Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 18:01:23 -0600


Kenneth -

Indeed, here is one of the replies that you anticipate, though from a new
quarter.

	You write that "Habermas's discourse ethics operates on the idea that 
the moral point of view can be established impartially" and argue that this
impartiality is illusory.       It seems that you (or Benhabib, or both of you)
are working with a very strong conception of impartiality - the traditional
conception of a God's eye point of view, from the perspective of all eternity,
etc.  Habermas seems to have a different idea of impartiality, though.  It seems
to me that impartiality means for him an effort, modelled as a procedure, to
bracket or factor out, as far as it is possible, personal or subjective biases
that might distort the process of moral decision making.  Since such procedures
must of necessity be historically and culturally situated, they will be partial
in the sense that any consensus reached will be limited (to just those
involved), provisional and subject to potential revision, as circumstances
warrant.  I think Habermas acknowledges these limits.  (He would be stupid not
to - he understands hermeneutics as well as any of us.)  I'm not sure that I
understand why this 'partiality' of his particular conception of 'impartiality'
is that big a problem.

	You argue that a consequence of this partiality of Habermas's discursive
procedure is that discursive agreement cannot be seen to confer rationality or
morality to a specific issue, only legal validity.  Could you explain in more
detail how you arrive at this conclusion?  I must confess that I don't see how
it follows. 

	A bit further on you refer to morality as "safety net" that protects the
web of communicative relations.  I find it useful to think of morality as a
system of rules that, if followed with consistency, (a) allows for the
possibility of forming an identity in the first place, and (b) reduces the risks
associated with the vulnerability of a communicatively constituted identity.
Now you suggest that speaking this way of the vulnerability of human identity
commits Habermas to metaphysical assumptions?  How is that?  And what do you
(we?) mean by 'metaphysical assumptions'?  To be sure, he is supposing that
humans are organisms of a particular sort - most immediately, that certain human
capacities can only take shape (come to 'be') in a context of interpersonal
communication.  (The capacities that Habermas has been most concerned with are
language, communicative action, and practical reason, but he could just as well
include [and probably should have included] trust, love, friendship, hermeneutic
sensitivity, and other capacities entailed in establishing and maintaining
interpersonal relations.)  Does that count as a metaphysical assumption?  What
makes it 'metaphysical'?  What is objectionable about such an assumption?  It
seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable and relatively uncontroversial starting
point for thinking about the function of morality in human societies. 

	Your objection seems to be that this starting point contains already
Habermas's ideal of unfettered communicative freedom.  Well...yes and no.  If
one has a robust sense of what these capacities ought to be like, then that will
impose limits or constraints upon what would be seen as a desirable form of
interaction.  Take trust, for instance.  If one thinks that certain kinds of
trust between, say, husband and wife, or between citizens on the street, are
desirable, then one will want society (the context of communicative interaction)
to be organized in such a way that these trusting relations are made possible -
that the capacities and dispositions that make them possible will be inculcated
in individual members of the society as part of the process of socialization.
Without a specific idea of what the capacities that humans are to have ought to
be, however, nothing follows from these starting premises.

	Though Habermas does not address the issue explicitly - indeed, he might
be said to have ducked it - it seems that he would have to derive his idea of
what these capacities ought to be from his model of communicative action, from
his concept of action oriented toward reaching understanding.  His reasoning
would have to proceed something like the following: if social agents are to
possess the capacities necessary to engage in action oriented toward reaching
understanding, then their society will have to provide a context of
interpersonal communication that fosters these capacities.  (This is what I
understand him to be getting at when he makes allusions to such things as
culture meeting discourse half-way, being raised in halfway decent families &
the like.)  So while there does indeed seem to be an implicit philosophical
anthropology (and sometimes he will acknowledge as much), its source would seem
to be found not in his conception of the intersubjective constitution of
identity, but in his conception of communicative action.  More specifically, the
basis for this philosophical anthropology would seem to be his claim that action
oriented toward reaching understanding is the most fundamental mode of language
use, that it is a necessary condition for the possibility of human society, and
that strategic action is parasitic upon (or a derivative of) it.  That claim, of
course, is another argument altogether.

	Finally - I didn't understand at all the reasoning behind your claim
that the idea of a performative contradiction is question begging.  Would you be
willing to try again, maybe this time in a little more detail?  I'd be much
obliged.

	C.Wright          




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