[lit-ideas] Re: Morc Huck Pump
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 06:54:40 +0700
Walter wrote:
"Perhaps in simpler terms, if what you're doing is wrong, the
"wrongness" of your action (and will) consists in the fact that
interlocutors engaged in discourse, under the epistemic conditions
identified by Habermas, could not find your action justifiable."
It seems to me that this isn't quite right. The failure of an action
to satisfy the criteria of Habermas' discourse morality doesn't
necessarily mean that the action is wrong, only that it doesn't rise
to the level of morally justified. From what I understand, Habermas
grounds 'wrongness' in a moral intuition, a non-rational response of
being offended by an event even though we are not directly affected by
it. In my opinion, this asymmetry between the moral intuition of
being offended and Habermas' account of a rational procedure for
arriving at morally justified actions as a response to said offense,
is a serious problem for Habermas' project. In particular, there are
the cases of people who have been 'wronged' but are unable to engage
in discourse practices because they don't have the necessary
abilities, or their abilities are limited, or in the extreme, the
people are dead. Habermas, himself, has noted that a weakness of his
account is its inability to account for those who cannot speak up for
themselves.
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
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