Much debate has been held over the question of whether Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach to ethics and the other can do justice to the alterity of the other, as exemplified in Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to ethics as first philosophy. The challenge to Gadamer and to hermeneutics more generally, comes obliquely from Levinas and more directly, from Robert Bernasconi, who argues that Gadamer cannot account for an otherness that ends in incomprehensibility as one finds in encounters between persons of asymmetrical power (...) relations—oppressed and oppressor, privileged and marginalized. Bernasconi’s critique has resulted in a flurry of hermeneutic responses that insist that Gadamer’s hermeneutics can, if understood in the right way, accommodate the other and serve as the foundation for robust ethical treatment of the other. I argue in this paper that participants in this debate have been insufficiently attentive to the ontologies that underlie the accounts of self and other in Gadamer and in Levinas. Because Gadamer and Levinas begin from different ontologies, their accounts of ethics and of the ground of ethics differ. (shrink)

This article contends that Socratic wisdom (sophia) in Plato's Apology should be understood in relation to moderation (sophrosune), not knowledge (episteme). This stance is exemplified in an interpretation of Socrates' disavowal of knowledge. The god calls Socrates wise. Socrates holds both that he is wise in nothing great or small and that the god does not lie. These apparently inconsistent claims are resolved in an interpretation of elenchus. This interpretion says that Socrates is wise insofar as he does not believe (...) himself to know what he does not know. Whether one knows is demonstrated through elenchus, which moderates between knowledge claims. Thus, elenchus is productive of a kind of wisdom even if it does not produce knowledge. This claim, if true, forms a suitable basis for Socrates' defense of himself. That it does so serves as further evidence for the interpretation of sophia as sophrosune. (shrink)

Highlighting a progression of exercises, this paper develops a pedagogical model aimed at giving students tools to deliberate about justice from within the Original Position and to debate the broader goals and limitations of justice as fairness. The approach focuses on the idea of a “distribution” of primary goods without relying on caricatures or being intimidated by the more technical features of the presentation. The series of exercises shows students how to move from more intuitive to less intuitive deliberative situations—a (...) move that depends on seeing a just distribution as a product of a pure procedure. In particular, the exercises show the importance of distinguishing carefully between a distribution and an allocation of goods. Finally, it suggests ways in which we may use the theory to engage with our own distributive practices in democratic societies by focusing on the moral significance of persons as equals. (shrink)

Economic theories of democratic legitimacy have criticized deliberative accounts of democratic legitimacy on the grounds that they do not represent a practical possibility and that they create conditions that make actual democracies worse. It is not simply that they represent the wrong ideal. Rather, they are too idealistic – failing to show proper regard for the cognitive and moral limitations of persons and the depth of disagreement in democratic society. This article aims to show that the minimalist criterion of democratic (...) legitimacy is self-defeating and that even if there are minimal cognitive, moral, and social requirements for the possibility of practicable deliberative democracy, these limitations do not necessarily impose insuperable barriers for democratic deliberation as the normative basis of democratic legitimacy. Thus, the limiting facts do not dictate the structure of appropriate normative models of democracy in the way minimalists have supposed. (shrink)

This paper identifies strands of reasoning underlying several theories of democratic authority. It shows why each of them fails to adequately explain or justify it. Yet, it does not claim (per philosophical anarchism) that democratic authority cannot be justified. Furthermore, it sketches an argument for a perspective on the justification of democratic authority that would effectively respond to three problems not resolved by alternative theories—the problem of the expert, the problem of specificity, and the problem of deference. Successfully resolving these (...) problems is at least evidence for the viability of a justification of democratic authority. This perspective integrates procedural concerns with those about the quality of democratic outcomes. It shows that democratic authority, if there is such a thing, requires reliable democratic procedures as the only sort citizens could rationally accept. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of the structural differences, neglected in the literature, between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Emmanuel Levinas, showing how Bonhoeffer’s account of persons and responsibility is differentiated through creation, fall, and redemption, whereas Levinas’s account of ethical selfhood offers itself as a kind of transcendental account of persons in which the self is structured by its encounter with the other which commands responsibility. This difference (situationally differentiated vs. transcendental) plays out in two ways – the role (...) of the will in ethical selfhood and the identity of the primal governing agent in the encounter with others. Bonhoeffer’s account, through its differentiation into different modes of existence, allows for the possibility of different stages and modes of the encounter with the other, and thus allows for the incorporation of one model of encounter at one stage, and another model at a different stage. As a consequence, Bonhoeffer’s account includes and develops upon the kind of demand-based account Levinas offers. This can serve as an advantage over Levinas’s model insofar as it provides a ‘multi-modal’ framework to absorb other views into one’s own in a way that a transcendentally conceived framework of selfhood does not. (shrink)