Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism. Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other (...) individuals, Rehg shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists. (shrink)

The contributions in this anthology address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens.

In Between Facts and Norms Jürgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action, bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more.The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, (...) noting that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so- called liberals and civic republicans.The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book.Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers. (shrink)

Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism. Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other (...) individuals, Rehg shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists. (shrink)

Despite the foment of the last two decades, philosophical ethics has fallen on hard times. While an increasing number of universalistic moral theories in the Kantian tradition limit themselves to questions of social and political justice, neo-Aristotelian theories of the good, like that of Bernard Williams, question the very possibility and desirability of a philosophical ethics. Viewed against this landscape, the program of discourse or communicative ethics, initiated by Karl Otto-Apel and then developed by Jürgen Habermas, is marked by its (...) optimism. Although sharing a great deal with the Rawlsian tradition, discourse ethicists insist that justice is not “the chief virtue of social institutions” alone, but the privileged domain of the moral as such. And although agreeing with neo-Aristotelians’ skepticism—later repeated by Hegel against Kant—about decontextualized ethical theory, discourse ethicists nonetheless believe that an abstract formulation of the moral point of view that would be context-sensitive is still possible. (shrink)

Central to the discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas is a principle of universalization (U) amounting to a dialogical equivalent of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Habermas has proposed that ?U? follows by material implication from two premises: (1) what it means to discuss whether a moral norm ought to be . adopted and (2) what those involved in argumentation must suppose of themselves if they are to consider a consensus they reach as rationally motivated. To date, no satisfactory derivation of ?U? (...) from these two premises has been presented. Thus the present study attempts to show how one can, without begging the question, arrive at ?U? by assuming a suitable explication of these two premises, supplemented with a fairly innocuous assumption about the context of discourse. If the argument is sound, then ?U? brings both deontological and consequentialist intuitions together with a notion of solidarity that requires an intersubjective account of insight. (shrink)

Attempts to employ discourse ethics for assessing communication and information technologies have tended to focus on managerial and policy-oriented contexts. These initiatives presuppose institutional resources for organizing sophisticated consultation processes that elicit stakeholder input. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, this paper supplements those initiatives by developing a more widely usable framework for moral inquiry and reflection on problematic cyberpractices. Given the highly idealized character of discourse ethics, a usable framework must answer two questions: How should those who lack organizational (...) power conduct their moral inquiry under non-ideal conditions of discourse? How ought they to understand the moral force of the judgments they reach under such conditions? In response, I develop the heuristic implications of Habermas’s principle of universalization. To render that principle usable for non-ideal discourse, I propose a modification that yields a scalar measure of “dialogically robust” judgments that are responsive to the actual state of discussion. To illustrate the use of these principles, I sketch two case studies, which examine the moral acceptability of violent video gaming and government cyber-surveillance. (shrink)

: For philosophers of science interested in elucidating the social character of science, an important question concerns the manner in which and degree to which the objectivity of scientific knowledge is socially constituted. We address this broad question by focusing specifically on philosophical theories of evidence. To get at the social character of evidence, we take an interdisciplinary approach informed by categories from argumentation studies. We then test these categories by exploring their applicability to a case study from high-energy physics. (...) Our central claim is that normative philosophy of science must move beyond abstract theories of justification, confirmation, or evidence conceived impersonally and incorporate a theoretical perspective that includes dialogical elements, either as adjuncts to impersonal theories of evidence or as intrinsic to the cogency of scientific argumentation. (shrink)

These 11 essays by noted philosophers and social theorists take up the philosophical aspects of Jürgen Habermas's unfinished project of reconstructing enlightenment rationality. They range in subject matter from classical problems to contemporary debates, covering historical perspectives, theoretical issues, and post-enlightenment challenges. A companion volume of essays will take up the cultural and political aspects of the work. Together, the two volumes underscore the richness and variety of Habermas's project. Contributors Karl-Otto Apel, Richard J. Bernstein, Peter Bürger, Martin Jay, Thomas (...) McCarthy, Herbert Schnädelbach, Charles Taylor, Michael Theunissen, Ernst Tugendhat, Albrecht Wellmer. (shrink)

Recent proposals for computer-assisted argumentation have drawn on dialectical models of argumentation. When used to assist public policy planning, such systems also raise questions of political legitimacy. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, we elaborate normative criteria for deliberative legitimacy and illustrate their use for assessing two argumentation systems. Full assessment of such systems requires experiments in which system designers draw on expertise from the social sciences and enter into the policy deliberation itself at the level of participants.

