> i agree that ken's made some mistakes in explaining what he's saying of course and, i argue, puts to much ON habermas for me to feel that he's actually engaged in an even-handed elaboration of his work.
?? First you defend me, then you make fun of what I've said, without even a nod to where I've opted out of coherency.
I think my treatment of Habermas has been pretty even-handed. Like I mentioned, I have references for each of the points - and I can hand them out in chronological order if you want. I admit that I've missed the point of some of Justin's rebuttles, but I've been trying to explain something in a couple pages that took Habermas 800 pages to outline.
As far as I can tell, Justin's response amounts to this: "So what?" My suspicion is, rhetoric aside, that Justin is a closet Rorty fan - one rule, hurting people is bad, after that, anything goes, just fight the good fight. Rorty tries to cut through a lot of bullshit, and pretty much sees most of what goes on in philosophy as a colossal waste of time and effort. The hilarious thing about Rorty is that he's an unconscious Kantian, which actually aligns him with Habermas is a weird sort of way.
Habermas is obsessed with the normative foundations of modernity. Rorty doesn't give a damn, it's just a good story. But Rorty implicitly draws on a rather Kantian testing mechanism: does it hurt or doesn't it? You see, Rorty believes the story of modernity, and Habermas theorizes it. They're both doing the same thing from completely different philosophical frames of reference. Rorty acts like a Habermasian but talks like a pragmatist.
So I'll outline a formal pragmatic argument and Justin will say, "So what?" - all the while going along with the outline: "Yes, I'm into this argumentation stuff." The posturing we've both been engaged in is comical precisely because we're not really disagreeing about anything.
What Habermas makes up for in rigorous inter-theoretical consistency, Rorty chalks up to common sense. The title of the thread is "ethical foundations of the left." Rorty doesn't think the left needs ethical foundations, everybody avoids pain. I've been pushing the question of foundations via Habermas because it is the most sustained defense of ethical foundations that doesn't lapse into metaphysics or theology. Habermas argues that 'the ought' cannot be derived from the is because in the determination of the is, there is already a de facto logical ought that we must pass through on the way to reaching an agreement. Habermas simply makes the 'rules' on what counts as an argument explicit. If these conditions are not met, then an argument cannot be said to have taken place. Rorty doesn't disagree with this in practice, he just disagrees with it in theory.
I don't mean to be pedantic here. I take it that Justin's point is that the left doesn't need ethical foundations, which is why he hasn't engaged my point directly, he keeps sliding off into pragmatic concerns: it doesn't work that way, we learn from art, there is more than one way to settle an argument, we can reach agreement without theory, what about global warming... these concerns don't really address the ethical foundations of the left. I'm guessing that Justin doesn't think they can be demonstrated 'in theory' - and what we need to do is emphatically push through the morass of fuzzy thought into positions where we can take advantage of our finer humane qualities. At worst, we use power to do the right thing, drawing on this intuitively, with a touch of reason and hopefully some solidarity along the way.
But, in the end, this isn't social theory, its politics - and there can be little doubt that politics needs some sort of philosophical foundation. Pragmatism does not have a social theoretical basis, it is not a scientific inquiry, it is probably more like a worldview. And that's the ridiculous part about our conversation: that we're both doing the same thing (arguing) within a practical discourse. I'm trying to clarify our doing with theory, and Justin is trying to raise practical issues that theory doesn't (and can't) address in a direct way. The entire debate has been a rather drawn out category mistake.
I suspect we can agree that the left needs social theory, and that this social theory shouldn't be based on what we had for lunch, how we're feeling in the morning, or our shoe size. In other words, we need the facts. Science is one way of doing this, probably the only way if we're going to get anywhere. The question, which is an open one, is whether or not this social theory has any links to an ethical foundation: is the research itself ethical, can it be put to ethical use, can a social theory be used to defend or justify ethical principles... can theory address moral concerns? Habermas is explicit on this point: moral theory provides cannot tell us what is right and wrong, but it can demonstrate that there are good and bad ways of communicating, true and false propositions. And it can address questions of cognitive development and questions concerning deception, manipulating, or power in an objective way. And, Habermas argues science can help reconstruct out intuitive faculties, and assist in the translation of intuition into reasons. Another way of saying this is that social theory can break up the spellbinding power of authority, charismatic or otherwise, into a set of propositions. Doing this always us to break out of the aura of illusion by putting it in the form of a yes or a no. Yes, that is true, or worthy of recognition, no, that is false, it is not worthy of my assent.
So, to call the question: does the left need an ethical foundation?
To answer this for myself - we already have an ethical foundation. It takes the form of social theorizing itself, which is a practical activity - the activity of criticism and self-reflection. What we do with this is a practical decision, and it awaits the response from an other. The ethical foundation of the left resides in its commitment to critique. The success or failure of the left will depend on how well, how accurate, and how compelling this critique is.
at the moment of my surmise, ken