Date: 	Fri, 24 Oct 1997 19:51:11 -0400
From: "kenneth.mackendrick" <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: Morals and the Good Life


Brian wrote:

>  What kind of conception of the good is possible if we accept 
(or do we?)  the rejection of metaphysically anchored 
conceptions of the good.

Agnes Heller (Beyond Justice) argues that justice is a 
conception of the good life and in this constitutes the minimal 
requirements for any possible good life.  Habermas contents 
that Heller is a decisionist and that justice and the good life 
should be kept, procedurally, separate.  I'm not sure this is 
necessarily anchored in a metaphysics.  A vision of the good 
life may be open to procedural debate.... esp. if justice is 
understood as a vision of the good life.


>Second  do we accept Habermas'' contention from TCA 
through to the work on law about the necessary separation in 
modern societies, of the right and the good.

If one follows Heller then this issue is addressed - justice is a 
chosen value of the good life with implications regarding all 
possible good lives.
 
> He would reject the neo-aristoelian claim that the separation 
of right and good is a pathological separation that loses the 
substance of morality.  he seems to say that the good doesn't 
disappear but it is differentiated out from claims about justice 
and bears a different relation claims about justice than it did in 
previous societies.

We might want to consider that Habermas's theory is 
pathological in this regard.  Is it psychologically possible or 
philosophically coherent for us to conceive of a just world 
where issues of the good are differentiated in such a strict 
manner?  Habermas's model is based upon the Kohlbergian 
model.  Is Gilligan's critique successful in that it successfully 
produces an 'enlarged mentality' which necessarily 
incorporates justice and care (Benhabib, Situating the Self).  In 
we follow Gadamer (Truth and Method) or Benhabib then 
understanding encompasses a meaningful aspect of the good 
life touched with a sense of justice.  Habermas's response 
has been that these things can be separated out.  Does 
Habermas have any evidence to support this? or is he right in 
supporting Kohlberg's thesis that "men" tend to orient 
themselves toward a moral domain whereas "women" 
generally orient themselves around an ethical domain.

ken




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