Abstract

For discourse ethicists like Jurgen Habermas, moral deliberation is limited to issues of justice about which universal agreement in principle can be achieved through rational argumentation. Drawing on recent writings by Iris Murdoch, Sabina Lovibond, and Stanley Cavell, I argue that the restrictions imposed on moral argumentation in Habermas' model deny important avenues of moral deliberation. To achieve an understanding even on abstract issues of justice, we must engage in a broader range of discourses through which value concepts can be shared and clarified. Through the way it speaks about a variety of human situations, literary discourse confronts us with previously unseen moral features of our shared situations. Precisely such confrontation provides the basis for genuine mutual understanding between agents with different moral conceptions. Further, this broader view of moral deliberation allows us to secure the possibility of discursive responses to racism, sexism, and homophobia. Such responses can combat forms of alienation caused by forms of social injustice that deeply threaten mutual intelligibility. In the end, only by achieving the conditions for a democratic republic with a thriving civil society can we fully engage in the interactions that bring mutual understanding as moral and political equals