Herta Nagl-Docekal

Learning to Listen or Why Morality Calls for Liberal Politics

Facing the various current phenomena of crisis, many people have come to think that politics, including decisions with regard to economy, needs to be based upon morality. Significantly, this opinion implies some kind of separation: As the cultivation of a moral attitude is considered a prerequisite for sound politics, morality itself is assumed to be independent from politics. The intention of the chapter is to challenge this assumption. The first part explains, referring to Kant, that the moral demand to respect everybody as a ‘person’ implies that we must consider the uniqueness of the individual. On this basis it is argued, firstly, that we cannot adequately answer the needs of others unless we learn to listen carefully to the ways in which individual perspectives are being expressed; secondly, that the diversity of individual experiences and expectations cannot be properly voiced unless there exists a legal framework that secures freedom of expression. Consequently, the point is that liberal politics constitutes a prerequisite for a comprehensive implementation of moral guidelines. Explaining this thesis, the chapter refers to contemporary conceptions of ‘world citizenship’ and ‘global democracy’.

Seyla Benhabib and the radical future of the enlightenment

If I had to choose a quotation to capture Seyla Benhabib’s philosophical and political intent, I would select the following sentence from her most recent essays: ’The point ... is not a rejection of the Enlightenment in toto, but a critical renegotiation of its legacy.’ The emphasis here is on the adjective ’critical’ and the prefix ’re’ before ’negotiation’, for Benhabib by no means has a mere return in mind. Where does her thought commence? Benhabib enters into the eye of the storm, so to speak, that decisively marks current philosophy: the debate around so-called ’postmodernism’, for example, as well as the debates concerning neo-Aristotelianism and the communitarian critique of liberalism. She here highlights theories presuming that the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment has become obsolete. Characteristic of Benhabib’s method is that it avoids general oppositions that allow only for an ’either/or’. In a step-by-step procedure she investigates the extent to which contemporary objections to modernity address problems that do, in fact, make necessary a distancing from Enlightenment conceptions yet she also notes that overdrawing this critique eliminates theoretical elements remaining indispensable to social theory. By confronting Enlightenment thinking with current reservations, in other words, Benhabib subjects it to a learning process. At this point, feminist issues come into play: for Benhabib, the concern with overcoming the discrimination and marginalization that