Rationality, Ethics, and Space: On Situated Universalism and the Self-Interested Acknowledgement of ‘Difference’

Abstract

The author explores the relationship between rationality, ethics, and space. He argues that the contemporary ethical project involves a derationalisation of ethics through a recorporealisation of space. There is a move away from the abstract space of liberal-individualist notions of justice to more enclosed and local spaces of communitarian loyalties and intersubjective communication. Postmodern interventions into the ethical realm lead us to a corporealised, intimate space that recognises difference and is heavy with phenomenological presence. The author argues that the conception of agency which explains adherence to community norms and the acknowledgement of difference is strategically rational self-interest. Situated practices and understandings of the other rely on rational assumptions. The time-space conditions of late modernity bring unlike others into more regular contact and open up the possibilities for more universalist forms of strong (ethical) social coordination based on expanded strategic rationality.