Social Inclusion and the Ethics of Citation: Introduction

In the heady days of Enlightenment certitude, the ideal of critical objectivity was regularly asserted over against the supposedly uncritical habits of thinking that were bequeathed from the past. “Reason” needed to prevail over tradition. This binary contrast is no longer tenable, even among trenchant defenders of modernity; any effort to recover Enlightenment values now requires complex defenses of public reasoning. In the influential account of discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas, for example, scholarly arguments might be viewed through the lens of an ideal speech situation in which rigorous and inclusive debate is informed by comprehensive scrutiny of available evidence.1 The ideal speech situation is a norm, rather than a reality, because numerous inequalities of power and resources inevitably influence scholarly proceedings. What aims to be an ideal speech situation often turns out to be, on closer inspection, yet one more example of systematically distorted communication.2 In the wake of a pandemic that has starkly revealed the inequalities of the world, the implications for biblical scholarship are clear: minoritized voices need