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?

Jürgen Habermas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹² 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.³

Sources

1. 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.

   Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 220

2. The medium in which we can hypothetically test whether a norm of action, be it actually recognized or not, can be impartially justified is practical discourse; this is the form of argumentation in which claims to normative rightness are made thematic.

   The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 - Reason and the Rationalization of Society, p. 19

3. 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).

   Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 111

Where the argument is made

• 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

How the argument was received

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.