Seyla Benhabib: Interactive Universalism, the Concrete Other, and Discourse Ethics

Seyla Benhabib’s work is among the best and most sociologically informative post-Enlightenment moral philosophy available. Yet her work is little known by sociologists. This chapter explores Benhabib’s resounding critiques of Enlightenment moral thought. These critiques are of particular significance because whereas theorists such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor focus on relatively abstract notions of culture and history to make their moral theories social, Benhabib also integrates important insights into personal relationships and everyday moral practice. Benhabib’s work also makes important contributions to conjoining moral particularism with a reformed conception of moral universalism. Benhabib’s contributions are explored in the first half of this chapter. The second half then uses Benhabib’s attempt to reformulate discourse ethics to illuminate issues of power that arise in many approaches to moral proceduralism. Specifically, Benhabib’s argument that discourse ethics can provide a procedural means to judge between competing moral claims leads her to prioritise the perspective of ‘postconventional’ Western modernism as the means to adjudicate between the moral tolerability of cultural beliefs and practices. This leads her to characterise ‘conventional’ moral systems as subordinate, which succumbs to postcolonial critiques of the role of processes of domination in organising the validity of moral claims. It is thus argued that Benhabib’s work raises important questions that sociologists of morality need to be aware of if they are to enter into cross-cultural normative argument.