Karim Sadek

The current crisis of democracy is largely one of rampant polarization, which systematically degrades citizens’ basic civic capacities, especially their ability to properly understand and respond to their political differences. This demands an ethical response mobilizing resources that can bolster those endangered capacities. We defend civility as a democracy-promoting ethical practice that facilitates the productive transformation of civic relationships across differences. Specifically, civility may redress polarization’s civic harms by treating civic relationships as flexible rather than rigid. Here the essence of incivility is seeing or treating others as incapable of being or acting differently and therefore as unable to contribute to civic relationships in unexpectedly valuable ways. We thus reframe civility as a subjunctive virtue of attunement to the very possibilities of civic relationship endangered by deep social and political divisions. The paper has four main sections. Section 2 introduces subjunctive civility and probes its moral psychology. Section 3 situates our account, showing that its focus on ethical attunement to possibilities is systematically overlooked within recent scholarship. However, Robert B. Talisse recently defends an account of the kind of self-work he believes civility requires in conditions of deep division. He believes his model, which he calls “civic solitude”, facilitates civic remediation under polarization. Section 4 critically engages with Talisse on this terrain. Section 5 develops an alternative account, "attentional self-work”, rooted in our subjunctive account of civility. We conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of subjunctive civility and attentional self-work for democratic theory and practice.

I argue for broadening contemporary argumentation theory’s normative scope by introducing a novel category of argumentative norms that synthesize virtue-theoretic and procedural rules. These norms are derived from munazara, a discipline distinguished by its systematic integration of ethics into procedural rules. Framed within normative democratic theory, I advocate the requirement of non-authoritarian argumentation for regulating public debate, targeting how reasons are exchanged, not which reasons are offered. My contention is that munazara’s ethical-procedural norms not only enrich argumentation’s normative toolbox but also enable the operationalization of democratically enhancing public debate.

This article presents an approach to how to make reasonable social choices when independent criteria (e.g., prioritarianism, religious freedom) fail to fully determine what to do. The article outlines different explanations of why independent criteria sometimes fail to fully determine what to do and illustrates how they can still be used to eliminate ineligible alternatives, but it is argued that the independent criteria cannot ground a reasonable social choice in these situations. To complement independent criteria when they fail to fully determine what to do, it is suggested that society must engage in public deliberation by way of generating new reasons that can determine how to rank the alternatives. It is suggested that the approach to social choice presented here reveals a way of accepting the relevance of independent criteria for social choice without letting go of the idea that the attitudes of affected parties matter.

The aim of this paper is to highlight an interdependence between procedural and agential norms that undermines their neat separation when appraising argumentation. Drawing on the munāẓara tradition, we carve a space for sequencing in argumentation scholarship. Focusing on the antagonist’s sequencing of critical moves, we identify each sequence’s corresponding values of argumentation: coalescence, reliability, and efficacy. These values arise through the mediation of virtues and simultaneously underpin procedural as well as agential norms. Consequently, an ambiguity between procedure and agent becomes apparent. This ambiguity hints at the potential for a virtue theory of argumentation that draws on procedural norms.

Can democracy be at once radical and Islamic? In this paper I argue that it can. My argument is based on a comparison and contrast of certain aspects in the social-political thought of two contemporary authors: Axel Honneth who defends a particular conception of radical democracy, and Rached al-Ghannouchi who defends a particular conception of the Islamic state. I begin with Honneth’s early articulation of his model of radical democracy as reflexive cooperation, which he presents as an alternative that reconciles Arendtian republicanism and Habermasian proceduralism while avoiding their weaknesses. I also refer to his more mature conception of democracy by way of highlighting his understanding of democracy as a process of constituting civil society. This is significant for the purposes of this paper since it forms the most important link between Honneth’s radical democracy and Ghannouchi’s Islamic model of political rule. I then introduce Ghannouchi’s theoretical account of the Islamic state with a focus on his conception of shura (consultation) in order to bring to the fore both the similarities and dissimilarities with Honneth’s theory of democracy. By this point I will have identified Islamic resources for a conception of democracy that, like Honneth’s democracy as reflexive cooperation, shares with proceduralism an instrumental view of democratic procedures, and with republicanism a strong connection between the pre-political social level and politics. Next, I ask whether this conception of radical Islamic democracy can square its dual commitment to pluralism and Islamic unity. Again, I draw on Ghannouchi’s thought to respond to the challenge, doing so in a way that brings out the agonistic dimension in radical Islamic democracy. I conclude by making explicit how radical Islamic democracy carves out a conceptual space in which proceduralist, republican and agonistic features are combined.

In this paper we draw on the munāẓara tradition to intervene in the debate on whether argument assessment should be agent- or act-based. We introduce and deploy the notion of sequencing – the ordering of the antagonist’s critical moves – to make explicit an ambiguity between the agent and the act of arguing. We show that sequencing is a component of argumentation that inextricably involves the procedure as well as the agent and, therefore, its assessment cannot be adequately undertaken if either agent- or act-based norms are ignored or demoted. We present our intervention through a challenge that virtue argumentation needs to address for it to be considered an alternative to existing theories of argument assessment (Section 2). We then briefly introduce munāẓara and focus on its notion of sequencing to explicate the interdependence between the agent and the procedure (Section 3). Next, we address the challenge by offering an account of the virtuous arguer as a virtuous sequencer (Section 4). In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of sequencing on virtue argumentation and the norms of argumentation.