Situating the Self

Introduction

The book collects essays written by Seyla Benhabib in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She defends the universalism of Habermas’s discourse ethics – norms are valid if all those affected could agree to them in open discussion – but reworks it in response to three challenges: communitarianism, feminism and postmodernism. Her best-known contribution is the distinction between the “generalised other”, whom we treat as a bearer of the same rights and duties as ourselves, and the “concrete other”, a particular person with a history, needs and feelings; a full moral point of view must take in both. Benhabib calls the resulting position an “interactive universalism”.

More works by Seyla Benhabib

• 2004The Rights of Others