Seyla Benhabib’s Interactive Universalism: Fragile Hope for a Radically Democratic Conversational Model

Abstract

Seyla Benhabib reformulates discourse ethics into a radically democratized strong conversational model to address communitarian, feminist, and postmodernist critiques of Habermasian formulations. This model of interactive universalism extends concepts of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity, enlarged thinking, and generalized and concrete Others. The procedural constraints of interactive universalism provide researchers a normative framework for investigating dialogical or conversational virtues that enable the model to thrive when deliberators engage in practical moral reasoning. Benhabib’s own engagement of critics of discourse ethics suggests one dialogical virtue that has moral weight: a modest, if fragile, hope that this conversational model can change deliberators and democratic discourse for the better.