Ethics and intersubjectivity: Care ethics and discourse ethics in dialogue (Immanuel Kant, Juergen Habermas)

Although an intersubjective conception of self has been incorporated into a number of contemporary moral theories, there is as yet no common understanding regarding what is meant by "intersubjectivity" or regarding what its implications are for moral theory. By contrasting the moral theories of Kant, care ethicists, and Habermas, this dissertation addresses these issues. It distinguishes between relational and communicative intersubjectivity while developing a framework for mapping systematic relations between them. This approach allows the dissertation to account for the ways that an intersubjective conception of self reconfigures the Kantian understanding of morality. Attention to the constitutive role social relations play in the formation of the self adds an important dimension to our understanding of moral agency and opens to view the role of dialogue in moral thinking. At the same time, a socially constituted self would seem to jeopardize the received understanding of Kantian autonomy. Far from requiring that we relinquish a concept of autonomy, it is argued that autonomy is a learned competence that is honed through engagement in the relational and communicative dimensions of social interaction.