I'd like to say that I think this last post illuminates what is at stake in the clearest terms yet.
>>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.
>
>Not exactly. I am a former Rorty student, and I am a pragmatist, but I am
>not as big a fan of banality as Rorty. My response hasn't been "so what"
>to philosophy, but to the Habermas you have laid out. (As I say, I don't
>pretend to know whether it represents his actual views.) I think there's a
>lot of interesting things to be said about social and moral theory, etc.,
>a lot more than "don't hurt people," but your Habermas hasn't said any of
>those things, far as I can see. I like Rawls and Scanlon better, or J.S. Mill.
Have you read Seyla Benhabib's critique of Rawls, Habermas and Kohlberg? ("The Generalized and the Concrete Other" in Situating the Self). I always use that essay in one of sessional courses I teach. Habermas, for the most part, agrees with it, and one can see the shift in his thinking from Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) to Justification and Application (circa 1990) to Between Facts and Norms (1994). Basically, Rawls model relies on role-taking, but role-taking where one generalized other is taking the role of another generalized other. This is exactly what Habermas is doing, but Habermas wants to bring in feelings, emotions and need interpretations into the discourse, as the backbone of where our reasoning comes from. Benhabib simply reinforces this point arguing that a moral theory of discourse, a communicative ethics, must do justice to both the humanity and individuality of people, and in this sense points out that Habermas's emphasis has been to one-sided. In this sense, Habermas and Rawls are a world apart. However, Habermas argues with Rawls that there has to be a procedure for doing this, and outlines a rational justification of why a procedure is the only way to achieve anything like impartiality, perhaps not impartiality, but at least the possibility of widespread legitimacy. If you can follow Rawls, then I don't see any reason why you won't follow Habermas. The idea of reflective equilibrium comes from Kant, and it is the heart and sole [sic] of Habermas's framework. What Rawls calls the original position, veil of ignorance, Habermas calls the formal conditions of discourse, but in Habermas's case you don't need the original position or the veil of ignorance. Interestingly, Habermas is more prone to defend the Rawls of A Theory of Justice than the Rawls of Political Liberalism, Rawls' response to Habermas (some 70 pages I recall) can be found in the last chapter of PL. I must admit to being guilty of overdetermining Habermas's real point. The theory of communicative action should not be confused with his moral theory of discourse... I chalk this up to my latest reading habits, I'm making the transition right about now.
>But Rorty implicitly
>>draws on
>>a rather Kantian testing mechanism: does it hurt or doesn't it?
>
>Why is that Kantian rather than utilitarian?
Because the proposition can be formalized. I could be wrong about this.
>>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.
>
>Look, I don't dispute that argument is valuable, I just don't think this
>fact has the significance your Habermas attributes to it. If we want to
>know the truth anout things, and be jutified in believing less obvious
>ones, we need arguments. (And now the Rortyan shrug:) So what?
Exactly. Habermas outlines how knowing things is linked up to an internal logic of communication, and that only some forms of communication make it possible to acquire knowledge. He wants to avoid the idea that we can write poetry and gain historical insight into the dynamics of social movements. I suppose you're correct, we don't need a theory to demonstrate this. But it makes one wonder what the hell some people are doing when they trace the history of a word back to its archaic origins and call it social critique.
>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.
>
>That's Rorty, not me. I don't know if we "need" ethical "foundations," but
>I have spent a lot of time elaborating moral justifications for left
>political views in a way I hope is consistent with a credible version of
>historical materialism. Most people, and most on the left, won't care, but
>that's OK; for those of us that do, it's worth doing this work as long as
>it doesn't detract too much from actually fighting oppression. I am
>Rortyan enough to think that we don't need to agonize too much about
>whether oppression ought to be fought, even if it's important to some us
>to be able to say just what oppression is and why it bad.
Ok, Habermas departs historical materialism because he thinks that a model of social evolution is better. In other words, he charts out the stage of cognitive development, on a psychological and sociological level: explaining how a mythological worldview comes to be transformed into a modern worldview. He then points out that, drawing on theories of cognitive development, we can gage *our* development (theoretically rather than in an ad hoc way). So we have, with Habermas, a yardstick for criticism. When money emerges, it is a medium that replaces communicative action. In effect, it is a communicative pathology, by merit of its very form. Any use of money, then, will distort human relations. However, it is useful as a means of avoiding 'overburdening' the subjective capacities of people in their social and daily lives. It is convenient that we don't have to argue *every* time we get out of bed. As the same time, money has come to colonize and replace communication actions, which creates social upheaval and political crises. More than that, the spheres of value are threatening to become autonomous from the political system proper, which aggravates the entire situation even more... and so on. But the benchmark for pathology can be measured against the theoretical construct of a theory of social evolution. When communicative actions break down, we can use a theory of evolution to inform us of what is required to get things back on track: it outlines the formal conditions required to 'take back' the lifeworld from systemic imperatives... Naturally, if one isn't interested in sociology, this won't make much difference.
>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.
>
>I don't find this way of talking illuminating. I am not interested in
>deriving oughts from is's; that only concerns people who are bothered by
>the fact that the world might contain irreducible oughts, which doesn't
>bother me in the least.
>
>Here'a nother ide taht just occurred to be based on your formulation: it
>seems that Habermas wants to reduce ethical oughts to logical oughts, and
>that doesn't seem too likely a prospect to me.
You might be on to something there.
>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...
>
>No, that's Rorty, not me. Rorty thuinks we have agreement without theory.
>I don't think we have agreement, and that theory won't help us get it.
Really? The theory of evolution, not by itself, but in its context along with other things, provided some pretty shattering re-orientations in religious communities... I think I have a 'happier' understanding of theory than you do... I think it guides our reflections and analyses. I'm glad someone theorized commodity fetish, and Freud... wow. I don't think this stuff should be treated like literature, which is why I think it helps us find an orientation that speaks to reaching agreement. I mean, if we've both read Marx, and we both have, it will be easier for you and I to agree than someone who hasn't gone beyond Aristotle.
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