Jurgen Habermas on Law and Morality: Some Critical Comments

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023

Jürgen Habermas is one of the leading social theorists and philosophers of the post-Second World War period in Germany, Europe, and the US, a prodigiously productive journalist, and a high-profile public intellectual who was at the forefront of the liberalization of German political culture. He is often labelled a second-generation Frankfurt School theorist, though his association with the Frankfurt School is only one of a rather complex set of allegiances and influences, and can be misconstrued. This entry will begin with a summary of Habermas's background and early and transitional works, including his influential concept of the public sphere, before moving on to discuss in detail his three major philosophical projects: his social theory, discourse theory of morality (or "discourse ethics"), and discourse theory of law and democracy. It will then more briefly address Habermas's methodology and philosophical framework (rational reconstruction and postmetaphysical thinking), his applied political theory, focusing on issues of national identity and international law, and finally his recent work on religion.

Jürgen Habermas is universally recognised as an extremely influential intellectual and a major philosopher. It comes as no surprise, then, that his contributions to the theory of law and the constitutional state -whose most developed statement is contained in Between Facts and Norms (Habermas, 1997), hereafter, BFNare widely cited and discussed by legal scholars. In spite of an ever-growing body of commentaries, both within and beyond legal academia, his contributions, specially those relating to the questions that have concerned the internal debates of contemporary jurisprudence, remain in important respects somewhat underexplored and insufficiently understood, partly because of difficulties derived from the very style and character of Habermas' philosophical approach.

In a well known passage of his Third Critique, Kant notes that there are two ways of debating an issue: one is to dispute about the conflicting claims; the other is to quarrel with the opposing parties. The debate that forms the subject matter of Golfo Maggini's study is a classic fixture in the field of moral and political philosophy. What makes Maggini's study distinctive is the meticulous way in which she unravels the development of that debate in the writings of Habermas, of his Non-Aristotelian fellow travelers or offshoots, and of his Neo-Aristotelian opponents; by paying proper attention to the argumentative moves of all parties involved, Maggini manages to give us a real sense of the intricacies and complexities of a discussion, which took off in the late 60's and reached a peak point in the mid 90's, without, as yet, having fully settled.

2013

This dissertation argues that Jurgen Habermas’s philosophy of communicative reason successfully defends the Enlightenment notion of Reason as the vehicle of truth and progress, while integrating Postmodern insights into the illusory nature of metaphysical foundations. Habermas discards the Enlightenment philosophy of the subject with its subjective reasoning, to create his paradigm of mutual understanding using intersubjective reasoning. In so doing, Habermas integrates philosophical hermeneutics and the Linguistic Turn, while using Pragmatism to avoid the Postmodern danger of relativism. The Enlightenment philosophy of the subject as developed from Descartes through Hegel entails aporias of subjectivism. The hermeneutic turn in philosophy reduced subjectivism by de-reifying the division of the objective and subjective worlds, and by including interpersonal learning within its paradigm. The Linguistic Turn in philosophy highlighted the linguistic nature of all knowledge and truth, t...

1998

JOrgen Habermas's lifelong work has focused on the problem of curtailed communication. In the best tradition of critical theory, he has set out to explicate the conditions that would need to be met to assure that persons could come together freely to negotiate about and decide upon the conditions of their existence collectively. Ideally, only the weight of the better argument would rule the day. If such were the case, presumably the oppressive social structures of tradition, power, status, sexism, racism , political influence, etc. that distort free communication could be eliminated, thereby contributing to the emancipatory project of critical theory. But many are dissatisfied with Habermas's "linguistic turn," as Habermas's emphasis on the transcendental grounds of reason appears overly abstract and rar removed rrom praxis or the promise or practical application. In the book under review, Habermas takes up a particularly troublesome practical domain for his theory: law.

History of the Human Sciences, 1993

Habermas Critical Theory and Education, 2010

The German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has had a wideranging and significant impact on understandings of social change and social conflict. His infl uence on ideas generated in the fields of sociology, political science, philosophy, law, and other areas such as media and communication studies, has been immense. From his early studies of the public sphere, through the development of his communicative action theory, and up to his more recent focus on law and forms of democracy, Habermas has consistently defended the project of modernity and the enlightenment tradition. It is for good reason that Bernstein called Habermas the ‘philosopher of democracy’ (1991, 207). However, compared to other well-known continental theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, his uptake in the field of education has not been as wide-ranging. This may be because, as Young points out (2000, 531), Habermas has provided little commentary on the topic of education, preferring instead to refer to the possibility of broader social learning processes becoming institutionalized. As a result, his work was always going to be at a disadvantage compared to someone like Bourdieu, who focused specifically on educational processes and outcomes, something reflected in his enduring popularity among theoretically minded educational researchers.

2019

Jürgen Habermas’s communicative theory is characterised by a postmetaphysical account of morality. This perspective stems from Habermas’s appropriation of Modernisation Theory (MT), with the Weberian distinction between questions of taste, truth and rightness. In view of the “disenchantment of the world”, Habermas proclaims the autonomy of science and morality from metaphysical perceptions, and conflates substantive ethics with issues of taste. As I demonstrate, such distinction between ethical and moral reasons takes the validity of MT, along with its epistemological assumptions, as a presupposition for the requirement of universal and impartial normative claims in discourse acts. However, this aprioristic validation of MT is at odds with Habermas’s own view that particular linguistic schemes of reason determine epistemological and truth standards of validity – as in accordance with a Pragmatic Theory of Meaning (PTM). Thus, by challenging Habermas’s differentiation of ethics and morality, I argue that communicative rationality should allow for a substantive account of normative validation, which in my theoretical framework combines elements of Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of traditions, reconfigured into a universalistic project of ethical learning. Furthermore, I contend that once the validity of MT is brought into question through PTM, metaphysical reasons can be rehabilitated for the justification of metaethical principles of communicative action.