Phil: Perhaps Eric could explain what he takes to be the implications of context-dependency? No one has denied the significance of context so I am not clear as to what Eric is trying to show.
As a mere literary bloke, I see (or feel) a contradiction between statements such as Walter's that, "Ethics is....not an empirical discipline" and related statements summoned to buttress the claims, such as Habermas's that "ethical questions ... can find an answer only in context-dependent discourses of self-understanding."
Everything empirical is context-dependent, nicht wahr? I take "empirical" to refer to Merriam-Webster's first definition of same, namely, "originating in or based on observation or experience."
In my opinion, almost everything outside of mathematics that is "originating in or based upon observation or experience" is subject to uncertainty, limitation of individual point of view, multivalence, and transience. (Even Kant's treasured conception of space as a priori, in its transience, has been subsequently reassessed by science and mathematics.)
So when Walter writes that, "if a maxim is universalizable (U) then it is that across all rational agents and it applies universally to all rational agents within relevantly similar circumstances. This is a normative claim, not an empirical claim," I tend to see (or feel) a prescriptive claim posing as something grander though it blushes to say so.
It's like someone holding a stiff 3-foot length of string and claiming that it connects to a cloud overhead.
Context-dependency, as such, seems only to muddle it further for me. What does context-dependency really mean? Interrelatedness of immediacy, as far as I can tell, which is almost a noun form of empirical, which by clearly indicating a lack of mediation, has yet to jump up into the sky and tie itself to that cloud. (Unless we are to call the air, water vapor, and any intervening migratory geese as part of the string ... just to be, you know, normative.)
Where does the maxim retain its form? In the cloud? In the yard of string? In the claim that the string connects to the cloud? Or perhaps, and this is the possibility that really bugs me, in the underlying motive -- to be prescriptive. Hence "to lord it over, to loom," etc.
Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
