The limits and possibilities of communicative ethics for democratic theory

Political Theory

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1993, Pages 294-321

  Ingram, David ^a  

^a LOYOLA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039791098     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591793021002008     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Cf. ?. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951); and W. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
2. J. Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. 2; and “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,’ in Foundations of Social Choice Theory, edited by J. Elster and A. Hylland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
3. This position is closely identified with the Praxis School, whose most prominent representatives are Mihailo Markovier, Gajo Petrovie, and Svetozar Stojanovic.
4. Cf. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by F. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 75-82.
5. For a sampling of the literature on communicative ethics, see The Communicative Ethics Controversy, edited by S. Benhabib and F. Dallmayr (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
6. Cf. C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16-18, 124-27.
7. Cf. P. Dews, Habermas: Autonomy, and Solidarity. Interviews with Jürgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1986), 187.
8. R. M. Hare links universalization to the semantic principle requiring consistent usage of predicates in similar cases. Applied to morality, it requires that a rule or obligation applying in situation X to person ? apply to all others in situations comparable to X. Habermas argues that consistency requirements like this fail to capture the meaning of impartiality. Only when universalization is linked to public defendability (Gert) and equality of treatment (Singer) does it approximate the meaning of impartiality. Cf. J. Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” (hereafter DE), in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by C. Lenhardt and S. Nicholsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64ff. (hereafter MC; R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); Bernard Gert, Moral Rules (New York, 1976); and Marcus Singer, Generalization in Ethics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
9. J. Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6,” Philosophical Forum 21 (Fall-Winter 1989-90), at 36 (hereafter JS).
10. J. Habermas, “Wahrheitstheorien,” in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 127-83 (hereafter VTKA).
11. That Habermas has not entirely transcended the monological method of ideal role taking is borne out by his claim that, in moral matters strictu sensu, that is, “when it is a question of examining norms with a genuinely universal domain of validity,” consensus functions as a regulative idea in the sense that arguments are “played out in the ‘internal forum’ “ (JS, 41).
12. J. Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” in D. Held and J. B. Thompson, Habermas: Critical Debates (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 273ff. (hereafter CD).
13. Although Habermas identifies justification (Begründung) and application (Anwendung) as two distinct steps of moral argumentation, his acceptance of Klaus Giinther's formulation of the universalizability test, which incorporates considerations of contextual applicability, suggests that the two are more closely linked. Cf. J. Habermas, Erläuterung zur Diskursethik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 94-96, 137-42 (hereafter EzD); D. Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 82; K. Günther, Der Sinn fir Angemessenheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 23-100; and David Ingram, “The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard,” and Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 11.
14. Habermas's response to this criticism hinges on the prima facie status of normative justification and obligation in light of ever changing contexts of action. Yet, despite his recognition of the fallibility of moral argumentation and the plurality of competing situational descriptions (EzD, 166), he insists that situations appropriately covered by two or more norms be adjudicated by a principle of coherent order determining the choice of precisely one correct norm (EzD, 140ff.). Cf. A. Wellmer, Ethik und Dialog: Elemente des moralischen Urteils bei Kant und in die Diskursethik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 54-112 (hereafter ED); and my criticism of Habermas in “Dworkin, Habermas, and the CLS Movement on Moral Criticism in Law,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 16 (1990): 237-68.
15. ED, 65-66. Rainer Döbert observes that neither perfect moral duties, such as promise keeping, nor “natural” imperfect duties underwriting mutual self-preservation, such as helping others who are in distress, are decidable by universalization procedures. “Wider die Vernachlässigung des ‘Inhalts’ in den Moral-theorien von Kohlberg und Habermas. Implikationen für die Relativismus/Universalismus-Kontroverse,” in Zur Bestimmung der Moral, edited by W. Edelstein und G. Nunner-Winkler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 86-106.
16. Habermas argues that we cannot always be expected to act morally in the absence of legal safeguards and other institutional supports (EzD, 198). Also cf. J. Habermas, “Law and Morality,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 244 (hereafter LM).
17. Cf. Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory (Chichester: Wiley, 1979); Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); and Richard Flathman, The Practice of Political Authority: Authority and the Authoritative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
18. I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Political Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 132.
19. The relevance of discourse ethic to public policy planning is amply documented in J. Forster, ed. Critical Theory and Public Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
20. Habermas accepts the communitarian critique of abstract individualism but decries its reactive affirmation of strong, traditional communities. See, for example, his critique of Sandel, Taylor, and Maclntyre (EzD, 18ff. 176-84, 208-17).
21. J. Habermas, “Ist der Herzschlag der Revolution zum Stillstand gekommen? Volkssouveranität als Verfahren. Ein normativer Begriff der Öffentlichkeit?” in Die Ideen von 1789 in der Deutschen Rezeption (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 7-36 (hereafter VaV).
22. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 111 (hereafter LC).
23. J. Habermas, “Legitimation Problems in the Modern State,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1979), 204 (hereafter CES).
24. Cf. J. Bohman, “Communication, Ideology, and Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 1 (March 1990): 93-109.
25. Cf. J. Habermas and N. Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? Was leistet die Systemforschung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 243ff. cited in LC at 101.
26. However, in LC at 109 Habermas expresses the rule of consensus in a manner that requires the “transferring] of subjective desires into generalizable desires.” This formulation of the rule could be construed as hostile to pluralism Conversely, when many laws are regarded as morally repugnant by a substantial minority-and this despite the fairness of procedural safeguards-not only the stability of government but also its legitimacy is at stake.
27. J. Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 241. This concession appears to undermine his objection to Ernst Tugendhat's interpretation of agreement as a “common decision” equilibrating particular interests under conditions of fair compromise (cf. DE, 72). For his critique of the Green Party, see P. Dews, 182, 215.
28. J. Habermas, “Ziviler Ungehorsam-Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat. Wider den authoritärischen Legalismus in der Bundesrepublik,” in Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Habermas adopts Rawls's view that justifiable civil disobedience must (1) not endanger the constitutional order through acts of violence, (2) have as its aim the conscientious correction of an egregious injustice, and (3) be undertaken only after all legal remedies have been exhausted (p. 83). Moreover, he follows Dworkin in conceiving civil disobedience as an indispensable device-along with judicial review-for adjusting legal requirements to the demands of changing political interests in cases where the will of the people (and its constitutional embodiment) is not adequately represented (p. 88). As such, civil disobedience symbolizes a potentially universalizable (legitimate) interest that supersedes the legality of parliamentary decision, especially when the decision does not reflect public opinion or effects changes that are irreversible, that is, that create permanent minorities or bind the democratic sovereignty of the people for an indeterminate duration, as in the case of German-based American missile installations (p. 94). It is interesting to note that Habermas no more than Rawls adequately acknowledges justifiable acts of civil disobedience that protest morally legitimate laws, or laws that appear to satisfy ideal as well as real (legal) procedural constraints. Cf. J. Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), paras. 55-59 (hereafter 77); and R. Dworkin, “Civil Disobedience,” in Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
29. Indeed, Habermas notes that even morally justified norms only obligate on condition that they apply to the situation at hand and do not impose practically impossible expectations (EzD, 198).
30. S. Benhabib, “In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel: Communicative Ethics and Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy,” Philosophical Forum, 12 (hereafter SAH).
31. Although Elster has been critical of democrats like Habermas who emphasize the virtues of process values over outcomes (see “The Market and the Forum”), he has recently sided with Habermas against rational choice theorists (esp. David Gauthier) who attempt to derive moral side constraints from economic rationality. As he notes, maximizing behavior cannot substitute for moral rules in constituting stable, legitimate order because contracts among economic maximizers inevitably favor the more powerful. Hence it is rational to bear the economic costs of democracy in the name of social justice. See D. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and J. Elster, Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 5.
32. J. Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 515-72. Rawls argues that the range of socially regulated goods must be preselected in advance of the hypothetical deliberations in the original position. In A Theory of Justice (1971), the list of primary goods is drawn up with reference to general psychological assumptions regarding the prerequisites for carrying out a rational plan of life. However, in “Social Unity and Primary Goods” (1982), they are justified as those that “are necessary for realizing the powers of moral personality.” The change in emphasis from a relatively neutral justification of primary goods in terms of rational choice to a justification based on a definite conception of moral autonomy- what Rawls, in reference to a model-conception of the person, calls the reasonable-is not inconsequential. For one thing, it shows that conditions of rational choice in the original position are already circumscribed by moral presuppositions, even if the economic rationality of the participants is not. For another, because personality traits now take over the burden of grounding justice formerly assumed by the ideal procedures underwriting the original position, it can be argued-as Habermas does-that Rawls has abandoned a cognitivist philosophical justification of morality in favor of a politically oriented ethics founded on a partisan view of a “thick” conception of the good (EzD, 128ff.).
33. J. Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 3, edited by S. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 6.
34. Habermas, “Wahrheitstheorien,” 165.
35. Habermas directs Donald Davidson's famous transcendental refutation of incommensurable conceptual schemes against Alasdair MacIntyre's defense of incommensurable schémas of rationality. Although Maclntyre (like Kuhn) argues that communication between untranslatable schémas is possible, he holds that this necessitates the conversion to a new way of life-a state, Habermas believes, that would entail either a loss of identity or a schizophrenic splitting of identity (EzD, 213-18). Cf. A. Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); D. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in D. Davidson, Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1985), 183-98; and my critique of Davidson in “The Copernican Revolution Revisited: Paradigm, Metaphor, and Incommensurability in the Historiography of Science: Blumenberg's Response to Kuhn and Davidson,” in History of the Human Sciences (forthcoming).
