Stevens, Katharina

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Browsing Stevens, Katharina by Subject "Adversarial argumentation"

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    Charity for moral reasons? – A defense of the principle of charity in argumentation
    (Taylor & Francis, 2021) Stevens, Katharina
    In this paper I argue for a pro tanto moral duty to be charitable in argument. Further, I argue that the amount of charitable effort required varies depending on the type of dialogue arguers are engaged in. In non-institutionalized contexts, arguers have influence over the type of dialogue that will be adopted. Arguers are therefore responsible with respect to charity on two levels: First, they need to take reasons for charity into account when determining the dialogue-type. Second, they need to invest the amount of effort towards charity required by the dialogue-type.
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    Silence at the meta-level: a story about argumentative cruelty
    (Penn State University Press, 2022) Stevens, Katharina
    One way in which we may be able to legitimately determine the norms that will guide our arguments is by using meta-dialogues. Unfortunately, situations where meta-dialogues are actually needed are also often situations of power inequality so that arguers may feel that it is too risky to attempt initiating a meta-dialogue. I argue that argumentative smothering is a high risk here, and that we therefore cannot rely on meta-dialogues to solve the problems of determining argumentative norms.
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    The roles we make others take: thoughts on the ethics of arguing
    (Springer, 2019) Stevens, Katharina
    Feminist argumentation theorists have criticized the Dominant Adversarial Model in argumentation, according to which arguers should take proponent and opponent roles and argue against one another. The model is deficient because it creates disadvantages for feminine gendered persons in a way that causes significant epistemic and practical harms. In this paper, I argue that the problem that these critics have pointed out can be generalized: whenever an arguer is given a role in the argument the associated tasks and norms of which she cannot fulfill, she is liable to suffer morally significant harms. One way to react to this problem is by requiring arguers to set up argument structures and allocate roles so that the argument will be reasons-reflective in as balanced a way as possible. However, I argue that this would create to heavy a burden. Arguers would then habitually have to take on roles that require them to divert time and energy away from the goals that they started arguing for and instead serve the goal of ideal reasons-reflectiveness. At least prima facie arguers should be able to legitimately devote their time and energy towards their own goals. This creates a problem: On the one hand, structures that create morally significant harms for some arguers should be avoided—on the other hand, arguers should be able to take argument-roles that allow them to devote themselves to their own argumentative goals. Fulfilling the second requirement for some arguers will often create the morally significant harms for their interlocutors. There are two possible solutions for this problem: first, arguers might be required to reach free, consensual agreements on the structure they will adopt for their argument and the way they will distribute argumentative roles. I reject this option as both fundamentally unfeasible and practically unrealistic, based on arguments developed by theorists like Krabbe and Jacobs. I argue that instead, we should take a liberal view on argument ethics. Arguers should abide by moral side constraints to their role taking. They should feel free to take roles that will allow them to concentrate on their argumentative goals, but only if this does not create a situation in which their interlocutors are pushed into a role that that they cannot effectively play.