Civil discourse as a source of social consensus: significance in wartime
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31874/2309-1606-2023-29-1-3Keywords:
civil discourse, social consensus, legitimation, democratic education, illegitimate, coercion, social values, social normAbstract
Peculiarities of civil discourse as a source and method of establishing social consensus are considered. The purpose of this article is to show the potential of civil discourse as a basis for obtaining a stable public consensus. The differences of civil discourse as oriented to a pragmatic result, in contrast to philosophical discourse as oriented to the search for truth for its own sake and rhetorical discourse as oriented to victory in a debate over an opponent at any cost within the rules of rhetoric, are clarified. The mutual conditionality of the development of the democratic culture of society and the unceasing deployment of open and free public discourse is emphasized. It was found that public discourse arises as an attempt to establish understanding between representatives of local discourses within individual social communities. Thus, social consensus emerges as a overlapping consensus between individual social communities of a certain society. Such public consensus appears as the next, higher level of legitimation that can be gained in open discourse. The importance of illegitimate coercion has been rethought: violence that destroys morality cannot be accepted under any circumstances, but attempts to temporarily limit the effect of morality in emergency situations (in particular, in conditions of war) can become the subject of civil discourse in order to reach a public consensus on the necessity and moral justification of armed resistance to aggression. Civil discourse is even more in demand in the space of global civil society, in particular, to achieve international consensus on the need to ensure the military defeat of the aggressor country. Another direction of the application of civil discourse is the determination of tasks and ways of post-war reconstruction of the victim country and post-war punishment and atonement for the crimes committed by the aggressor state.
References
Arendt H. (1970). Macht und Gewalt. München: Piper.
Barnes, P., Morris, M. P., Pierce, A. L., & Shaffer, T. J. (2022). Answering the call: Offering and analyzing civil discourse opportunities in undergraduate public affairs education. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 29(2), 213–231 https://doi.org/10.1080/152368 03.2022.2148604
Benjamin, M. (1995). The Value of Consensus. Bulger R. L., Meyer Bobby, E. & Fineberg, H. V. (Ed.). Society’s Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pp. 241–260.
Birnie, B. (2016). Promoting Civil Discourse in the Classroom. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 52. 52-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00228958.2016.1156508
Boichenko, M. & Rudenko Y. (2020). Sources of state sovereignty and the idea of national identity. [In Ukrainian]. Political Science Bulletin, 85, 158–173. https://doi. org/10.17721/2415-881х.2020.85.158–173.
Boychenko, M. (2016). The ethos of communicative communities as a basis for the generalization of social values: limits of conceptual understanding. [In Ukrainian]. Bulletin of Lviv National University. Series: Philosophical Sciences, 18, 172–182.
Flierman, R., & Welton, M. (2021). De Excidio Patriae: civic discourse in Gildas’ Britain. Early Medieval Europe, 29, 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12475
Fromm E. (1973). Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Gergen, K. J. (2001). Social Construction in Context. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Grechko, K. (2013). Problems of global civil society in terms of communicative and network paradigms. Philosophy and political science in the context of modern culture, 4(6), 112–116.
Hrudka, O. (2020). Homo sacer: a man without attributes. [In Ukrainian]. Krytyka. Book reviews. https://krytyka.com/ua/articles/homo-sacer-lyudyna-bez-vlastyvostey
Habermas, J. (2000). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. from German by A. Onishko. [In Ukrainian]. Lviv: Litopys.
Habermas, J. (2001). Philosophical discourse of modernity. Trans. from German by V. Kuplin. [In Ukrainian]. Kyiv: The Fourth Wave.
Hawkins, K. (2014). Richard Dawkins: ‘Immoral’ not to abort Down’s foetuses. BBC News, Ouch. 21 August 2014. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-28879659
Humphries, E. K. (2019). Civic Discourse. Bob Graham Center for Public Service University of Florida. https://reference.jrank.org/governance/Civic_Discourse.html
Legate, M. (2018). Civil Discourse in the Classroom: Preparing Students for Academic and Civic Participation. Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English, 138. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/138
Lehrer, K., & Wagner, C. (1981). Consensus and Philosophical Issues. In: Rational Consensus in Science and Society. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8520-9_1
Leskes, A. (2012). A Plea for Civil Discourse: Needed, the Academy. https://www.aacu. org/liberaleducation/2013/fall/leskes
MacMahan, J. (2002). The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. New York: Oxford University Press
Massey, C. R. (2000). Civic Discourse Amid Cultural Transformation. 12 Cardozo Studies in Law & Literature 193. http://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/1132
Rawls, J. (2001). The theory of Justice / trans. from English by O. Mokrovolskyi. [In Ukrainian]. Kyiv: Osnovy.
Rogozha, M. (2022). Overlapping consensus in the space of public morality (On John Rawls’ political constructivism). [In Ukrainian]. Philosophical thought, (1), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.15407/fd2022.01.051
Sweet-Cushman, J. (2021). A Format-Flexible Pedagogy of Civil Discourse. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 180–181. doi:10.1017/S1049096520001547
The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force. (2011). A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. The U.S. Department of Education. October 5, 2011. 118 p. https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/college-learning-democracys-future/crucible-moment.pdf
Vallor, S. (2021). Social Networking and Ethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-social-networking/
Walker, P., & Lovat, T. (2022).The Moral Authority of Consensus. The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, 47(3), 443–456. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhac007
Downloads
-
PDF (Українська)
Downloads: 141
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication;
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
