Abstract
Many political theorists today appeal to, or assume the existence of, a political culture in which the public values of Western liberal democracies are embedded – a political culture that is necessary to render their ideas plausible and their proposals feasible. This article contrasts this approach with the more ambitious arguments advanced by Jürgen Habermas in his original account of discourse ethics – a moral theory to which, he supposed, all human beings were demonstrably and ineluctably bound by the communicative constitution of collective life. Although these arguments have been largely discredited, I argue that Habermas’ analysis can be enlisted in defence of a weaker claim: namely, that principled commitment to discussion is not always necessary for genuine deliberative engagement to occur. As a result, there may be hope for democratic deliberation in contexts where a liberal democratic political culture is lacking.
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Notes
It is, however, important to remember that extremely reasonable moral arguments can be advanced on behalf of the prevailing status quo. It could be argued that the status quo is preferable to a state of anarchy or civil war (as for Hobbes); alternatively, it could be argued that the status quo is preferable to revolutionary experimentation (Burke). Obviously, the fact that these are reasonable arguments in the abstract does not mean that they are or should necessarily be decisive in any particular case.
This need not be how interlocutors conceive of moral argument: they might believe they are demonstrating the objective truth of certain claims. Nevertheless, it remains the case that, as a matter of fact, assuming conversation is not otherwise interrupted or abandoned, and interlocutors are sincerely trying to reach agreement, argument will cease when all participants believe that agreement has been reached.
This does not mean that the fact that they are accepted is the reason that they are acceptable to us. Such a set-up would be akin to the opinion-poll politics we have already rejected. This also means it is perfectly possible, on Habermas’ account, for people to agree to the same norm for different reasons. Rawls’ charge that Habermas dismisses ‘religious and metaphysical views … as unusable’ in light of ‘philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse and communicative action’ overlooks this point (Rawls, 1995, p. 135).
Habermas himself appears to acknowledge as much in his more recent writings on religion (2006).
The observation has been made by commentators broadly sympathetic to the Habermasian enterprise (for example Benhabib, 1990, and Bohman, 1995), as well as those who take a more critical stance (for example Young, 1996, and Mouffe, 2000).
See Finlayson (2000) for a critique sympathetic to a more historically situated form of Habermasian theory.
This last ‘post’ is taken from Habermas (2006, p. 15).
It should be noted that Habermas did, on occasion, advance similar claims in his earlier writings; see, for example, his Legitimation Crisis (1975, pp. 86–87).
Indeed, it seems doubtful that this norm would even qualify as ‘fundamental’ within Western societies – as another critic has pointed out, there are surely ‘situations in which it is appropriate to act as one justifiably believes morality requires even in the face of disagreement’ (McMahon, 2000, p. 532).
There are some eminently justified norms for which we might be reluctant to provide reasons. Bernard Williams points out that ‘one does not feel easy with the man who in the course of a discussion of how to deal with political or business rivals says, ‘Of course, we could have them killed, but we should lay that aside right from the beginning’. It should never have come into his hands to be laid aside. It is characteristic of morality that it tends to overlook the possibility that some concerns are best embodied in this way, in deliberative silence (1985, p. 185). As Michael Oakeshott observed, ‘the invitation to justify need not be accepted; the belief that an action is somehow morally incomplete unless it is supported by a “justification” is a superstition’ (1975, p. 69).
The idea is similar to that suggested by Cass Sunstein's work on incompletely theorized agreements (1995, 2007). However, whereas Sunstein argues that this restraint requires interlocutors to ‘accept at least one general theory … the theory that tells them to favor incompletely theorized agreements’ (1995, p. 1771), Habermas’ analysis shows that this restraint may arise simply from the de facto economy of real-world normative debate, in which people do not argue back to first principles, but rather to whatever level of abstraction is necessary to resolve the concrete disagreement at hand.
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O'Donovan, N. Does deliberative democracy need deliberative democrats? Revisiting Habermas’ defence of discourse ethics. Contemp Polit Theory 12, 123–144 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.13