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Conflicts on social, ethical and political issues are an undeniable feature of life in contemporary (liberal) democracies.¹ There has been much debate in recent times on the 'struggles for recognition" to which they give rise and how we might go about dealing with these. Part of the debate has focused on what I shall refer to as ethical disagreements: on the diversity of deeply felt ethical commitments and convictions that result from apparently conflicting substantive ideas of the good life. These widely diverging, deeply felt ethical convictions and commitments are, at the very least, a potential source of conflict. (I am using the category of the ethical to refer to context-specific convictions and commitments that are justified through reference to ideas of the good life. By the latter I mean the horizons of values within which individual human beings develop their subjectivities. Here one must be careful not to interpret the notion of substantive ideas of the good life too rigidly or narrowly. I take it that, from the point of view of any individual subjectivity, these ideas may be multiple and shifting; moreover, I take it that the ethical commitments and convictions that result from ideas of the good life pertain to a wide variety of questions: they include interpretations of conceptions of individuality, sexual identity, racial identity, nationality, religion, and so forth).

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27445-1_11

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