260 Addendum Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made an influential proposal to base this justification on ‘reason’ (understood as the human, rational mind). In Kant’s thinking, moral precepts are reasoned from each individual’s application of universal rational reasoning. In contrast, Hegel (1770-1831) argued that people are part of a community that determines people’s fundamental values and norms, and that this community constitutes how people understand themselves. In Hegel’s view, Kant’s individual, rational approach does insufficient justice to this social dimension of people’s self-understanding. Identity-related moral conflicts are so intractable because particular, fundamental values associated with membership in a specific community clash. Kant’s universal precepts may conflict with these fundamental values, while - according to Hegel - from the perspective of such an identity, Kant’s universalism is unjustified. So, on the one hand there is the idea that it is possible to justify universal solutions, on the other hand that people are inevitably part of a community with specific (particular) fundamental values. The tension between these basic ideas is an important theme in philosophy since Kant and Hegel and is the underlying philosophical issue in discerning solutions to identity-related moral conflicts. After all, such conflicts involve non-negotiable, particular and fundamental values of different parties that cannot be expressed and realized at the same time. How, then, can a stable solution ever be discerned that is justified from the perspective of each identity, in other words universally just? Since Kant and Hegel, various theories have been developed that try to resolve the tension between the universal and the particular. I investigate whether three influential theoretical lines of thought can distinguish a stable and just solution for IRMCs. These lines of thought have in common that justice is defined in one way or another in a form of coordination or deliberation between conflicting parties. All three can therefore be regarded as part of a ‘deliberative tradition’. The lines of thought differ in terms of strategy on how to deal with identity differences. I distinguish the following strategies: • Strategy 1: privatizing identity differences: in this strategy a distinction is made between a public and private sphere. In the private sphere everyone is free to live according to their own particular values, but the public sphere is organized according to universally justified norms. An influential elaboration of this idea can be found in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. In distinguishing solutions from IRMCs, the challenge here seems to be how to bring and keep the clashing identities in the private sphere. After all, an IRMC is already a public conflict. • Strategy 2: arguing from identity differences: in this strategy, identity differences are not relegated to the private sphere, but are fully admitted in the public debate about just norms. The idea is that any conceivable norm or value may be presented in a dialogue in which agreement is reached on the basis of rational arguments (and not, for example, through the exercise of power). Jürgen Habermas’ Discourse Ethics is an influential elaboration of this strategy. In advance, the challenge of this line of thought seems to be to show how rational argumentation is possible about fundamental values.
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