Discourse and morality

Ethics

Volumn 110, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 514-536

  McMahon, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0034164753     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233322     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. His interpretation is stated in William Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View: Deriving a Dialogical Principle of Universalization," Inquiry 34 (1991): 27-48, and Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chap. 3. In two recent works, Habermas briefly sketches the main idea of his discourse ethics and then refers the reader to Rehg. See Jürgen Habermas, "Remarks on Discourse Ethics," in his Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 32, n. 18, and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 109, n. 38.
2. His interpretation is stated in William Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View: Deriving a Dialogical Principle of Universalization," Inquiry 34 (1991): 27-48, and Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chap. 3. In two recent works, Habermas briefly sketches the main idea of his discourse ethics and then refers the reader to Rehg. See Jürgen Habermas, "Remarks on Discourse Ethics," in his Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 32, n. 18, and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 109, n. 38.
3. His interpretation is stated in William Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View: Deriving a Dialogical Principle of Universalization," Inquiry 34 (1991): 27-48, and Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chap. 3. In two recent works, Habermas briefly sketches the main idea of his discourse ethics and then refers the reader to Rehg. See Jürgen Habermas, "Remarks on Discourse Ethics," in his Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 32, n. 18, and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 109, n. 38.
4. His interpretation is stated in William Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View: Deriving a Dialogical Principle of Universalization," Inquiry 34 (1991): 27-48, and Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chap. 3. In two recent works, Habermas briefly sketches the main idea of his discourse ethics and then refers the reader to Rehg. See Jürgen Habermas, "Remarks on Discourse Ethics," in his Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 32, n. 18, and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 109, n. 38.
5. Thus I shall not discuss other writers, such as Karl-Otto Apel, who have evidently made important contributions to discourse ethics.
6. Jürgen Habermas, "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification," in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 65. In addition to (U), Habermas has formulated a principle that he says "contains the distinctive idea of an ethics of discourse": "(D) Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse" (p. 66). (U) states a reason on the basis of which norms or principles are to be accepted - namely, that they are in the interests of all-while (D) leaves this open. The points that I shall make about (U) apply to (D) as well.
7. Jürgen Habermas, "On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason," in his Justification and Application, pp. 1-17. See also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.
8. Jürgen Habermas, "On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason," in his Justification and Application, pp. 1-17. See also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.
9. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), chap. 4.
10. I assume that when Habermas speaks of a "norm," he has in mind a practical principle, i.e., a conceptual entity that grounds reasons for action. This interpretation is most consonant with the distinction that he makes between discourses of application and discourses of justification (see Justification and Application, esp. pp. 36-38 and 128-30). Discourses of application seek to identify the course of action in a particular situation that is required by the totality of all the valid moral principles applicable to that situation. Dis-courses of justification establish what the valid moral principles are. Principle (U) states a condition that is meant to be satisfied by discourses of justification only. Henceforth, I shall simply speak of principles instead of norms.
11. Compare the discussion of two levels of noral thinking in R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), chaps. 1-3.
12. Habermas defines discourse as follows: "I shall speak of 'discourse' only when the meaning of the problematic validity claim conceptually forces participants to suppose that a rationally motivated agreement could in principle be achieved, whereby the phrase 'in principle' expresses the idealizing proviso: if only the argument could be conducted openly enough and continued long enough" (The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. [Boston: Beacon, 1984-87], vol. 1, p. 42). See also Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," p. 105.
13. Habermas defines discourse as follows: "I shall speak of 'discourse' only when the meaning of the problematic validity claim conceptually forces participants to suppose that a rationally motivated agreement could in principle be achieved, whereby the phrase 'in principle' expresses the idealizing proviso: if only the argument could be conducted openly enough and continued long enough" (The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. [Boston: Beacon, 1984-87], vol. 1, p. 42). See also Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," p. 105.
14. "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real" (Charles S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler [New York: Dover, 1955], p. 38).
15. For a discussion of the distinction between realist and constructivist views, see David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 14-22. According to Brink, a constructivist account of an area of inquiry holds that (1) there are facts or truths of a certain kind, and (2) these facts or truths are constituted by the evidence for them (p. 16).
16. See Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," pp. 57-62.
17. Ibid., p. 68.
18. Habermas derives his idealizations from the presuppositions of communicative action. The thought here can, perhaps, be put as follows. We are accustomed to the idea that regardless of the truth of determinism, agents must take themselves to be free. Similarly the participants in a communicative enterprise must take it that the outcome will be determined by the force of the better argument. A certain ideal situation is thus implicit in the act of communication: the situation in which this expectation is met. Of course, even when all parties are conducting themselves appropriately, actual discourses will require time, perhaps a lot of time, to attain a consensus. Habermas, following Apel, connects Peirce with the assumption that each participant is influenced only by the force of the better argument (ibid., pp. 88-89).
19. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), esp. lecture 3.
20. Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," p. 91.
21. An anonymous referee has suggested that (O) is not odd, offering the example of excluding Hitler from discussion. But here it is being presupposed that Hitler is unreliable. What Habermas seems to regard as odd is excluding people not known to be unreli-able just because one does not want to hear their opinions. In The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), Robert Nozick argues against Habermas that the rationality of the individual members of a society need not be compromised by social constraints that prevent everyone's opinion from being heard (p. 125n). His target here is what I have called the requirement of weak dialogicality. Nozick may be right about this, but for present purposes, I will take weak dialogicality to be a genuine requirement of (fully) rational inquiry. My main objective is to argue against the more demanding require-ment of strong dialogicality. If the requirement of weak dialogicality needs to be qualified, my conclusions can be modified accordingly.