This article proposes a way of connecting two levels at which scholars have studied discursive practices from a normative perspective: on the one hand, local transactions-face-to-face arguments or dialogues-and broadly dispersed public debates on the other. To help focus my analysis, I select two representatives of work at these two levels: the pragmadialectical model of critical discussion and Habermas's discourse theory of politicallegal deliberation. The two models confront complementary challenges that arise from gaps between their prescriptions and contexts of actual (...) discourse. In response, I propose a theory of argument cogency that distinguishes three kinds of merit: content, transactional, and public. Normative links between the two levels arise through the ways argument contents spread across multiple transactions in a social space whose structure and composition favor collective reasonableness. (shrink)

The essays in this volume reflect on and expand Frankfurt School critical theory as reformulated after World War II by Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and others. Frankfurt School critical theory since the pragmatic turn has become a richer source of critical analysis that is at the same time socially and politically more effective. The essays are dedicated to Thomas McCarthy, who has done perhaps more than any other scholar to introduce English-speaking audiences to contemporary German critical theory.The book is organized (...) into three parts. Part one deals with social theory and the rational basis of communication, including basic issues raised by the pragmatic turn. Part two examines conceptions of autonomy and the self. Part three deals with political theory, focusing on problems stemming from sociocultural pluralism. Together, the essays provide an overview of the latest developments in Frankfurt School critical theory as it responds to the challenges of pragmatism and social pluralism. (shrink)

According to the standard version of discourse ethics (e.g. as formulated by Apel, Habermas, and others), the objectivity of moral norms resides in their intersubjective acceptability under idealized conditions of discourse. These accounts have been criticized for not taking sufficient account of contextual particularities and the realities of actual discourse. This essay addresses such objections by proposing a more realistic, contextualist 'principle of real moral discourse' (RMD). RMD is derived from a more comprehensive concept of objectivity that links intersubjective objectivity (...) with a factual objectivity based in features of social conflicts and the moral problems they pose. To clarify RMD and make this approach more plausible, a number of theoretical and practical questions are addressed concerning the notions of reasonability and inclusivity entailed by RMD. (shrink)

In his massive 2019 work on the history of the faith-reason discourse in the West, Habermas replies to Kant’s question of rational hope with the prospect of an eventual intercultural agreement on cosmopolitan principles of justice. To warrant such hope he points to the growth of democratic institutions and human rights across the globe. Habermas’s answer thus relies on political structures that foster transformative social movements—but not on modern moral attitudes, which he regards as too individualistic to generate collective action. (...) I argue that Habermas, following Kant, relies on flawed assumptions about social movements. As a result, his structural approach provides an incomplete basis for hope. In the spirit of ongoing dialogue between religion and secular thought, I translate Aquinas’s treatment of fraternal correction into an ethics of moral leadership that can fill the gaps in Habermas’s project. (shrink)

The thesis of my paper is that argumentation theory provides a promising heuristic framework for addressing issues raised by the rationality debates in the philosophy of science, in particular the issues connected with scientific controversies over the appraisal and choice of competing theories. The first part of the paper grounds this thesis historically. In criticizing the logical empiricists, Thomas Kuhn set the stage for the subsequent opposition between a normative, anti-sociological philosophy of science and a descriptive, anti-philosophical sociology of knowledge. (...) But he also hinted at the main lines of a multi-dimensional theory of argumentation which might frame a wide range of current investigations into scientific reasoning. In the second part of the paper I focus on the central normative aspect of this framework, dialectical argumentation, and clarify the key challenge, the underdetermination of theories by evidence. In the third part, I attempt to get beyond the dichotomy informing the rationality debates by reformulating the problem of theory choice within a broader context of scientific rationality. (shrink)

