If political dialogue is to identify and redress existing forms of injustice, participants in the dialogue must be able to appeal to the concept of objectivity in order to exchange claims, attitudes, and background beliefs which distort or conceal various forms of injustice.
The conceptions of objectivity traditionally employed in liberal democratic political philosophy are not well-suited to play this role because they are insufficiently sensitive to the social and ideological pluralism of modern societies. Some liberal political philosophers have recently offered more context-sensitive and pluralistic conceptions of objectivity, requiring participants in political dialogue to frame their demands for justice in terms of a conception of justice acceptable to all participants in the dialogue. I argue that this conception of objectivity constitutes an improvement over traditional liberal conceptions.
However, it is ultimately unacceptable because it does not take adequate account of the limited and distorted knowledge that members of dominant social groups tend to possess about the oppression experienced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups. As a result, this conception of objectivity wrongly deems the demands for justice voiced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups to be subjective simply because they seem unreasonable from the limited and distorting standpoint of dominant social groups.
Throughout the modern history of Western political philosophy, objectivity has often served as a bulwark reinforcing the privilege of dominant groups rather than as a fulcrum for subordinate groups to use in undermining that privilege. This is at least partly due to the prevalence in Western philosophy of conceptions of objectivity as either emotional detachment from the immediate circumstances of one’s life, or being able to view social arrangements from the privileged perspective of a distanced observer, or viewing society as it is, independent of any particular observer’s perspective or interpretation. Whatever the theoretical merits of these conceptions of objectivity may be in the abstract, in the concrete circumstances of practical deliberations they all tend to permit the privileged perspectives of dominant social groups to masquerade as objective and thus as valid, by comparison with the subjective and thus invalid perspective of subordinate social groups.
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