Reviews : Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. paper £11.95, xiii + 225 pp (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Metaphysics of Communicative Action: A Critique of Habermas’s Moral Theory
2019
Jürgen Habermas’s communicative theory is characterised by a postmetaphysical account of morality. This perspective stems from Habermas’s appropriation of Modernisation Theory (MT), with the Weberian distinction between questions of taste, truth and rightness. In view of the “disenchantment of the world”, Habermas proclaims the autonomy of science and morality from metaphysical perceptions, and conflates substantive ethics with issues of taste. As I demonstrate, such distinction between ethical and moral reasons takes the validity of MT, along with its epistemological assumptions, as a presupposition for the requirement of universal and impartial normative claims in discourse acts. However, this aprioristic validation of MT is at odds with Habermas’s own view that particular linguistic schemes of reason determine epistemological and truth standards of validity – as in accordance with a Pragmatic Theory of Meaning (PTM). Thus, by challenging Habermas’s differentiation of ethics and morality, I argue that communicative rationality should allow for a substantive account of normative validation, which in my theoretical framework combines elements of Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of traditions, reconfigured into a universalistic project of ethical learning. Furthermore, I contend that once the validity of MT is brought into question through PTM, metaphysical reasons can be rehabilitated for the justification of metaethical principles of communicative action.
Habermas, Discourse Ethics, and Normative Validity
Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy
This paper is an exploration of Habermas' critical reconstructions of the problematic of rationality via critical theory's critique of instrumental reason. It brings together several key ideas ranging from the dialectic of instrumental reason and how it leads to epistemological dissonance to the discursive redemption of the normativity of reason. It sketches, as a concluding reflection, whether or not his ideas may be situated within the larger methodological trajectory of Philippine social science research. The paper thus considers the concepts of discourse, discourse ethics and normative validity as crucially important.
Philosophy & Social Criticism 41(3): 273-91, DOI: 10.1177/1091453714563877
The aim of this article is twofold: to display some of the fruitful starting points in the later Habermas’ principal monograph for the development of a new kind of cognitive sociology; and to indicate the form of such a sociology by critically extrapolating its major parameters from Habermas’ assumptions regarding immanent transcendence, formal pragmatics and reconstructive sociology. The intended cognitive sociology is conceived as a refinement of a hitherto largely implicit dimension of Critical Theory. Its promise is far-reaching: to considerably sharpen the latter’s analytical repertoire and penetration; to draw attention to the need to recognize that the foundations of critique are not to be sought directly in normativity but rather in the cognitively structured normative dimension; and to stimulate consideration of the materialist implications of the rootedness of the human cognitive endowment in natural evolution and phylogenesis and the role of the resultant cognitive structures in the construction and elaboration of sociocultural forms of life.
A Pragmatic Approach to Morality: An Application of Jürgen Habermas' Discourse Ethic
Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) attempts to inject rationality into the public sphere by proposing a theory of language and its implied "discourse ethics" as a mechanism for consensus formation. This paper intends to argue this consensus is crucial for modern post-secular pluralistic societies to secure normative values in order to function as a state. By building on John Searle's Speech Act Theory and Ralph Johnson's approach to informal logic, I explicate how a discourse ethic can supplant the unified traditional religious authority and socially integrate decentered liberal democracies of the West.
"Habermas and the Project of Immanent Critique" (PRE-REVIEW VERSION)
Constellations, 2013
According to Jürgen Habermas, his Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental nor a metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to clarify the normative foundations of critical theory. In response to this insight, Habermas develops a novel account of normativity, which locates the normative demands of critical theory within the socially instituted practice of communicative understanding. Although Habermas has claimed otherwise, this new foundation for critical theory constitutes a novel and innovative form of "immanent critique." To argue for and to clarify this claim, I offer, in section 1, a formal account of immanent critique and distinguish between two different ways of carrying out such a critique.
Habermas's project of social criticism.pdf
This work maintains that Jürgen Habermas‘s moral and political theories rely on a modified version of Kant‘s notion of normativity. Taking this as a starting point, it examines this component in light of criticisms inspired by Hegel‘s critique of Kant. The text shows that Habermas can answer most of the criticisms that could arise from Hegel‘s critique. That said, Hegel‘s criticism of the will as a tester of maxims does apply to Habermas. This criticism states that Kant cannot connect the universal will of morality and the particular will of the empirical subject because he rules out particular contents as susceptible of being universalized. And it can apply to Habermas because he set strict limits to what can count as a content which may bleed into the justification of moral norms and, following Kenneth Baynes – in his interpretation of Habermas‘s theory –, of legal and political norms. To be justifiable, – according to Habermas – these norms need to embody generalizable interests and they cannot be based on particular interests. However, Habermas infers from this that norms can only be justified with impartial, that is agent neutral reasons, and cannot be justified with agent-relative reasons. From this, emerges the question whether and to what extent a theory of this sort can successfully include particular contents (for example a particular agents‘ real interests, inclinations and needs). The strict version of the generalizability of norms seems to occlude this possibility. Nonetheless, it is possible to rebut this criticism by slackening the strong version of normative justification that Habermas has built into the theory. By means of an analysis of two elements that he incorporates into his reconstruction of the normative point of view, namely, the concept of ideal role taking and the notion of mutual recognition, it is possible to argue that the loosening of the strict notion of generalizability is a modification that does not contradict and actually coheres with Habermas‘s Kantian concept of moral reason, and this operation fortifies the theory in the face of the Hegelian criticism of the will as a tester of maxims. To develop these issues, this work is divided in two parts with two chapters each part. Part I is an analysis of Habermas‘s notion of moral reason and autonomy and it reconstructs its normative Kantianism. After that, it discusses Hegelian criticisms of Habermas‘s moral theory. Part II focuses on Habermas‘s political Kantianism in Between Facts and Norms and in the debate with Rawls and it examines Hegelian criticisms of that Kantianism.