File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2003/habermas.0310, message 68


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


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