Papers by James Finlayson
The Habermas-Rawls Debate
The Habermas-Rawls Debate, 2019
The Habermas-Rawls Debate, 2019
Modernism/modernity, 2003
One of the big questions Adorno's work raises concerns the normative and evaluative ground of his... more One of the big questions Adorno's work raises concerns the normative and evaluative ground of his ethical writings and of his social theory. 1 In the major works of his mature philosophy-Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory-Adorno criticizes the elements of social life that threaten the autonomy of the individual and that encourage individuals to adopt instrumental relations to other people and things. 2 Adorno's criticisms are unambiguously normative. In Negative Dialectics, he describes his theory as "the ontology of the false state of things" and adds that "a right state of things would be free from dialectics: just as little a system as a contradiction." 3 The rather puzzling counterposition of the attributes "false" and "right" betrays his underlying normative concern. Adorno has an emphatic conception of truth/ falsity that is both Platonic and Hegelian. Insofar as he conceives truth as an aspect of the good, or rather the converse, untruth as an aspect of the bad, Adorno is a follower of Plato. Insofar as his conception of untruth "aims at bad actuality," i.e., insofar as he maintains that untruth or falsity is embodied in the social world, Adorno follows Hegel. When Adorno claims that philosophy responds to a "world that is false to its innermost reaches," he means that it responds to a corrupt or bad world, to a world that ought not to be as it is (ND, 41 [31]). That said, Negative Dialectics is not a work of normative ethical theory, and Adorno's ethical concerns are atypical. He makes no attempt to answer the central questions of normative ethics such as "What is goodness?" "How should one live?" "What ought I to do?" etc. Even when writing about Kant's practical philoso-
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1999
The Habermas-Rawls Debate
The Habermas-Rawls Debate
European Journal of Political Theory, 2018
In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it... more In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that those who have made it have thus overlooked the distinctiveness of Habermas’s theory and approach. Consequently, I argue, they tend to wrongly infer that objections directed at Rawls’s ‘proviso’ apply also to Habermas’s ‘institutional translation proviso’. Ironically, Habermas’s attempt to rebut those objections leads him to advance a peculiar, and ultimately indefensible, thesis about the cognitive requirements of democratic citizenship for secular citizens. I argue that the underlying problem that Habermas takes the peculiar thesis to solve is not that the public reason requirements of the secular state are unfair towards religious citizens, or biased towards secular views of the world, but that the nature of religious arguments, and of scientism, as Habermas understands these, prevents c...
The Habermas-Rawls Debate, 2019
Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2019
Introduction to the papers presented in the present edition that were first heard at the Critical... more Introduction to the papers presented in the present edition that were first heard at the Critical Theory and the Concept of Social Pathology Conference held at the University of Sussex in September 2017.
Kantian Review, 2016
Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between... more Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between Rawls’s original position and Habermas’s principle (U), neither of which is germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law ‘morally freestanding’, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and natural law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Ha...
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Papers by James Finlayson