{"agent_id":"habermas","agent_name":"Jürgen Habermas","slug":"discourse-ethics-and-the-universalization-principle","label":"Discourse ethics and the universalization principle: can a purely procedural morality generate substantive obligations, or is it Hegel's empty formalism in a linguistic key?","topic":"Discourse ethics and the universalization principle","question":"Can a purely procedural morality generate substantive obligations, or is it Hegel's empty formalism in a linguistic key?","position":"A norm is valid only if all who could be affected by it would accept the consequences of its general observance in an unconstrained practical discourse. I do not offer this as a moral intuition but as a rule of argumentation that anyone who argues has already accepted. The presuppositions of discourse — that no competent speaker is excluded, that anyone may question any assertion, that no one is prevented by coercion from doing so — cannot be denied in an argument without performative contradiction. Morality is therefore not grounded in a metaphysical insight or a shared conception of the good but reconstructed from a competence ordinary speakers already possess. Questions of justice admit of a universalizable answer; questions of the good life do not, and the theory says so rather than pretending otherwise.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A norm is valid only if all who could be affected by it would accept the consequences of its general observance in an unconstrained practical discourse.","n":[1]},{"t":"I do not offer this as a moral intuition but as a rule of argumentation that anyone who argues has already accepted.","n":[2]},{"t":"The presuppositions of discourse — that no competent speaker is excluded, that anyone may question any assertion, that no one is prevented by coercion from doing so — cannot be denied in an argument without performative contradiction.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Morality is therefore not grounded in a metaphysical insight or a shared conception of the good but reconstructed from a competence ordinary speakers already possess.","n":[]},{"t":"Questions of justice admit of a universalizable answer; questions of the good life do not, and the theory says so rather than pretending otherwise.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"*Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action* (1983; Lenhardt and Nicholsen trans. 1990), especially \"Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification\" and \"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action\"; *Justification and Application* (1991); *The Inclusion of the Other* (1996), especially \"A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality\" and the two Rawls essays. Reception: Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental-pragmatic demand for ultimate grounding (*Letztbegründung*); Seyla Benhabib's *Situating the Self* (1992) on the generalized and the concrete other; Albrecht Wellmer's *The Persistence of Modernity*; Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the situated, tradition-borne character of practical reason; Rawls's reply in the 1995 *Journal of Philosophy* exchange.","works":["*Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action* (1983","Lenhardt and Nicholsen trans. 1990), especially \"Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification\" and \"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action\"","*Justification and Application* (1991)","*The Inclusion of the Other* (1996), especially \"A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality\" and the two Rawls essays"],"reception":"Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental-pragmatic demand for ultimate grounding (*Letztbegründung*); Seyla Benhabib's *Situating the Self* (1992) on the generalized and the concrete other; Albrecht Wellmer's *The Persistence of Modernity*; Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the situated, tradition-borne character of practical reason; Rawls's reply in the 1995 *Journal of Philosophy* exchange.","status":"The most technically scrutinized position in the authorship, and the one where the Hegelian objection to Kant has been most persistently redirected against Habermas himself. Benhabib's charge — that the generalized other is bought at the cost of the concrete other, and that care and the particular relationship fall outside the theory — is widely taken to have landed. Apel presses from the opposite side, that the refusal of ultimate grounding leaves discourse ethics without a foundation.","era":"1929-present","discipline":"Philosophy, Sociology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action","page":"p. 220","canonical":"","quote":"This is what one means when one speaks of an ethics as being *formalist.* Discourse ethics replaces the Kantian categorical imperative by a procedure of moral argumentation. Its principle postulates, Only those norms may claim to be valid that could meet with the consent of all affected in their role as participants in a practical discourse.","label":"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 220"},{"n":2,"work":"The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 - Reason and the Rationalization of Society","page":"pp. 65–66","canonical":"","quote":"For this reason valid norms must be capable in principle of meeting with the rationally motivated approval of everyone affected under conditions that neutralize all motives except that of cooperatively seeking the truth.' We rely on this intuitive knowledge whenever we engage in moral argument; the ''moral point of view' is rooted in these presuppositions.'® This need not mean that these lay intuitions could also be…","label":"The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 - Reason and the Rationalization of Society, pp. 65–66"},{"n":3,"work":"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action","page":"p. 111","canonical":"","quote":"If after these cursory remarks we accept the rules tentatively set down by Alexy (pending a more detailed analysis), we have at our disposal, in conjunction with a weak idea of normative justification (i.e., one that does not prejudge the matter), premises that are strong enough for the derivation of the universalization principle (U).","label":"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 111"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-bourgeois-public-sphere","label":"The bourgeois public sphere: did you write the history of an emancipatory institution, or idealize an exclusionary one that never admitted most of the people it claimed to speak for?"},{"slug":"system-and-lifeworld","label":"System and lifeworld: is the two-level social theory a genuine diagnosis of modernity, or a concession to functionalism that puts the economy beyond the reach of critique?"},{"slug":"the-linguistic-turn-and-the-abandonment-of-psychoanalysis","label":"The linguistic turn and the abandonment of psychoanalysis: in replacing the philosophy of consciousness with a theory of speech, did you lose the depth dimension — the drives, the unconscious — that made critical theory critical?"},{"slug":"modernity-as-an-unfinished-project","label":"Modernity as an unfinished project: is the campaign against the French critics of reason a defense of the Enlightenment, or a systematic misreading of thinkers you declined to read closely?"}]}