Quentin Skinner Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
Finally, there is the still more rhetorically minded view associated with Renaissance humanism: that our watchword ought to be audi alteram partem, always listen to the other side. This commitment stems from the belief that, in moral and political debate, it will always be possible to speak in utramque partem, and will never be possible to couch our moral or political theories in deductive form. The approprate model will always be that of a dialogue, the appropriate stance a willingness to negotiate over rival intuitions concerning the applicability of evaluative terms. We must strive to reaching understanding and resolve disputes in a conversational way. p. 15-16
Ricoeur, Le Juste The Just
"Let us define 'ethical aim' by the following three terms: aiming at the 'good life' with and for others, in just institutions."
Bonnie Honig Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
The lesson of the contest between virtue and virtú, is that politics never gets things right, over, and done with. The conclusion is not nihilistic but radically democratic. To accept and embrace the perpetuity of contest is to reject the dream of displacement, the fantasy that the right laws or constitution might some day free us from the responsiblity for, (and, indeed, the burden of) politics.
Jurgen Habermas Between Facts and Norms
Moreover, a moral-practical self-understanding of modernity as a whole is articulated in the controversies we have carried on since the seventeenth century about the best constitution of the political community. This self-understanding is attested to both by a universalistic moral consciousness and by the liberal design of the constitutional state. Discourse theory attempts to reconstruct this normative self-understanding in a way that resists both scientistic reductions and aesthetic assimilations.
