Social Harm, Political Judgment, and the Pragmatics of Universal Justification

How is to be policy action guided in cases of conflict among basic rights? The clash among rights of equal standing within a society’s broad conception of justice is often articulated in the terms of unfairness. By drawing a distinction between justice and fairness, and by exploring the pragmatics of justification in cases of conflicts among rights, this chapter adumbrates a discourse-theoretic model of political judgment – what I name ‘critical deliberative judgment’. The parameters of this model emerge first from a particular reconstitution of Critical Theory (as a tradition of social philosophy) that focuses attention on the emancipation-oriented, rather than on the consensus-generating, dimension of rights: the question “What is justice?” gives precedence to “Who suffers?”. The model is further elaborated by way of a pragmatist political epistemology that accounts for the way specific experiences of injustice affect publics’ identification of what issues count as relevant ones in debates over conflicting rights. Finally, the model is completed with an account of the critical and emancipatory work democratic practices of open dialogue are able to perform, ultimately relating local sensitivities to universal demands of justice by disclosing the socio-structural (rather that agent-specific or culture-specific) sources of injustice.