> 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.
Habermas has about 20 pages on skepticism in his well known essay on "discourse ethics." Basically, the skeptic can doubt whatever they want, as long as they put their doubt into reasons, which means they accept the moral foundation of a discourse ethics, as reason giving and taking.
However, the ultra-skeptic (my term) can opt out altogether. That's fine too. And they might be able to live their life quite happily as a skeptic. But the moment they start to impose their will on other people, they can be called into account, and asked to justify their position. If they refuse, then they have opted for an instrumental approach to all other dialogical participants.
What do we do when compassion, solidarity and freedom has been offered to someone and they refuse - opting for violence instead? I don't know. I really don't. Communicative freedom runs up against objective limits - a violent interlocutor is one of those limits. I'm not sure this is a theoretical flaw. Does the idea of morality disappear when one person isn't completely moral?
>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.
There is no such place as the ideal speech situation, there never was, Habermas never wrote about it, he said it didn't exist, he said it wasn't a place, he said we don't go there... it is just this: there are idealizations inherent to the communicative process. In the same way that when we speak, there is an 'ideal' grammatical form that we can 'weigh' in on the speech (from a second person perspective).
Obviously, there is no such thing as a 'third person' perspective when it comes to grammar, although many idiots have claim this to be the case. Habermas is not one of those idiots.
ken