Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a critique of Jurgen Habermas's communication-theoretic proposal for a discourse ethics. In doing so, I confront the theory of communicative rationality with the pronounced intention of letting discourse ethics take, as Habermas puts it, its orientation for an intersubjective interpretation of the categorical imperative from Hegel's theory of recognition. My objections to this attempt to provide a critical theory with normative grounds generally relate to what I see as a too excessive formalism, and a tendential repression of the dimension of ethical ontology. ;Although Habermas insists that agents always bring their lifewordly conditions of existence--their particular identities and histories--with them when they engage argumentatively to redeem validity claims, the discourse model has throughout its effective history been notoriously helpless when engaging with the internally related issues of motivation and the cognitive problems of judgment and context-sensitive application. In analyzing the principle of universalizability , I show why it is necessary to construct a dialectical relationship between morality and issues of the good life, and to introduce a notion of reflective judgment. Moreover, I argue for a detachment of moral theory from the quasi-transcendental grounding in formal structures of rationality. ;In the course of my successive interpretative confrontations with discourse ethics, I formulate a hermeneutic approach. One important upshot of this is that discourse ethics will be situated closer to Habermas's early suggestions towards a critical hermeneutics. This is a conception which emphatically promotes an internal link between judgment, action and argumentation. Another consequence relates to the need for a realist realignment of discourse ethics. I suggest that reflection and moral discourse, starting from the particularity of concrete cases but ultimately aiming towards universality , should be involved, not in a process of further disintegration of ethical life , but in a process of healing, in which universality serves a memorial, imaginative and communicative function: it creates a conceptual reservoir for interpreting our complex moral experiences, and ultimately for gaining knowledge of the self and its intricate bonds and attachments to others.