A critical consensus model of political legitimation: On the pre-discursive conditions for debates on justice in complex democracies. A contribution to communicative theories of normative validity.

摘要

To be politically relevant liberal normative theory should meet two conditions: First, to take into account both the instrumental and ethical dimensions of interactions. Second, to enable a critical stance towards established norms. This dissertation offers a model of critical validation (the Critical Consensus Model) by recasting the communicative model of democratic justification around a theory of judgment focused on the relevance dimension of moral arguments, rather than on notions of truth, or strategic interests.; The relevance dimension concerns the way issues appear as significant for participants beyond moral disagreements. It involves the articulation of arguments within society's cognitive constitution by means of a non-instrumental pre-selection of categories and patterns of distinctions comprehensible for all participants, despite diverging interpretative positions. These relevance dynamics are initiated on a pre-reflexive level and enable the communicative expression of moral disagreements. This level is contentious: social conflicts are already latent here before being articulated in strategic-instrumental and ethical terms. To understand political conflict and political self-reflection we need to account for this pre-discursive and meta-ethical formation of normative judgment.; The structuring of relevance is socially rooted and reflects a context's particularity in its relative generality---the point in which a situation of injustice becomes a public concern. Focusing on particular forms of intersubjectivity in which disagreements take place allows me to complete the theory of communicative justification, as advanced by Habermas and Rawls, by enhancing its political cogency.; The first two chapters evaluate Habermas's and Rawls's models in the light of the objective of politically cogent social criticism. Chapter Three offers an alternative recasting of the communicative turn through a model of judgment focused on the shared notions of relevance---or what I name a societal 'paradigm of articulation and signification'. This enables an account of the way cognition affects evaluation and structures our sense of the moral. Chapter Four addresses both the enabling and disabling effect of prediscursive structuring. Finally, in chapter five the Critical Consensus Model is staged in a dynamic mode in order to account for normative criticism and innovation.