Abstract
Richard Rorty’s approach to moral discourse, like his approach to theoretical discourse, is radically deflationary. It involves what Jürgen Habermas has aptly described as a “liquidation of unconditional claims”: talk of obligation is replaced by talk of solidarity, just as talk of truth is replaced by talk of justification.2 As Rorty sees it, there is no such thing as an “unconditional claim.” “This is a notion,” he writes, “for which I can find no use.”3 All claims are conditioned by the contexts of practice within which they are made and defended. From these contexts there is no escape into a rarified realm of transcendent truth or duty. But in rejecting a platonistic perspective on our practices, Rorty seems to forfeit the critical capacities required for reforming them. Without a notion of “unconditional validity,” we would appear to lack the resources for contesting the prevailing moral and theoretical consensuses of our respective times and places. In the absence of any further authority, the majority becomes — in effect — a law unto itself.
We should not then think so much of what the majority will say about us, but what he will say who understands justice and injustice …
Plato1
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Notes
Plato, Crito, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 48a.
Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Revised Edition, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), 248.
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 307–308.
Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 87. Note that Habermas’s technical use of the term “discourse” is more narrowly extended than its use by other philosophers in reference to discussion or “talk.”
Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 65. Formulated in this way, (U) is ambiguous as to whether the reference to “everyone’s interests” is meant in a “strong” sense — to refer to identical interests shared by all — or in a “weak” sense — to refer to everyone’s particular interests. In other words, it is ambiguous as between a collective and a distributive interpretation. In other writings, Habermas appears to endorse the strong interpretation. However, for a discussion of some of the difficulties that arise in connection with either interpretation, see Gordon Finlayson, “Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Theory Apply to Discourse Ethics?” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 41–45.
Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1990): 360–361.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 323. Cf. Habermas’s remark that “[l]anguage games only work because they presuppose idealizations that transcend any particular language game; as a necessary condition of possibly reaching understanding, these idealizations give rise to the perspective of an agreement that is open to criticism on the basis of validity claims.” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 199.
Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 266. Quoted by Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 40.
Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 86.
Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 410. Perhaps Kohlberg means that this is what is held to be right by a person at this stage of development. But this raises certain concerns about the possibility of adequately accounting for moral education in the way Kohlberg does. After all, is a child at this stage already sufficiently initiated into the practices of a moral community in order to warrant attributing to him or her developed conceptions of duty — ones which nevertheless differ importantly from those implicit in the community of which she is a part?
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), 113.
Maeve Cooke writes, “In the case of questions of moral validity, universal agreement achieved under ideal justificatory conditions does not simply authorize validity, it guarantees the rightness of moral judgements. In short, whereas Habermas insists on the disjunction between truth and justification, he defends a purely epistemic conception of moral truth. Ideal rational acceptability exhausts the meaning of moral validity.” Maeve Cooke, “Critical Theory and Religion,” in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 233.
Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), 38.
Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, ed. and trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 8.
Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 143.
Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983), 12.
Jürgen Habermas, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 231.
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 15. Indeed, even as early as 1971 Habermas recognized that religious practice, however confused, can harbor authentic human interests. Thus, one task of postmetaphysical philosophy is to “take into itself an interest in liberation and reconciliation, which till then had been interpreted in religious terms.” Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, 23.
Habermas does not consider the question of whether a moral concept can retain its intelligibility when abstracted from the religious context in which it was originally embedded. Indeed, as I point out below, his entire project rests on a strict distinction between justification and application, which is subject to the objection that a norm would be unintelligible without some reference to its mode of application. For a discussion of how certain moral concepts can appear to live one in the absence of the religious framework of thought essential to their sense, see James Conant, “Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,” in Religion and Morality, ed. D.Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 250–298.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 28: Law and Political Theory, trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1966), Q.94, Art. 4.
Georgia Warnke, “Communicative Rationality and Cultural Values,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131.
Robert Piercey, “Not Choosing Between Morality and Ethics,” The Philosophical Forum 32, no. 1 (2001): 66–67.
Frank I. Michelman, “The Problem of Constitutional Interpretive Disagreement: Can ‘Discourses of Application’ Help?” in Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Catherine Kemp (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114.
J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), 102.
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33.
Robert Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 363–364.
McDowell writes, “It is not to be denied that behaviour that is in fact virtuous can in some cases be found unsurprising through being what one would expect anyway, given an acceptably ascribed desire that is independently intelligible… Such coincidences constitute possible points of entry for an outsider trying to work his way into appreciation of a moral outlook…. What is questionable is whether there need always be an independently intelligible desire to whose fulfillment a virtuous action, if rational at all, can be seen as conducive.” John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 83–84.
Interestingly, Habermas has much in common, on this point, with Rorty, who writes: “[W]hen I face a choice between incriminating my child or breaking my country’s laws by committing perjury, I start looking around for some ethical principles. I may not find any that help, but that is another question.” Richard Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantai Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 41. What Rorty apparently fails to appreciate is that the choice he describes would pose a moral problem only for someone already in possession of a number of ethical or moral commitments. Indeed, I suspect that the nature of the problem — assuming it is indeed a moral problem at all — could not even be articulated without the use of distinctly moral terms like “betrayal,” “lies,” “duty,” and “obligation.”
Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 172–173.
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© 2005 Richard Amesbury
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Amesbury, R. (2005). The Force of Reasons: Habermas on Norms and Justification. In: Morality and Social Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_2
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