the previous discussion for the future of Critical Theory

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Pablo Gilabert
Concordia University

Citations of this work

Reflections on Human Rights and Power.Pablo Gilabert - 2018 - In Adam Etinson (ed.), Human Rights: Moral or Political? Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 375-399.
Remarks on the concept of critique in Habermasian thought.Simon Susen - 2010 - Journal of Global Ethics 6 (2):103-126.

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References found in this work

What we owe to each other.Thomas Scanlon - 1998 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Political Liberalism.John Rawls - 1993 - Columbia University Press.
Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
World Poverty and Human Rights.Thomas Pogge - 2002 - Ethics and International Affairs 19 (1):1-7.

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