Ethical foundations of the left

Peter Kosenko kosenko at netwood.net
Tue Jul 31 12:47:18 PDT 2001


So you think that Habermas's approach is too busy worrying about how to convince the ruling classes, who don't want to be convinced but who will just erect more and more barriers to any seepage of corrective ideas into their realm? That is a thought that I've had myself. Then came the thought, "Maybe I'm talking to the wrong people."

Anyway, the below does explain more.

Peter


>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.

I don't think you're stupid, and I haven't meant you to take my jibes at lawyers personally. Did you hear the one . . .

Peter Kosenko


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