Pete asks if this is what is bothering me about ideal speech situation theory:
>
>How about this. The kinds of standards for
>agreement that Habermas's ideal speech situation
>hold out seem so high that it is unlikely that the
>cafeteria worker next door to me will be able to
>live up to them. Does the ISS mean that she has
>nothing to contribute to the social debate?
No. Let us assume that under utopian conditions, everyone can contribute at a level that would put Habermas in the shade. My problem does not depend on the assumption that most people are too stupid even under ideal condition. Rather, I have two problems that apply even if we assume that they are not stupid.
First, my problem is that justification by reference to an ideal state of affairs will fail to motivate people in the here and now, where conditions are not ideal. In particular, if you tell the people who are privileged by the inequalities that make our actual situation non-ideal that if those inequalities didn't exist they'd think differently, they wouldn't care. They'd say, right, but since these inequalities do exist, this is what I think. You say, but that situation is normatively ideal! They reply (if they are smart), no, that begs the question. You are supposed to _show_ that these inequalities are bad, so you cannot presume that the fact that we would condemn them if they did not exist shows that they are bad.
A closely connected point: the privileged, given their privileges, will be motivated by their interests to oppose equalization that would damage their privileges. Therefore they will oppose any transition to an ideal speech situation. But if people cannot be motivated to act on some set of principles, such as those that would be agreed to in the ideal speech situation, the principles are no good as political principles. It is no use at all to say, as Habermas does, that they should act according to what would be agreed to in the ISS if they cannot be motivated to get there.
So, those are my main problems with the story. I have also been asking about how, if the ISS is a necessary condition of communication, we can communicate at all if we are not in it, and have been getting cold stares for my stupidity, but I still don;t understand. Kells says that is wnot what Habermas means, but then she says our communication is systematically distorted, so I am doubly baffled. I guess this is an instance of systematically distorted communication.
>
>P.S.S. The problems to be solved aren't
>necessarily the finer points of analytic language
>philosophy (which may just be a tool of thought
>for getting clearer about some issues
Agreed.
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