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Some Conditions for Culturally Diverse Deliberation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law, University of WollongongWollongong NSW 2522Australia, rick mohr@uow.edu.au
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Abstract

This is an inquiry into the ways in which reasoning attaches to cultural context. It considers whether to seek grounds for decision-making in some common ground or in a recognition of diversity. The essay considers feminist criticisms of Habermas's discourse ethics and Benhabib's efforts to revise such an approach in response to cultural diversity. While the conditions for communication across cultures may be readily met with good will and good procedures, the conditions for reaching binding or consensual decisions are more challenging. The essay rejects the possibility of universal standards for reasoned decisions on three grounds. Reasons conforming to the standards of a multicultural public cannot rest on a single yardstick. Reasoning cannot be detached, in the Cartesian manner, from the corporeal being who is doing the reasoning. Reasoning is not a private and privileged mental process conforming to a unique set of rules. Drawing particularly on traditions of rhetoric from Aristotle to Perelman, the essay concludes: that reasons must be addressed to diverse audiences; that the affective and bodily specificity of deliberators is of central relevance (it matters who judges are); and that we must all continue our “moral education” in dialogue with diverse groups and ways of thinking.

Résumé

Cet article analyse les façons dont le raisonnement s'attache aux contextes culturels et pondère les fondements de la prise de décision dans une sorte de terrain commun ou dans une reconnaissance de la diversité. Il considère la critique féministe de l'éthique du discours selon Habermas et les efforts de Benhabib de réviser cette approche pour répondre à la diversité culturelle. Alors que la bonne volonté et de bonnes procédures peuvent certes créer les conditions de la communication transculturelle, le défi est autre de créer les conditions pour arriver à des décisions consensuelles ou qui lient les parties. L'auteur rejette la possibilité de standards universels de décisions raisonnées sur trois points. Les raisons conformes aux standards d'un public multiculturel ne peuvent s'appuyer sur une mesure unique. Le raisonnement ne peut être détaché, de manière cartésienne, de l'être incorporé qui raisonne. L'acte de raisonner n'est pas un exercice mental privé et privilégié qui se conforme à un ensemble unique de règles. S'appuyant particulièrement sur les traditions de la rhétorique, d'Aristote à Perelman, l'article conclut que les raisons doivent s'adresser à diverses audiences, que la spécificité affective et corporelle de ceux qui délibèrent est d'une importance cruciale (il importe qui sont les juges) et que nous devons tous poursuivre notre «éducation morale» en dialoguant avec divers groupes et manières de penser.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 20 , Issue 1: Cross-Cultural Jurisprudence / Jurisprudence Transculturelle , April 2005 , pp. 87 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2005

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References

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16 Fraser, supra note 13 at 137.

17 Benhabib “Communicative Ethics,” supra note 9 at 358.

18 Ibid., at 346.

19 Supra note 8.

20 Benhabib, Claims, supra note 8 at 135–146.

21 Recent versions of positivism, particularly those associated with MacCormick and Campbell, have made efforts to broaden the base of positivism to include “wisdom, compassion and a sense of justice”. See MacCormick, Neil & Weinberger, Ota, An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986) at 205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Tuori has even proposed to open it to influences from civil society, but without showing how this could override the institutional privilege of law and its separation from politics which underlies even this ‘critical’ positivism (Tuori, Kaarlo, series ed. Campbell, Tom, Critical Legal Positivism. Applied Legal Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)Google Scholar).

22 Some of the procedural principles of the international Green parties bear a family resemblance to these principles, and suggest how they might operate in an institutional framework. The common heritage in post-war Germany through the early ascendency of the German Greens suggests a more than coincidental link to Habermas.

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27 Benhabib, Claims, supra note 8 at 138. Benhabib here refers to the further development, by Cohen and Arato, Fraser and herself, of Habermas's original notion of the public sphere found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans, by Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar, first published in German in 1962.

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29 Perelman, Chaim, Justice, Law, and Argument. Essays on Moral and Legal Reasoning (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar summarises some aspects of this concept, particularly in the introduction. They are developed more fully in Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).Google Scholar

30 Tindale proposes that the universal audience ‘is developed out of the particular audience and so is essentially connected to it’ Tindale supra note 1 at 117. By proposing that this connection is one of aggregation I have tried to make this development more specific than Tindale does. To this extent I am moving away from Perelman's universal audience (which is grammatically required to be singular) to a collection of audiences.

31 Nedelsky, “Embodied Diversity” supra note 26 at 107.

32 Ibid., at 100 ff.

33 Young, supra note 14 at 76.

34 Benhabib, Claims, supra note 8 at 139.

35 Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, Grosz, Elizabeth, “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason” in Alcoff, Linda & Potter, Elizabeth, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York & London, Routledge, 1993) 187.Google Scholar

36 In specific cases or debates on judicial impartiality the racialized or gendered body of the judge has been an issue (eg. R. v. S. (R.D.) [1997] 3 S.C.R. 484). In advocating that we recognize the white male body as much as any other, I draw attention to all the corporeal influences on our decisions, those arising from privilege as well as those associated with a subaltern position.

37 Benhabib, Claims, supra note 8 at 115.

38 Ibid.

39 Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961) at 220 ff.Google Scholar

40 I use this example with some embarrassment, only to follow Benhabib. I am fully aware of the irony involved in lecturing Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis on the benefits of “western” thinking. The influence of western educated intellectuals, jurists and political figures has been conspicuous in each of these countries, and the perspectives they have derived from their own cultures have of course been influential in the West. On some of these ironies, see the review of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Difference by Chaudry, Amit, “In the Waiting Room of History” (2004) 26 London Review of Books 12.Google Scholar

41 On the degradation of public debate in Australia and some other western countries see Watson, Don, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (Milsons Point, NSW: Knopf, 2003).Google Scholar