Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 23:28:31 -0600
From: noelle-AT-ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Noelle McAfee)
Subject: Re: Habermas and Emotions


Scott Johnson wrote:

>When those who agree are "all concerned" the agreement is as universal
>as it can concretely be. To ask for more, to take more as a standard, is
>to develope an abstraction, to demand a transcendent truth. If later it
>becomes apparent that in this or that particular sphere the issues
>transcend such a  limited sphere (that generalizable interests are
>involved somehow) then the discourse naturally widens as the earlier
>agreement is questioned. Habermas doesn't have to be read as posing an
>abstract universality to which an equally abstract particularity can be
>posed, rather I think that discourse, as Habermas conceives it, is where
>universality and particularity meet. The same normative speech act is
>both universal and particular at the same time in that the claim (indeed
>the language itself) transcends the individual while still being truly
>motivating, not an alien "ought". I'm sympathetic to these criticisms of
>Habermas (in fact Steve can attest to the fact that I can get pretty
>heated up in arguing along just those lines), but if Habermas does tend
>to lean to far toward Kantian liberalism, he at the same time points
>beyond this old dichotomy of universality and particularity. 


Habermas' whole point about postconventional morality is that we have to
get beyond conventional norms and expectations and towards expectations
that would be acceptable to anyone under any circumstances.  I don't like
this strict notion, and apparently Scott Johnson doesn't either, but that
doesn't change what Habermas is doing.  Note this formulation of (U) in
_Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action_, p. 197:

(U) For a norm to be valid, the consequences and side effects of its
general observance for the satisfaction of each person's particular
interests must be acceptable to all.

The phrase "acceptable to all" does not just mean "to all those involved in
this particular situation." It means acceptable to anyone anywhere, whether
affected or not.

That's my reading of Habermas, anyway, and one place where I part company
with him.


__________________________________
Noelle McAfee
Dept. of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
voice: 512/450-0705
fax: 512/450-0545
noelle-AT-ccwf.cc.utexas.edu