22. Even if we assume that there is a single set of reasons that is germane to the acceptance of moral principles, there may still be disagreements about their force that do not involved malfunction, at least if malfunction is understood in terms of what normal human beings can achieve. The idea that there can be disagreement about the force of a common set of reasons without cognitive malfunction lies behind Rawls's notion of the "burdens of judgment" (see Political Liberalism, lecture 2, sec. 2).
23. Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View," pp. 44-45, and Insight and Soli-darity, pp. 77-78.
24. Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View," pp. 44-45, and Insight and Soli-darity, pp. 77-78.
25. In Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 32.
26. Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," p. 58. Because of the intersubjective dimension of communicative action, Habermas treats its constitutive rules under the heading of "pragmatics." For a discussion of the Habermasian notion of pragmatics that relates it to analytic speech-act theory, see Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas (Albany, N.Y: SUNYPress, 1992), pp. 88-108.
27. Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," p. 58. Because of the intersubjective dimension of communicative action, Habermas treats its constitutive rules under the heading of "pragmatics." For a discussion of the Habermasian notion of pragmatics that relates it to analytic speech-act theory, see Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas (Albany, N.Y: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 88-108.
28. For an account of warrant statements, see Robert Fogelin, Evidence and Meaning (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), chap. 1.
29. See also Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 10.
30. This argument was suggested to me by a reading of Rehg's "Discourse and the Moral Point of View." He presents a somewhat simplified version of the argument in Insight and Solidarity, chap. 3. I do not claim to have captured all the features of Rehg's argument. In the next section, I try to show that strong dialogicality is an untenable ideal. If this is right, no argument for it can be sound.
31. Rehg, "Discourse and the Moral Point of View," p. 31.
32. The argument I have just described, with its claim of privileged access to the reasons provided by one's own needs, may seem to have a morally uncongenial result if an individual is ignorant of needs she genuinely has. An anonymous referee has suggested that certain needs, such as nutritional needs, are not best determined by those whose needs they are. And an editor has noted that an individual may adapt her need judgments to existing social realities, thus failing to make legitimate need claims that could force the transformation of these realities. But we must bear in mind that the argument seeks to characterize the endpoint of an idealized inquiry aimed at identifying the true principles of morality. Thus we should assume that shared deliberation will eliminate any ignorance or error that might distort the exercise of the authority regarding the reasons provided by her own needs that each is supposed to have.
33. Here I am following Habermas and Rehg. As an editor has noted, reasons germane to the identification of the true principles of morality may also be provided by other features of a person's situation, such as capabilities. And claim-adjudicating notions like fairness or reasonableness can play a role as well. The argument that follows does not depend on how the relevant reasons are understood.
34. An anonymous referee has noted that in the practical sphere, we might ground reasons in desires instead of either practices or in independent realm of normative facts. But I do not believe that this alternative is compatible with the Habermasian view that tracking the unforced force of the better argument will ideally lead to intersubjective recognition of a validity claim.
35. It may be possible to formulate the argument that follows without making use of Wittgensteinian ideas. But since Habermas's theory of communicative action highlights the social dimension of language use, it is, I think, instructive to consider what the views of the later Wittgenstein imply for Habermasian dialogicality. In The Theory of Communicative Action (vol. 2, pp. 15-22), Habermas discusses the connection between Wittgenstein's views on language and his own theory of communicative action and quotes the passage from Wittgenstein that I quote immediately below.
36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 81.
37. For discussion of these issues, see Philip Pettit, The Common Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 76-106; and John V. Canfield, "The Community View," Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 469-88.
38. For discussion of these issues, see Philip Pettit, The Common Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 76-106; and John V. Canfield, "The Community View," Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 469-88.
39. We need not suppose that the rule-following practices associated with the grasping of reasons make use of explicit formulation 5 of the rules being followed. For discussion of this point, see Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), chap. 1.
40. See n. 3 above.
41. An editor has suggested that the possibility of dismissing deviation as arising from the corruption of judgment could present a problem for my argument, since it means that if all but one of the members of a group deem a certain principle to be a genuine principle of morality, they may be able to disregard the view of the lone dissenter. But as I have indicated, I believe that this possibility actually provides further support for the conclusion I want to draw: there is no cognitive requirement to suspend judgment as long as anyone disagrees.
42. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
43. See T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
44. See T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism andUtilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
45. Scanlon makes similar points in What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 393-94, n. 5, and p. 395, n. 18.
46. This was proposed by an editor.
47. My argument has proceeded within the framework of a practice-based understanding of reasons. I suggested earlier that when judgments purporting to identify genuine moral principles are at issue, such a view provides the most natural home for the construc-tivist ambition to avoid problematic metaphysical commitments. Nevertheless, I believe that the same conclusion - the untenability of strong dialogicality - follows if we accept a realist view of reasons. For Habermas, a principle is a genuine principle of morality if and only if its acceptance would be seen to be justified by the relevant reasons at the endpoint of idealized inquiry. On a realist construal of reasons, deviation from a collective judgment purporting to capture the force of the relevant reasons can be criticized as mistaken. The collective judgment may be based on an accurate grasp of normative reality. But indepen-dent judgments can also have this feature. Indeed, it is plausible that a group's capacity to make epistemic contact with an independent realm of reasons must be derived from the capacity of its individual members to do this. (And if reasons truly occupy a realm that is independent of "observers," it is not plausible that each individual has privileged epistemic access to some of them.) So on a realist view as well, there is no basis for saying that rational conviction in the moral sphere requires that judgments cashing in the force of the relevant reasons must be made collectively.
48. Compare Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, pp. 242-43. Of course, the judgments of those who disagree would be equally open to criticism.