Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing
with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice,
morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper,
I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with
the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists.
The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—
what I call a conflict’s evaluative ‘structure’—a…
Read moreMost familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing
with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice,
morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper,
I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with
the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists.
The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—
what I call a conflict’s evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational
way of responding to that conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social
conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain
rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure
in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response
of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict
involves a society’s deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society
should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable
one.