Beyond Critique and Polemic: Public Debate On and Offline as a Test for the Ethics of Care

Authors : Ali Özgür Gürsoy

Pages : 61-78

Doi:10.32739/uskudarsbd.9.17.132

View : 31 | Download : 39

Publication Date : 2023-12-31

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This article investigates the state of public communication on and offline as a test case for the viability of care ethics to deal with the fundamental disagreements that characterize our communicative interactions. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I adumbrate two styles of argumentation that I link with two influential modern ethical theories, the critical-deontological and the polemical-utilitarian. I claim that restricting ourselves to these four terms imprisons us to oscillations between two apparently incompatible frameworks that picture public communication either in normative terms or in terms of power politics. Second, I claim that care ethics offers promising conceptual and normative resources to overcome these oscillations between critique and polemic. Third, I show how this is the case because of the unique way in which care ethics seeks to overcome the opposition between dependence and independence by reconfiguring the standard picture of the separation between morality and politics. Finally, I claim that the real limitation of care ethics is not to be found in its lack of universalizable norms or precise standards, but rather in its insufficient questioning of the extent to which disagreement as dissensus might characterize contemporary politics.
Keywords : Bakım etiği, Kritik, Polemik, Kamusal İletişim, Dissensus