>rob, since you get the diff b/t moral and ethical,, pls 'splain me coz i
>never get it when ken 'splains it.
Well, Kell --- dunno if I get it or not. But you're welcome to my get ...
I reckon McCarthy helps us out. For him, Habermas's is a proceduralist conception that, "applies the idea of justification by appeal to generally acceptable reasons to the deliberations of free and equal citizens in a constitutional democracy." The central focus and example of such deliberation is "...the institutionalization of political autonomy, that is, of the public use of reason in the legal-political domain." In this domain, reasoned agreement involves three sorts of practical reasoning, "PRAGMATIC discourse about how best to achieve our ends, ETHICAL discourse concerned with goods, values, and identities, and MORAL discourse concerning what is just, fair, or equally in the interest of all."
So I take the moral dimension to be where the principles of justice and the shape and role of institutions are negotiated - just those across-the-board principles all communities must continually reproduce - ie where sorta community-defining norms must be justified in terms sensible and relevant only at the whole-of-community level, and without reference to particular contexts.
But, I always ask myself, why doesn't Habermas call his 'discourse ethics' 'discourse morality' then? Doesn't 'discourse ethics' present itself as a just norm of relevance to all, to which all must subscribe if a democratic community is to be shared? Maybe not, I answer myself ... maybe it's precisely the fact that he's talking about only that particular moment where citizens come together to discuss abstract principles of common justice in which all must be interested that makes them discourse ETHICS ...
Anyway, if that's close to useful, then I take the realm of ethics to be the particularity of contexts, the plurality of values, and the many forms 'good' lives can take.
Such a reading has the potential to take the tyrannical edge off the moral dimension, because the distinction allows for 'the real world' as it manifests in each particular moment. Material equity has a glimmer of a chance under the otherwise potential tyranny of formal equality.
I think that freedom, if it is to be understood in Hegelian/Marxian/Habermasian (ie socially embedded) terms, does come with a hefty price tag. But the woman does not strike me as morally free unless she is free to make ethical decisions. Isn't this an example of what Berlin meant by positive freedom - ie the freedom TO? (Of course men, have a pronounced negative freedom in this particular respect: freedom FROM - but even that is not without price.)
I also reckon that it is unfair that all the ethical responsibility should fall on one person, when the impregnation is not the work of one, and where the lifeworld exerts such an unusually heavy load on 'motherhood'. But the woman strikes me as a more appropriate locus for the decision than the man, who himself seems a tad closer to relevance and authority than a society which, when it comes to motherhood, exacts far more than it bestows. And if there's nothing ethical about the decision then there's all the less call on the society to bloody well fix itself on the matter.
I need to get to bed ...
G'Night, Rob.