>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."
Sort of, but not quite. The justification problem requires, as I take it, that we be able to produce an argument that shows that those who reject our ethics are wrong. I don't think it is possible to answer the moral skeptic generally, any more than to respond to the Cartesian doubter about ordinary knowledge, but there are few of any real moral skeptics. The reply should be addressed to people who can raise substantive grounds for doubt based on their own moral perspectives. That is why the issue is choice between competing conceptions of justice and freedom--in my schematization, between the justice of domonation and of emancipation. And the reply in favor of emancipation should not beg the question against domination. It should proceed from premises the doubters abour emancipation accept.
However, the true social theory (historical materialism, but a very weak version) tells us that such a reply will not motivate the defenders of domination, at least the ruling classes whose interests are promoted by domination. This ensures that any justification that does not provide some motivational basis for a transformation of social life to emancipation by someone--not neceassrily the ruling class--will beg the question. Without such a basis, we just have a faceoff of competing, self-enclosed perspectives based on present interests.
However, with such a basis, we can say that a transition to emancipation is possible, because someone (the subordinate classes) is motivated to undertake it, and the views of the ruling classes are wrong on their own terms, although they will not be motivated by this. The last clause gives us a justification for the transition in the first clause; the first clause addresses the "ought implies can" problem that started me on this inquiry.
Habermas' account seems to me to address neither problem. By putting us in the ideal speech situatiuon, it begs the question against the domination of the ruling classes; by abstracting from the question of motivation, it fails to address the issue of transition. So it is doubly defective.
--jks
>
>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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> >
> >
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