From: Antti Kauppinen <amkauppi-AT-cc.helsinki.fi> Subject: [HAB:] Rational Barbarians? Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 20:10:23 +0300 (EET DST) > > In my view Habermas is certainly wrong on this. There can be perfectly > rational brabarism! Nazis were not 'irrationalists'. They were morally and > factually wrong. But surely there is a reason, or rather a whole host of reasons, for why the Nazis were morally wrong. And not only is there a reason for that, but the Nazis themselves had very good reason not to do what they did - that they could not possibly justify the way in which they acted to their victims under circumstances free of coercion. Saying that they were not irrational suggests that you use 'rationality' only in the instrumental or strategic sense. The point of quasi-transcendental pragmatics is to show that anyone of us is necessarily committed to the ideal of justifiability to others insofar as we use language in the first place. It is obviously a matter of a great deal of debate how plausible this is, but if it is true, it makes good sense to say that when someone acts in an unjustifiable way, not to mention in a way that could not under any circumstances be justified to others, he is contradicting an evaluative standard he is himself committed to and therefore acts (communicatively) irrationally. If you reject this line of thought, there is nothing recognizable left of Habermas's philosophy - to me, this is the core of his philosophy of language, social action, democracy, or truth (though, as Gary is working out for us, his views on truth have changed to a more realist direction), and the basis of his criticism of one-sided modernization as well as postmodernist responses to it. Or, to throw the ball back in your court, if the Nazis did not have good reason not to do what they did, what do you mean when you say they were morally wrong? Are you saying that you feel bad about it or that it's a brute fact in the manner of the fact that the highest mountain on Earth is less than nine kilometres high? Habermas finds the first alternative seriously inadequate (Himmler felt good about it, after all) and the second incomprehensible and metaphysical in the derogatory sense. We *do*, of course, feel certain that Nazis were horribly wrong, but that is not *just* a feeling but a moral stand that can be rationally defended - it is essential for Habermas (and many others, naturally) that there is a difference between that and the certain feeling some people have that, say, homosexuality is morally wrong. 'But isn't it crazy to say that what is wrong with the Nazis is that they cannot justify their actions - surely the wrongness of it all resides in the unimaginable suffering of their victims?' This sort of objection to discourse ethics seems to arise all too often. The response takes the form of a simple distinction: what it *is* for an action to be wrong is for it to be unjustifiable to those affected, but what *makes* it wrong are the things for which it is unjustifiable - in this case, the unimaginable suffering. Antti --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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