Discourse Ethics

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Discourse ethics arises out of Habermas's application of his theory of communicative action, in particular the validity claim of normative rightness, to moral theory and moral philosophy. Discourses, which address problematic validity claims, represent a reflective form of communicative action. All moralities are viewed as revolving around ideas of equality of respect, solidarity, and the common good, and such ideas can be reduced to the symmetrical and reciprocal relations presupposed in communicative action. In everyday communicative action within a particular lifeworld it is not necessary to extend the presuppositions about symmetry and reciprocity to people external to or not belonging to such a lifeworld. However, because lifeworlds exist in the plural, an extension into universality becomes necessary when argumentation on moral norms is at issue. Habermas distinguishes among three kinds of practical questions—pragmatic, ethical, and moral—but only issues of the right or of the just regulation of social interactions are subject to universally valid argumentation, agreement, and consensual regulation. Ethical questions (e.g., who we are, who I want to be), questions of the good, cannot be abstracted from specific ideas of identity and the good life within particular lifeworlds and traditions. This focus on the moral sphere as coextensive with questions of justice excludes much that is at present understood under the term ethics.

The project of discourse ethics has been assisted by Habermas's early collaboration with Karl-Otto Apel on the idea of an “ideal community of communication.” This allows for a reformulation of the monologic nature of Kantian ethics by grounding moral norms in dialogic communication. As participants in argumentation, viewed as a problem-solving procedure that generates convictions, we are all on our own yet simultaneously embedded within a communication context. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative—”Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that [Page 309]it should become a universal law”—is replaced by a procedure of moral argumentation, combining the discourse principle (D) and the universalization principle (U).

The principle of discourse ethics (D) states that only those norms can claim to be valid that meet, or could meet, with the consent of all people affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse. Ideal conditions of such practical discourse can never be fully realized, and Habermas has now moved some distance from his earlier outline of the ideal speech situation, but the idea of consensus under ideal conditions has concrete practical implications in that participants engaged in a cooperative search for normative rightness or the just in any given contested situation must assume that such conditions are met to a reasonable degree. For this to occur (U), the universalization principle must hold, and such conditions are not met unless all affected can freely accept the consequences and the side effects that the general observance of a controversial norm can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each individual and that these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation. In practical discourse U acts as a rule of argumentation and is grounded in the presuppositions of argumentation in that anyone who attempts to discursively redeem normative claims to validity intuitively accepts such procedural conditions. Apel notes that this insight was unavailable to those following the philosophy of the subject (e.g., Kant) in that the uncircumventable “I think” (“Cogito”) is not now to be understood as something transcendentally isolated and autarkic (as portrayed, e.g., in Rodin's The Thinker) that could never become part of language but must always and already be understood as “I argue in a discourse.” One argues in practical discourses as a participant who belongs simultaneously to a local and an ideal communication community of Others.

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