Commentary on: Kathryn J. Norlock's "Receptivity as a virtue of (practitioners of) argumentation"

While significant work in argumentation theory (and philosophy of argument) has been devoted to the presentation of arguments, many now argue for renewed attention to responses to arguments, and, in particular, to the epistemic responsibilities of responders who clearly also play a central role in the successes or failures of argumentation. As Kathryn Norlock notes, this renewed attention is motivated, among other things, by concerns about the ancillary adversarial “blood sport” practices of argumentation that are not unknown in philosophy and in other contexts of debate. Since practices of argumentation are significantly communal and relational, Norlock adds, we need to assess these practices as also ethical ones. More particularly, she argues that we can usefully mine insights from an ethic of caring (as advanced by Nell Noddings especially), and she endorses Noddings’s account of receptivity (“the precondition for ethical interaction”) as a virtue that practitioners of argumentation might usefully exhibit. My comments will focus on two central topics: the ambivalent use of “caring” as central to the ethical picture Norlock sets out, and the relationship between the epistemic and the ethical in argumentation as suggested by her account. 2. PROBLEMS WITH “CARING” Norlock does not overlook the fact that there has been some controversy about “an ethics of care/caring,” as that has been proposed as a model for a feminist ethics, particularly when it problematically draws on stereotypes of femininity. Caring can, Norlock notes, “evoke associations with sentimental emotions, femininity, and inarticulate feelings of affection”--clearly something not associated with rigorous logic and argumentation. She draws attention to relationality as the key feature of an ethic of care that she wants to emphasize--particularly as it applies to argument situations, where discussants are understood to be in a dyadic relationship of reciprocal receptivity which is, in Noddings’s words, “not necessarily an emotional mode.” But the “caring” background is still somewhat problematic. I think it is evoked by Norlock’s interlocutor who objects, “But I can go to a conference session without any interest in the other’s well-being.” Norlock responds that some aspects of morally caring about a speaker may not be relevant here, and I would like to see

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