The idea that business firms qualify as group moral agents offers an attractive basis for understanding corporate moral responsibility. However, that idea gives rise to the “corporate autonomy problem” (CAP): if firms are moral agents, then it seems we must accept the implausible conclusion that firms have basic moral rights, such as the rights to life and liberty. The question, then, is how one might retain the fruitful idea of firms as moral agents, yet avoid CAP. A common approach to (...) avoiding CAP appeals to specific features of human embodiment, such as vulnerability to pain, as the basis for attributing moral rights to human persons but not to firms. But that response has less purchase in a Kantian framework, which does not ground moral status in such particularities of human embodiment, but rather in the rational nature that humans share with other rational beings. To avoid CAP while retaining a (broadly) Kantian framework, one does better to rely on features of firms as cooperative, compositionally derivative moral agents, created for the pursuit of specific ends. As derivative agents, firms do not qualify as Kantian ends in themselves, and thus are not appropriate bearers of basic moral rights. To further clarify the level of consideration we owe to firms, I draw on Darwall’s distinction between recognition respect and moral esteem, arguing that we should not respect firms as unconditional ends in themselves, but rather esteem morally autonomous firms as collective achievements of their human members. (shrink)

Contemporary critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition have focused considerable attention on theories of deliberative democracy, which in general attempt to show how public argumentation can be both democratic and reasonable. In this context, political questions that involve or depend on science present an acute challenge, inasmuch as deliberation must meet especially demanding epistemic requirements. In this article, the author examines two past responses to the challenge, each of which failed to reconcile reasonableness and democracy: that of the (...) scientists involved in policymaking in the 1940s in the United States, and that of Herbert Marcuse and the New Left in the 1960s. Both the scientists and Marcuse depended on general models of science-in-society that ultimately led them into elitist modes of argumentation. The author concludes by drawing some lessons for an interdisciplinary, argumentation-theoretic approach to science-related public argumentation. /// Pensadores críticos contemporâneos trabalhando dentro da tradição da Escola de Frankfurt prestaram considerável atenção a teorias sobre a democracia deliberativa, as quais em geral procuram mostrar até que ponto a argumentação pública pode ser simultaneamente democrática e razoável. Neste contexto, questões políticas que involvem ou dependem da ciência apresentam um sério desafio, tanto mais que a deliberação deve satisfazer requisitos epistémicos particularmente exigentes. No presente artigo, o autor examina duas respostas que no passado foram dadas a este desafio, cada uma das quais foi incapaz de reconciliar razoabilidade e democracia: a dos cientistas involvidos no desenho de políticas concretas durante os anos 40 nos Estados Unidos, e a de Herbert Marcuse e a Nova Esquerda durante os anos 60. Tanto os cientistas como Marcuse estavam dependentes de modelos genéricos de ciência-nasociedade os quais em última análise os conduziram a modelos elitistas de argumentação. O autor conclui extraindo algumas lições pertinentes para uma abordagem interdisciplinar, argumentativa e teorética à questão da ciência em sua relação com a argumentação pública. (shrink)

In the literature on scientific practices, one finds sustained analyses of the contextualist elements of inquiry. However, the ways in which local and disciplinary contexts of practice function as common goods remain largely unexplored. In this paper I argue that a contextualist analysis of scientific practices as common goods can shed light on the challenges of scientific communication and interdisciplinary collaboration, albeit without invoking Kuhn's problematic notion of incommensurability.

This article asks whether an interdisciplinary "critical science studies" (CSS) is possible between a critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition, with its commitment to universal standards of reason, and relativistic sociologies of scientific knowledge (e.g., David Bloor's strong programme). It is argued that CSS is possible if its practitioners adopt the epistemological equivalent of Rawls's method of avoidance. A discriminating, public policy–relevant critique of science can then proceed on the basis of an argumentation theory that employs an immanent standard (...) of relevance, which is illustrated by drawing on Helen Longino's critique of behavioral theory. (shrink)

This article examines two approaches to the analysis and critical assessment of scientific argumentation. The first approach employs the discourse theory that Jurgen Habermas has developed on the basis of his theory of communicative action and applied to the areas of politics and law. Using his analysis of law and democracy in his Between Facts and Norms as a kind of template, I sketch the main steps in a Habermasian discourse theory of science. Difficulties in his approach motivate my proposal (...) of an alternative approach that starts not with a theory of communicative action but with some broad categories drawn from argumentation theory. Using these categories, one can survey the various conceptions of scientific argumentation that have already emerged in the multi-disciplinary field of science studies. The more flexible, open-ended theoretic categories put one in a better position to'develop cooperative interdisciplinary studies that can inform the critical assessment of scientific argumentation. (shrink)