File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0110, message 13


From: "John Wright" <john.wright15-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: HAB: Re: more on motivation: Habermas, Freud and Hegel
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 01:49:57 -0400




----- Original Message -----
From: "Hiro Saito" <hirosophy-AT-hotmail.com>

> But Habermas removes morality (Moralitat) from ethics (Sittlichkeit), so
> that morality justified within practical discourse can transcend
> historically conditioned forms of life, Sittlichkeit--he wants to prevent
> "historical dissolution of morality in ethical life" (1993 [1990]:1).

We need to be careful about the sense in which we say Habermas 'removes' morality
from ethical life.  By my understanding, he would mean this only conceptually.  He
wants to say that we can find the elements that would allow for the discursive
justification of norms in communicative action generally, as the primary way in which
humans deploy language.  In moral philosophy, we can show the ideal connection
between the justification of norms and those features of human interaction, such
that, when challenged by a normative validity claim, there can be no option of
backing out that preserves one's standing as a rational agent.  But, as  you point
out, the realization of that linguistic potential in the actual development of moral
norms seems to await the emergence of an ethical life that can support it.  Thus, he
avoids relativism, but formalism, too.


> It
> seems to me that this "form of life that meets it [universalistic morality]
> halfway" cannot but be (a new, perhaps World) Sittlichkeit in which
> justified morality can be efficaciously and actually grounded.

Could be a world Sittlichkeit, but needn't be, and these forms of ethical life are
found; despite their fallibility, post-traditional societies cropping up here and
there do bear the fruit of attempts to ground moral principles on reasons potential
acceptable to all of its members.  So I would claim, anyway -- there is some
institutionalization of such discourses, already.







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