Abstract
This chapter is an elaborate examination of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics. Just as assertoric sentences used in constative speech acts are differentiated from normative sentences used in regulative speech acts, assertoric sentences constitute the truth while normative sentences constitute the rightness, although both types of sentences can be used cognitively in different ways. It is also suggested that no moral norms can be grounded in an absolute way (letztbegründet), if one assumes a meta-ethical theory of moral cognitivism without the presupposition of a moral realism; one can only say that for some moral norms there are just no alternatives (alternativenlos). And this lack of alternatives (Alternativenlosigkeit) manifests itself again and again through every moral argumentation.
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Notes
- 1.
In short, Putnam argues for a cognitive theory of morality that presupposes a moral realism, while Habermas defends a cognitive theory of morality without presupposing moral realism. That is why Habermas cannot help being a moral minimalist, but that does not make him wrong.
- 2.
See EA 11. In this essay I use the expression “moral theory,” because Habermas himself said that the name of “discourse ethics” might have been misleading (see EA 101).
- 3.
EA 11.
- 4.
See Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Ethik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013), 29–30.
- 5.
Lutz-Bachmann, Ethik, 33.
- 6.
“Normen [sind] darauf angewiesen, dass legitim geordnete interpersonale Beziehungen immer wieder hergestellt werden.…Demgegenüber sind wir konzeptuell zu der Annahme genötigt, dass Sachverhalte auch unabhängig davon existieren, ob sie mit Hilfe wahrer Sätze konstatiert werden oder nicht” (MkH 71). Without this differentiation, naturalistic cognitivism revokes the difference between empirically “true” and morally “right”; see Lutz-Bachmann, Ethik, 33.
- 7.
Habermas discusses this in the context of the “ambiguous nature of ought-validity” (Sollgeltung); see MkH 71.
- 8.
Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Prussian (later German and Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences, 29 vols (Berlin: George Reimer (later Walter de Gruyter), 1900–), vol. 6, p. 333.
- 9.
MkH 71.
- 10.
MkH 70.
- 11.
MkH 72.
- 12.
MkH 77.
- 13.
MkH 86.
- 14.
MkH 93.
- 15.
Robert Alexy, “Eine Theorie des praktischen Diskurses,” in Normenbegründung, Normendurchsetzung, ed. Willi Oelmüller (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1978), 40–1.
- 16.
“Die Präsuppositionen selbst können nun in der Weise identifiziert werden, dass man demjenigen, der die zunächst hypothetisch angebotenen Rekonstruktionen bestreitet, vor Augen führt, wie er sich in performative Widersprüche verwickelt” (MkH 100). Cf. Apel: “By a transcendental pragmatic self-contradiction, I understand a performative contradiction between the content of a proposition and the intentional content of the act of proposing the proposition”; Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 8.
- 17.
MkH 105.
- 18.
See MkH 106.
- 19.
MkH 103.
- 20.
According to Habermas, we can say as the result of our consensus whether a norm is right or not. This is the point of consensual cognitivism.
- 21.
Putnam says that “very likely Habermas’s actual response will turn out to be different from both”; Hilary Putnam, “Values and Norms,” in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 120. According to my understanding, Habermas would not hold the first view, and the second could not be criticized.
- 22.
The discussion developed in two essays that were published before Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: “Wahrheitstheorien” (1972), and “Was heißt Universalpragmatik” (1976), in Habermas, Vorstudien zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 127–83 and 353–440.
- 23.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 122.
- 24.
See Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Reflexive Letztbegründung (Freiburg: Alber, 1985), 73.
- 25.
Albrecht Wellmer, Ethik und Dialog (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 101–2.
- 26.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 126.
- 27.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 127. Cf. Putnam, “Antwort auf Jürgen Habermas,” in Hilary Putnam und die Tradition des Pragmatismus, ed. Marie-Luise Raters and Marcus Willaschek (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 307.
- 28.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 128.
- 29.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 119.
- 30.
Habermas, “Werte und Normen: Ein Kommentar zu Hilary Putnams Kantischem Pragmatismus,” in Hilary Putnam und die Tradition des Pragmatismus, 299.
- 31.
MkH 96.
- 32.
MkH 113.
- 33.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 122.
- 34.
See Putnam, “Antwort auf Jürgen Habermas,” 309.
- 35.
Putnam, “Antwort auf Jürgen Habermas,” 309.
- 36.
EA 119.
- 37.
“The moral theorist can take part as affected person, if applicable as expert, but he cannot direct these discourses” (MkH 104).
- 38.
Putnam, “Values and Norms,” 116.
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Funaba, Y. (2016). On Jürgen Habermas’s Cognitive Theory of Morality. In: Kim, H., Hoeltzel, S. (eds) Transcendental Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9_13
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