The Ideal of Objectivity in Political Dialogue
ABSTRACT: If political dialogue is to identify and redress existing forms of injustice, participants in the dialogue must be able to appeal to the concept of objectivity in order to exchange claims, attitudes, and background beliefs which distort or conceal various forms of injustice. The conceptions of objectivity traditionally employed in liberal democratic political philosophy are not well-suited to play this role because they are insufficiently sensitive to the social and ideological pluralism of modern societies. Some liberal political philosophers have recently offered more context-sensitive and pluralistic conceptions of objectivity, requiring participants in political dialogue to frame their demands for justice in terms of a conception of justice acceptable to all participants in the dialogue. I argue that this conception of objectivity constitutes an improvement over traditional liberal conceptions. However, it is ultimately unacceptable because it does not take adequate account of the limited and distorted knowledge that members of dominant social groups tend to possess about the oppression experienced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups. As a result, this conception of objectivity wrongly deems the demands for justice voiced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups to be subjective simply because they seem unreasonable from the limited and distorting standpoint of dominant social groups.
Throughout the modern history of Western political philosophy, objectivity has often served as a bulwark reinforcing the privilege of dominant groups rather than as a fulcrum for subordinate groups to use in undermining that privilege. This is at least partly d...
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...thout insisting that all evidence about the nature of justice be equally accessible to every member of society, regardless of the epistemic limitations and distortions of that person’s social standpoint. One way this might be achieved is to define objectivity in terms of each person’s responsibility to seek out, uncover, and undermine whatever impedes social dialogue about matters of justice, whether it is an incorrigible appeal to incommunicable evidence of the existence of a purported injustice or a lazy assumption that those who suffer injustice must bear the sole responsibility for bringing that injustice to light. More could surely be said about how to develop a conception of objectivity in this direction, but that will have to wait for the discussion period.
NOTES
(1) See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 140-205.
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Mearsheimer J. J. (2010). Structural Realism. International Relations Thoeries, Discipline and Diversity (Second Edition), p.77-94
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Tennant, Neil, perf. Dreaming of the Queen. Prod. Chris Lowe. Kobalt Records, 1994. Web. 1 Apr 2014. .
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