Mark Kingwell

Some recent philosophical examinations of the question "What is justice?"--a question at least as old as Plato--have made what might be called a dialogic turn. That is, instead of determining original choice options, bases of legal contract, or a calculus for summing preferences , these theories have sought to specify the conversational conditions under which any legitimate set of principles of justice must emerge. The approach offers the immediate advantage of understanding the determination of justice principles as cooperative task, a task achieved in, and only in, some kind of social dialogue among all members of a society. ;But what kind? In this dissertation I explore three theories that give divergent answers to this question: the constrained liberal dialogue defended by Bruce Ackerman, the model of traditions in translation outlined by Alasdair MacIntyre, and the revitalized rationalism of Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics. In my view, none of these theories constitutes the best possible answer to the question, "What is just talking?" MacIntyre's strong conservative critique of liberalism's universalist hopes is an effective reminder that trans-contextual norms are difficult to justify. But MacIntyre is himself guilty of employing a largely undefended notion of rationality to ground his picture of the conversation among traditions. At the same time, Habermas's radical attempt to complete the Enlightenment project of rationally grounding morality by way of a reconstruction of communicative competence is, though compelling in its own terms, ineffective in meeting the practical political problems that prompted the justice question in the first place. ;In pointing out shortcomings in these theories, I am concerned ultimately to isolate at least preliminary conditions for the best possible answer to the question "What is just talking?" In concluding the examination, then, I suggest a fourth model which seeks to combine the most effective aspects of each preceding model, and which I believe forges an effective weld between the wide rationalist hopes of procedural justice theory and the call for recovery of ethical context found in communitarian critics of that type of theory. This fourth model I call 'justice as politeness."