File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2003/habermas.0310, message 89


From: Antti Kauppinen <amkauppi-AT-cc.helsinki.fi>
Subject: Re: [HAB:] Re: Rational Barbarians? [Gary]
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 02:48:51 +0300 (EET DST)



Gary and others,

First of all, apologies for not responding sooner - I'm having trouble
with my dial-up connection at home and haven't had time at the office. 

> Inthe meantime, can you further clarify the
> very interesting distinction you're making here?:
> 
> A> ... 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.

This is a kind of Scanlonian rendering of a problem that haunts any
broadly contractarian account of ethics: intuitively, actions are wrong
in virtue of things like causing pain or humiliation. How is this
compatible with saying that an action is wrong because its maxim cannot be
universalized or (insert your favourite Habermasian formulation of (U)
here)? What role does, or indeed can, failure to reach discursive
agreement have in this picture? People like Philip Pettit say that it is
redundant, having at most an epistemological role. Everyone can agree
under idealized conditions that torture is wrong, but it's not our 
agreement that makes it wrong, but the properties that lead us to agree 
about its wrongness, such as its causing excessive pain to a helpless
person who is in any case no longer in a position to threat anyone if
she ever was, and so on. I'm not sure yet if I want to defend this type
of theory myself, but I don't think that people like Habermas and
Scanlon would fall for such a simple trap. I can hopefully return to
this next week, since I'm re-reading Scanlon for a seminar on Tuesday
and his theory has important structural similarities to Habermas's.

> Women who stay in violently dysfunctional relationships may
> believe that they brought their suffering on themselves
> (by, say, not "loving" him well enough or not understanding
> him "fairly" enough, etc.). We know that this is
> unjustifiable, but it's not "unjustifiable to those
> affected." We might say that the resigned suffering of
> people expresses a *lack* of capacity for justifiability
> (such that "not unjustifiable" doesn't mean that they have
> actively justified their suffering; they merely live their
> suffering as their lot).

This kind of cases are indeed a problem for any liberal theory that
gives an important role to people's own beliefs about their own good.
The basic escape strategy is the one that Habermas uses: let us talk
about justifiability under *ideal conditions*. I think this strategy can
surely handle of lot of cases. Remember the Habermasian conditions:
everyone should have the chance to make proposals that are equally
considered, nobody should be coerced or manipulated into accepting a
proposed norm, and so on. So we can say: sure, these women might agree
to this kind of treatment, but this consent is due to some kind of
manipulation or indoctrination, so it doesn't carry the moral weight it
would without these factors. The problem then becomes providing a
non-question-begging characterization of manipulation and indoctrination
- perhaps these women would say that it is in fact we who have been
indoctrinated by a hedonistic, individualistic culture that does not
give due weight to true commitment...
 
> So, why might it be the suffering that we can't imagine
> that makes naturalized poverty wrong, rather than an
> inherent capacity for identification with the other (or
> care) that grounds a positive *theory* of rights as
> *entitlements* based in our self-understanding (thanks to
> high literacy) of our capabilities as humans (which is the
> stance of welfare economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya
> Sen)?

I'm not sure if I understand this sentence correctly - could you break
it down a bit for me?

Antti


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