The philosopher-citizen
by: Charles Gelman on October 19th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
At The Immanent Frame, eminent philosopher Charles Taylor reflects on the life and work of his colleague Jürgen Habermas:
Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive.
[...]
The alternative route which he explored was that which makes the rationality of ethical conclusions a function of the rationality of the deliberation which produces them. A deliberation is rational if it meets certain formal requirements. This is, of course, the route which was pioneered by Kant. But Habermas made a revolutionary change in this tradition. Whereas for Kant the principal criterion of a rational and therefore defensible deliberation was that it was sought universalizable maxims, for Habermas the very notion of deliberation is transformed. Following Kant a lone reasoner can work out what maxims can be the objects of a universal will. But Habermas introduces the dialogical dimension. The ultimately acceptable norms are those which can pass the test of acceptance by all those who would be affected by them.
Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.
I did my bachelor’s thesis on metaethics. I was looking for something that would be as central and unquestionable a precondition of ethics as Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction — that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect and at the same time — is central and unquestionable to logic. My thesis advisors thought that I did in fact find it and that my thesis was publishable.
The conclusion that I reached after 25 pages was this: that all ethics depends upon the presuposition that those who are parties to any ethical dispute or discussion are behaving rationallly, The metaethical foundation of ethical discourse is that one ought to be rational [where O = 'it ought to be the case that' and r = 'one is rational', Or]. My conclusion regarding the content of rationality vis a vis ethics was very similar to Habermas’. I had the same problem with Kant’s universe-of-one and questioned the rationality of having an ethical dispute or discussion with onesself.
My paper was never published — no one publishes the work of state U seniors — but I know that the ideas were sound, and it is nice to have confirmation of some of my thesis from a real big-name philosopher.