Habermas by Baynes Kenneth

Author:Baynes, Kenneth [Kenneth Baynes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317445876
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

III. Conclusion: A dialectic of moral and political constructivism?

In concluding this chapter, I return to the suggestion made above, namely, that Habermas’s discourse morality might be located between a liberal moral realism as articulated, for example, by Larmore (among many others) and forms of contextualism that (I will assume here without further argument) are not attractive. Is there any conceptual space to be occupied between these two alternatives? A variation on this question has been posed to a moral constructivist even more sharply in connection with a recent discussion by Samuel Freeman (2007). Freeman asks: who specifically is the audience to whom Scanlon’s moral contractualism—or Habermas’s discourse morality—might be directed? If it is to citizens of a liberal polity then, Freeman claims, it cannot provide an appropriately stable or reliable moral basis for a liberal constitution because it fails the publicity condition of (Rawls’s) political constructivism: It is not reasonable to assume that all citizens would endorse a constructivist account as the best or correct “comprehensive” morality. According to Freeman, it could count at most as one among other reasonable private or personal moralities which could in turn become part of a reasonable overlapping consensus. On the other hand, however, a gnawing skepticism persists among many critics that Rawls’s own “free-standing” political conception, insofar as it takes for granted the values of a liberal political culture, does not adequately address the question of the moral foundations of a liberal-democratic constitution in an increasingly pluralist and fragmented world (Forst 2012, 92f.). It is here that the liberal “moral realist” stakes his claim and argues that political constructivism comes up short (Larmore 1996). It is here too that more proceduralist positions attempt to gain a foothold (Waldron 1999). But, finally, it is here that the advantages of discourse morality more fully emerge. Rather than entrusting the weight of moral constructivism solely to individual judgments about reasonableness (or what is or isn’t reasonably rejectable)—as important and indispensable as those individual moral judgments are—discourse morality differs from Scanlon’s contractualism by turning attention additionally to the equally indispensable need for multiple and overlapping forms of practical discourse dispersed throughout a formal and informal public sphere—that is, through a vibrant and robust civil society and a complex and interlocking set of institutions for deliberation and decision-making in a formally constituted political government. Like Scanlon’s contractualism, discourse morality is (in some sense) a “comprehensive” moral doctrine—it is not, for example, limited only to questions of what citizens (in contrast to “all affected”) can legitimately demand of one another. It is nonetheless a constructivism that has as its broader aim an operationalizing of the deliberative procedure in such a way that “comprehensive moral doctrines” (or, perhaps more accurately, their contested substantive norms) can themselves become the content of a broad and public moral discourse. In this sense, and in contrast to more contextualist readings of Rawls’s political constructivism, it does seem to fulfill a demand that reasonable citizens can appropriately expect of one another, at least when it

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