[lit-ideas] Re: Morc Huck Pump
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 17:44:30 -0330
LOTS of good stuff to challenge one's dogmatic slumbers. Please see my
specific
responses to PE below:
Quoting Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 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."
Then PE goes (yes, I'm teaching undergrads this term):
> 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.
Then WO goes:
Not sure I follow the inference here. If an action "doesn't rise to the level
of
morally justified" then how could it possibly be that that action is not
morally
wrong? If you have the latter, then you also have the former. And conversely.
PE goes on:
> 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.
WO goes against this by saying: I think that Habermas identifies the origins of
our sense of being wronged in our feelings of resentment at the sight or
experience of being treated in certain (immoral) ways. I don't think H.
identifies such resentment as being necessarily "non-rational." The early
sections of *Moral consciousness and communicative action* deal with this
matter. H appeals to Strawson's analysis of the origins of such feelings. At
any rate, just because our moral sense originates in our feelings of being
wronged does not mean that morality arises in such empirical factors. (Didn't
somebody else also claim this? I may be mixing up "arising" with "originating"
here. Recall that H's Discourse Ethics is a "transcendental-pragmatic"
account.)
Moral "wrongness" for H, resides in a maxim or action that cannot be agreed upon
by interlocutors engaged in discourse under conditions of symmetry and
reciprocity. As such, moral rightness and wrongness arise for us as normative
concepts in the satisfaction, or not, of these epistemic
conditions/presuppositions of discourse oriented to the establishment of a
universalizable interest.
I postpone a reply to the matter of application below, until we're clearer on
the principles involved in justification of moral rightness and wrongness.
Walter O
MUN
> 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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