Post-Modern Cosmopolitanism & Discourse Ethics

This paper sets out an approach – post-modern cosmopolitanism – that seeks to allow moral conversation and moral justification between groups and individuals who do not share any substantive values. It does this without denying the plurality of value systems (universalism) and without allowing groups to retreat behind inviolable walls of ethical self-containment (relativism). The approach relies on many aspects of Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, but it takes discourse ethics in a new direction, leading to a unique approach. I start the paper by showing the problems with the current dominant alternatives – universalism and relativism – both in terms of their lack of internal consistency and in terms of their inability to mitigate and resolve conflict in practice. I then introduce some of the important concepts that form the basis of the post-modern cosmopolitan approach: discourse ethics, communicative reason, the principles of discourse, and the idea of fundamental goals. Following this I discuss the nature of ‘reasons,’ in order to make sense of the claim of discourse ethics that we should engage with each other via an ‘exchange of reasons,’ and also to outline some of the key distinctions necessary for understanding the praxis of post-modern cosmopolitanism, the ‘cosmopolitan conversation’. Finally I examine some of the deficiencies in Habermas’s discourse ethics, and show how post-modern cosmopolitanism can overcome them. I conclude by outlining the nature of the ‘cosmopolitan conversation,’ and gesture at how we might begin to apply post-modern cosmopolitanism in real-world situations.