Toward Empathic Agonism: Conflicting Vulnerabilities in Urban Wetland Governance

Critics of attempts to achieve consensus through Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’ dismiss this as unachievable due to participants' selfishness and irrationality, and the inevitability of power relations. Instead, Mouffe advocates ‘agonistic pluralism’, a dynamic process of continual debate grounded in mutual respect. In this paper I argue that, for this to succeed, we need to recognize and embrace the role of emotion in moral reasoning. Here, I examine a dispute over wetland management in suburban New Jersey. Each side articulated distinct understandings of what was and was not vulnerable, backed by emotional appeals partly based in self-interest but that also encompassed care and concern for others. Each side accused the other of being irrational and immoral, drawing ‘moral microboundaries’ between them. I conclude that participants in a public debate may not simply be pursing self-serving goals, nor might open communication resolve their differences. Instead, each may be deeply convinced that he or she is advocating the most rational and moral course of action. This questions the very notion of a unitary, potentially agreed-upon ‘common good’ and instead challenges us to attempt to grasp each other's moral worlds, and in particular the emotional bases of these, through the seeming oxymoron that I term ‘empathic agonism’.