Jürgen Habermas is one of the very few indisputably great moral and social thinkers of our time. We must situate our own thought with respect to his in order to know what it is we truly think, even when we then find that we must disagree. Over a number of years, Habermas has been working out a new conception of moral philosophy that he calls “discourse ethics” (Diskursethik). To some extent, this line of thought has developed at a very abstract level. Perhaps its most prominent feature has been the attempt to find the source of morality in a general principle of universalization that any agent must assume just by virtue of being a competent speaker with an understanding of the concept of reasons for action. It cannot be said that this attempt has met with evident success. Like all efforts to draw some fundamental set of moral obligations from the notion of practical rationality as such, Habermas's reflections at this level seem caught in a well-known but inescapable dilemma: either the idea Habermas proposes of practical rationality (or “communicative reason,” as he terms it) proves too weak to deliver any moral principles, or it is made to yield the desired conclusions only by virtue of moral content having been built into it from the outset (see Chapter 2).

These exercises in “first philosophy” have been, however, only one part, and doubtlessly not the most deeply felt, of Habermas's project of a “discourse ethics.”