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An Ethical Validity Claim for Discourse Ethics

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An Ethical Validity Claim for Discourse Ethics ETHICAL VALIDITY: AN ETHICAL VALIDITY CLAIM FOR DISCOURSE ETHICS by JAMIE BURKE LINDSAY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2020 i © 2019 JAMIE BURKE LINDSAY All Rights Reserved ii Ethical Validity: An Ethical Validity Claim for Discourse Ethics by Jamie Lindsay This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________ ______________________________________ Date Omar Dabhour Chair of Examining Committee _______________ ______________________________________ Date Nickolas Pappas Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Linda Martín Alcoff Frank M. Kirkland Jeffrey Flynn (Fordham University) THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Ethical Validity: An Ethical Validity Claim for Discourse Ethics By Jamie Burke Lindsay Advisor: Linda Martín Alcoff Discourse ethicists generally are anti-realists about moral rightness, in that the rightness of moral norms is a matter of discursive justification, and is not grounded in or by any objective feature of the world. Put differently, the position is that rightness is wholly constructed by our moral practices. Further, discourse ethics and liberal theories of justice more broadly generally rely on a distinction between goods that are generalizable, and goods that are in some way context-bound and particularistic. Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics makes the distinction wholly formal, abstaining from any theoretical commitment to which goods are generalizable and leaving this as a matter for discursive deliberation. Those goods that are discursively determined to be generalizable are the object of valid moral norms, and those that are not generally justifiable as goods involve at best ethical values. In this dissertation, I argue – against Habermas – for a moral realist conception of discourse ethics, and for a substantive modification of the formal structure of Habermas’ position, in order to accommodate a validity claim attaching to ethical discourses. I argue that Habermas’ position requires a goodness claim, in addition to the rightness validity claim attaching to moral discourses. In the first chapter, I consider a couple of Habermas’ more idiosyncratic arguments, defending quasi-moral obligations to non-human animals, and arguing against non-therapeutic pre-birth genetic manipulation, governed only by market forces (or what he terms ‘liberal eugenics’). I argue that Habermas’ discourse theory of morality depends on a background general ethics that is at least under- iv theorized, a point which Habermas himself seems to begin to acknowledge, in The Future of Human Nature, in developing an ethics of the species when faced with the question of how to ethically value morality as a whole, suggesting the need for a specifically ethical validity claim. In the second chapter, I shift from the discourse theory of morality and ethics to the discourse theory of law and democracy, considering Habermas’ defenses of civil disobedience and his variable responses to humanitarian military intervention, particularly in Kosovo and Iraq. I argue that, as in the discourse theory of morality, Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy contains an implicit ethics. At the end of the second chapter, I consider Jacques Rancière’s theorization of a politics of dissensus, showing that Rancière is unable to justify his normative claim that there are better and worse sorts of policing. I show that this difficulty for Rancière is conceptually related to Habermas’ rejection of the possibility of an ethical validity claim. In the third chapter, I argue that moral feeling stands in a realist grounding relation to moral rightness, and that ethical feeling operates rather differently, and provides further guidance in developing an ethics integral to the discourse theory of morality and the discourse theory of law and democracy. I argue that Habermas’ account of moral feeling provides a referent, analogous to sense perception in truth-oriented discourses, a referent that is not wholly discursively produced. This suggests that Habermas must reject his antirealist reading of discourse theory. Then, I turn to the ethical feeling of hope, considering the role played by hope in discourse theory, and drawing out the implications for an ethical validity claim. I conclude by arguing that the presuppositions of discourse – including the values of inclusion and civility – are themselves ethical values. I argue that Habermas' necessary pragmatic presuppositions of communicative action are those of a particular – if generalizable – form of life, such that there is a worldview in discourse ethics, that they take the form of necessary preconditions of the moral point of view, much like the values put forward in Habermas’ “ethics of the species,” but that this means that, as Habermas himself maintains, these 'necessary v presuppositions' are not moral oughts, and yet, contra Habermas, they are worth valuing. Put differently, Habermas argues that the necessary pragmatic presuppositions are justified functionally or pragmatically, but I aim to show that the presuppositions are neither moral nor merely pragmatically justified but are properly ethical. This move would pluralize without radically relativizing the normative discourses of Habermasian discourse theory. In order to situate this dissertation within the broader contexts of ethics and political philosophy, in two appendices I critically engage the work of Allen Gewirth and Iris Marion Young. In the first chapter, I argue, against Allen Gewirth’s defense of universal moral human rights to freedom and well-being, that rather than leading to what he terms a ‘dialectically necessary’ conclusion, Gewirth’s argument is contingent on affirmation of the principle of strict correlativity of rights and duties, which he uses as a logical principle. Further, I argue that this in fact exhibits a larger problem, that Gewirth equivocates between sorts of necessity, conflating pragmatic necessity with logical necessity. In the second appendix, I start with a reconstruction of Young’s theory of justice, in order to deal with what appears to be an equivocation between two senses of ‘justice’: procedural justice understood in terms of democratic legitimation, governed by procedural norms including equality, inclusion, publicity, and reasonableness; and ideal justice understood in terms of self-determination and self-realization. Then, I argue that both the procedural and ideal accounts of justice rest on another ideal, the principle of the equal moral worth of persons, such that her overall account has a foundationalist structure: both procedural norms and the ideals of self-determination and self- realization are grounded in the ideal of the equal moral worth of persons. However, Young argues that ideals are only useful for awakening political imagination concerning alternatives to present conditions, such that the foundational ideal of Young’s theory provides a viable basis neither for the procedural norms Young defends nor for the norms of ideal justice. vi Jamie Burke Lindsay 9.13.19 Table of Contents Dissertation Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Ethical Validity ........................................................................................................... 5 (I.1) Habermas’ Discourse Ethics ......................................................................................................... 7 (I.2) Moral Norms vs. Ethical Values ................................................................................................. 18 (I.3) Quasi-Moral Obligations to Non-Human Animals & The Principle of Universalization (U) ....... 24 (I.4) Liberal Eugenics and an Ethics of the Species ............................................................................ 31 (I.5) Substantive Ethics ...................................................................................................................... 38 Chapter Two: Jürgen Habermas on Civil Disobedience and Military Intervention ........................... 51 (II.1) Habermas on Civil Disobedience .............................................................................................. 54 (II.2) Habermas on Humanitarian Military Intervention ................................................................... 66 (III.3) At the Limits of Habermas’ Discourse Theory of Law & Democracy ........................................ 80 Chapter Three: Normative Affect: From Immanuel Kant to Jürgen Habermas ................................. 92 (III.1) Kant’s Moral Feeling ................................................................................................................ 96 (III.2) Habermas and Affect ............................................................................................................. 105 (III.3) Generalizable Interests & Moral Feeling ............................................................................... 110 (III.4) The Ethical Feeling of Hope ................................................................................................... 121 Dissertation Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 137 (1) Overview of Dissertation
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