36. K.O. Apel, “The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of Language,” in Afier Philosophy, edited by K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 277.
37. Cf. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. I. Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 10, 85, 273-74; D. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); and J. Johnson, “Habermas on Strategic and Communicative Action,” Political Theory 19 (May 1991): 181-205. For further discussion of the distinction between strategic and communicative action, see my essay “Foucault and Habermas on the Subject of Reason” in Gary Gutting, ed. The Foucault Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
38. Cf. P. R. Dasen, ed. Piagetian Psychology: Cross Cultural Contributions (New York: Halstead, 1977).
39. See T. McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,”in CD, 72-73.
40. See J. Paul, “Substantive Social Contracts and the Legitimate Basis of Political Authority,” Monist 66 (1983): 517-28; Benhabib, Philosophical Forum, 8-9; and Gould, Rethinking Democracy, 127. Gould accuses Habermas of circularity here. Benhabib defends Habermas against this charge but neglects to mention that the rights to which we are compelled in discourse are not, strictly speaking, prescriptive rights as Alexy's formulation appears to imply.
41. It was such an appeal to universal rights (Volkerrechte) that largely undergird Habermas's qualified support for a measured, military response to Iraq's violations of Kuwait's sovereignty during the Gulf war. See J. Habermas, “Wider die Logik des Krieges: Ein Pladoyer fur Zuruckhaltung, aber nicht gegenuber Israel,” Die Zeit (overseas ed.) 46 (22 Feb. 1991), 16.
42. For Habermas, the distinction accorded perfect duties consists in the fact that they directly regulate and reflect the minimal conditions necessary for communicative action and discourse (EzD, 174ff.).
43. Benhabib for one criticizes Habermas's Kohlbergian tendency to subordinate the ethics of solidarity and care to the morality of individual rights. See S. Benhabib, “The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics,” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, edited by David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram (New York: Paragon, 1991), 388-99; and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).
44. No set of political principles can assure against tyrannical outcomes. Democracy governed by the principles of discourse ethics is no exception, for the demand that all needs be validated through public discourse favors the political activist (and orator) over the domestic caretaker. Cf. J. Fishkin, Tyranny and Legitimacy: A Critique of Political Theories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), and J. Donald Moon, “Constrained Discourse and Public Life,” Political Theory 19, no. 2 (May 1991), 202-29.
45. Habermas here criticizes Apel, who expects discourse ethics to tell us why we should behave morally as well as what we should do (EzD, 185-99). Because Wellmer does not adequately distinguish Apel's position from Habermas's, he wrongly directs Hegel's critique of ethical formalism against the latter. However, as Habermas points out, Hegel's critique assumes that ethical formalism provides strong criteria for deducing substantive outcomes-a view that is actually closer to Apel's than to either his or Kant's deontological ethic (EzD, 9-30, 135ff.).
46. This line of argument is developed in greater detail by Gould (he. cit.).
47. See D. Schweickart, Capitalism or Worker Control: An Ethical and Economic Appraisal (New York: Praeger, 1981).
48. Habermas does not talk about abolishing labor markets per se, but he does mention the elimination of unemployment as basic to the socialist ideal he defends. See J. Habermas, “Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf: Was heisst Sozialismus heute?” in Die Nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 199.
49. See my Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, 155ff.
50. Nowhere, to my knowledge, does Habermas develop a critique of corporatism in detail. Corporatism-“the delegation of negotiating competence to the conflicting parties and the institutionalization of quasi-political bargaining processes” (LM, 231)-is discussed in great detail in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Here, Habermas notes that the transformation of strategic negotiations between private parties into matters of public concern has not resulted in their being subject to public oversight and debate. On the contrary, in conformity with the “refeudalization” of the welfare state, such negotiations are treated as if they were private matters involving competing special interests and bureaucratic governmental agencies (pp. 148ff. 197ff. 23Iff.).
51. Despite Habermas's claim that the “argument about forms of ownership has lost its doctrinal significance” (“Nachholende Revolution,” 198), the argument remains central to discussions of democracy. As Gould notes, a prima facie case for private worker ownership (qualified by public oversight) can be made on the grounds that such ownership is needed to safeguard worker self-management rights against arbitrary bureaucratic interference. Schweikart argues, to the contrary, that public ownership is required to ensure even development and to protect against the potential for exploitation inherent in private financial markets.
52. The idea that mass democratic parties are functionally requisite for procuring the loyalty of the modern state has its moral justification in Habermas's argument that ego development involves an expansion of role identity beyond occupations to embrace more abstract principles and in his further claim that this sets in motion a certain decentration and fluidity in one's perspectives and loyalties (CES, 95ff.).
53. Cf. Jean Cohen, “Discourse Ethics and Civil Society,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 14, no. 3-4 (1989): 315-37.