I said: I like Rawls and Scanlon better, or
>>J.S. Mill.
>
You (Kenneth) said:
>Have you read Seyla Benhabib's critique of Rawls, Habermas and Kohlberg?
I confess that I have not. You may have gathered that while I am not a bigot, I am not big on continental philosophy. I never could get much out of what Benhabib I tried, lacked the patience for it.
>
You said:
>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,
That's not my reading of Rawls, but if it's what your Habermas is doing, that's illuminating about where you stand. Btw, I don't follow Rawls, as you'll see. I think the two principles of justice in Rawls are OK, though overly schematic, but I reject the method of the original position.
>but Habermas wants to bring in feelings, emotions >and >need
>interpretations into the discourse, as the backbone of where >our
> >reasoning comes from.
Rawls isn't interesting, in setting up the OP, in where our reasoning comes from. He wants to represent a miminally controversial model that abstracts from all possible conflicts of interest. He fails of course, but adding in feelings and especially need interpretations would only make things worse by generating conflict, where he needs something like agreement.
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,
Of course, it is exactly the failure to respect the individuality of poeople that Rawls attacks in utilitarianism, and that he thinks his theory captures.
If you can follow Rawls, then I don't see any reason why
>you >won't follow Habermas.
As I say, I don't follow Rawls. And I reject Habermas for similar reasons: I don't think ideal agreements abstracted from actual conflicts can motivate us as we are, stuck in our actual conflicts, and if they cannot motivate, they run afoul of ought implies can.
The idea of reflective equilibrium comes from
>Kant,
Oh, no. No no no. Absolutely not. It's pure pragmatism. Rawls got it from Nelson Goodman--see Goodman's discussion of the justification of deduction in Fact Fiction and Forecast--and it's straight from the black Hegelian heart of John Dewey. Goodman, however, probably got it from Otto Neurath, the Marxist in the Vienna Circle. Nothing whstoever could be further from Kant's transcendental philosophy than RE.
Kant doesn't want us to systematize our beliefs by going back and forth from specific judgments to general principles, discarding what doesn't fit. That he would regard as mere psychology--quite correctly from his point of view. He wants transcendental conditions of experience, something we prags, with out naturalized RE perspective, regard as unattainable, unnecessary, and uninteresting.
I studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with Rorty, among others, a long time ago.
>
You saiD: >>But Rorty implicitly
>>>draws on >>>a rather Kantian testing mechanism: does it hurt or doesn't
>>>it?
>>
>>I responded: Why is that Kantian rather than utilitarian?
>
>You replied: Because the proposition can be formalized. I could be wrong
>about >this.
I think you are. I don't follow your answer. Utilitarianism can bea s
formalized as you like. Many people consider it that one of its attractions.
You want formalized utilitarianism? Check out John Harsanyi, utilitarianism
with heavy lifting mathematics. But the idea that pain is the intrinsic evil
is pure Bentham. Kant doesn't think pain is bad in itself. What's bad in
itself is heteronomy, he things. AT least the only thing good in itself is a
good will, i.e., free action in accordw ith the categorical imperative.
>
>
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.
But he's obviously too limited about what they are. He should reread Hegel on Master and Slave, where Hegel shows how slavery made it possible for the slave to acquire knowledge of the external world and his own nature.
>He wants to avoid the idea that we can write >poetry and gain historical
>insight into the dynamics of social >movements.
A desperate fallacy. More is to be learned about the dynamics of the English Revolution from Milton's poetry than from many volumes of social theory. Sure the fellow who wants to put feeling and emotion into the conditiosn of communication cannot be so flatheaded?
I said that mys ocoal theoty was historical materialism.
>
>
>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.
ANd the rise of capitalism didn't have anything to do with this? I hardly call tahn an improvement/
> So we have, with Habermas, a yardstick for criticism.
And not with hostorical materialism?
>When
>money emerges, it is a medium that replaces communicative action. In
>effect, it is a communicative pathology, by merit of its very form.
Seems to me I read this in an old critique of political economy by a now-forgotten German exile in London . . . .
>Any use
>of money, then, will distort human relations.
. . . But the fellow's name escapes me. March, Mark, something like that.
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:
As I recall it--it was long ago, and is rather dim, the old German fellow had some ideas about that, something about workers of thew orld uniting, I think it was
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.
But of course, I guess the German guy wasn't interesting in sociology, and hadn't much to say about it.
I said:
. Rorty thuinks we have agreement without
>>theory.
>>I don't think we have agreement, and that theory won't help us get it.
>
You said:
>
>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...
Kenneth, this example may be a result of living in Canada. Here in America, the theory of evolution is controversial--it's probably actually a minority view. Granted, we are backwards, but here religios communities have not exactly accomodated themselves to Darwinism. Here in Illinois, the theory of evolution is not part of the school curriculum taught in public schools. I'm talking Illinois, not Mississippi. It's not taught there, either. At least here the schools just dodge the issue. There they teach creationism.
I think I have a 'happier' understanding of
>theory >than you do...
Yeah, cause you're not a historical materialist.
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,
So what is your conception of literature and your idea of how it should be treated, exactly? I guess you think that we cannot learn from it, that Tolstoy, Brecht, Milton, etc. are just entertainers on the level of, I don't know, Danielle Steele?
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.
But if we've learned anything from Marx, we will realize that if I am a capitalist and you area worker, we are not going to agree about the division of the social product, eh?
--jks
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