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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