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Discourse Ethics and Moral Rationalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2009
Abstract
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I raise the following question: can the ethical thought of Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel provide us with a way of showing that morality is a rational requirement? The answer I give is that (unfortunately) it cannot. I argue for this claim by showing that a decisive objection to Alan Gewirth’s line of thought in Reason and Morality also applies to discourse ethical arguments that try to show an inescapable commitment to a moral principle.
RÉSUMÉ: La pensée ethique de Jurgen Habermas et Karl-Otto Apel peut-elle nous fournir une façon de montrer que la moralité répond à un besoin rationnel? Ma réponse, malheureusement, est que non, elle ne le peut pas. Je défends cet argument en montrant qu’une objection décisive à ce courant de pensée, tel qu’il est présenté par Alan Gerwirth Raison et Moralité, s’applique aussi aux arguments ethiques qui essaient de prouver leur lien incontournable avec un principe moral.
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- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 373 - 386
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2009
References
Notes
1 See, for instance, Alan Gewirth in Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Christine Korsgaard in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Allen Wood also reads Kant as offering this sort of argument in Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). In addition, Korsgaard offers her own version of the argument she finds in Kant in her The Sources of Normativity. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2 The literature here is voluminous. However, I find Loren Lomasky to have the most devastating criticism of this sort of project in his “Gewirth’s Generation of Rights.” (Philosophical Quarterly 1981(31), pp. 248-53).
3 As Nagel puts it in The Possibility of Altruism: morality is grounded in something from which we cannot “escape by begging off,” p. 4.
4 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, p. 122.
5 Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality, p. 41.
6 Ibid., p. 52.
7 Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, p. 17.
8 Ibid.
9 Christine Korsgaard would later note the inadequacy of her argument here and offer her much maligned “private reasons argument” to fill in this gap.
10 Gewirth, Reason and Morality, pp. 66, 104, 110.
11 Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen and Christian Lenhardt (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), p. 65.
12 Ibid., p. 58.
13 Ibid.
14 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action V1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 38.
15 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 58; see also The Theory of Communicative Action V1, p. 302.
16 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 58.
17 Ibid., p. 102.
18 Ibid., p. 130.
19 Ibid., p. 100.
20 Ibid., p. 211.
21 Habermas refers to (U) as a “moral principle” in several places. See, for instance, Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 163.
22 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 84, 130.
23 This is explicit in his “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 1–20) and implicit in his discussion of Apel in Justification and Application, p. 79.
24 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 76.
25 Ibid., pp. 76–7.
26 Although one might get the impression that he is thus trying to explicate the content of morality, this is deceptive. (U) does not tell us how to act. It merely tells us to submit our maxims to a discourse in which all are allowed to participate under ideal conditions. (U) is a rule of argumentation and as such does not answer the question “What is the right way of acting under the given circumstances?” (Justification and Application, p. 35).
27 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 33.
28 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 120.
29 Karl-Otto Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press), p. 255.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 247.
32 Ibid., p. 232.
33 Ibid., pp. 58, 210.
34 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 83, 86; Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 163.
35 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), p. 45; Justification and Application, p. 32; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 86, 92–93, 198.
36 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 32; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 86, 92–93, 198.
37 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 52; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 196.
38 Habermas, Justification and Application, pp. 9, 32.
39 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 65.
40 Ibid., p.196.
41 Ibid., p. 100.
42 To be sure, most of us do not take this attitude. We are socialized into accepting the moral point of view (see Lawrence Kohlberg’s The Philosophy of Moral Development, (San Fransisco: Harper and Row, 1981)). However, this does not show the impossibility of rejecting what Korsgaard has called “enlightenment morality” (see The Sources of Normativity, p. 123).
43 Karl-Otto Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 29.
44 Ibid., p. 44.
45 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 56.
46 The notion of public advocacy is at the heart of Bernard Gert’s attempt to give morality “a new rational foundation” in The Moral Rules (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). See especially p. 89.
47 Compare to what Thomas Nagel says in What Does It All Mean (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1997), p. 66.