Forst, Rainer. "Justifying Justification: Reply to My Critics." Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification: Rainer Forst in Dialogue. Ed. Rainer Forst. : Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 169–216. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544735.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 17:03 UTC. Copyright © Rainer Forst and contributors, 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 8 Justifying Justification: Reply to My Critics Rainer Forst The task of replying to the distinguished colleagues gathered here presents an aporia for me. For it is such a great honour and pleasure to have these powerful minds comment on my work that out of sheer gratitude I feel I should applaud everything they say. But at the same time, that would violate the game of giving and asking for reasons that we are playing here – and it would be disrespectful of the marvellous reconstructions and thorough criticisms they have to offer. So I fear I am forced to show my gratitude by a response that explains, defends and refines my often inchoate and muddled views – though not really retracting. But I assume that – knowing me – my dear colleagues also did not quite expect me to go that far. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks for the completely unde- served privilege of being in the position to reply to these critics – and a special thanks to David Owen who, together with Matt Matravers, organized the wonderful conference at the University of York on my work in June 2011, where a number of these papers (and others which will appear in a second volume) were presented. David was also responsible for organizing a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle in September 2011, from which three more papers included here stem.1 I am deeply indebted to him. 1 There was also a symposium at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division Meeting 2012 in Atlanta with comments by Seyla Benhabib, Jeff Flynn and Matthias Fritsch to which I replied; the symposium is forth coming in Political Theory. 170 Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification From Germany to Scotland – and back In his excellent piece, Andrea Sangiovanni forces me to clarify my discourse-theoretical constructivism, and I could not think of a better challenge to explain the moral-philosophical ‘groundwork’ of my Neo- Kantian view. I admire Sangiovanni’s work on justice and the relation between morality and politics, and I feel close to his ‘practice-dependent’ account of justice, though I have some questions about the relation of immanence and transcendence with respect to that.2 I leave that aside here, as I will have further occasion to comment on my view of practice in replying to some of the other papers. In a fine instance of Humean-humane empathy and solidarity, Sangiovanni wants to save me from German rationalism and asks me to join the club of what he calls Scottish constructivists, which strikes me as a rather new club, given that constructivism generally holds that the principles of construction are principles of practical reason – implying a notion of practical reason for which Hume had little time. So I think that Sangiovanni’s Scotland is already closer to the Continent than is normally the case. Still, according to him, ‘rationalist constructivism’ cannot stand on its own feet as long as it lacks a good account of moral emotions, like empathy. For him, these ‘contingent human sensibilities’ present the ‘seat of normativity’ (58); in other words, only where empathy is coupled with ‘deliberative reflection and action’ (62) can we find the very ground of morality. I think I should, in typical dialectical fashion, agree and (mostly, I fear) disagree: Empathy is an important capacity of responsible moral agents, but it can only be such if it is guided by practical reason and indeed a part of practical reason, properly understood. Otherwise, empathy can be partial and thus also be ‘morally blind’, to use Sangio- vanni’s term, to which I will return. In conjunction with norm-guided practical deliberation, empathy is a necessary condition for engaging 2 See my ‘Transnational Justice and Democracy. Overcoming Three Dogmas of Political Theory’, in Eva Erman and Sofia Näsström (eds), Political Equality in Transnational Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013d, 41–59. Justifying Justification: Reply to My Critics 171 in moral justification in the right way, but that does not mean that it has a ‘grounding’ role to play. For the reconstruction of the moral point of view follows another route and presupposes a reconstruction of moral validity claims and criteria for their justification (one notion of ‘grounding’ I use),3 and, furthermore, the validity of the fundamental right and the categorical duty of justification cannot be made contingent upon the existence of certain humanitarian motives of persons (another notion of ‘grounding’). In a nutshell, that would be to mistake a justificatory and an explanatory account of moral action and to exchange the standpoint of the first and second person with that of the third person – a mistake easily made by those fully enthralled by Scottish empiricism, as Andrea Sangiovanni is not, I believe. According to my Kantian view of the autonomy of morality, morality can only be based on moral grounds, namely on the respect for every other person as an equal in the normative space of justifications, regardless of how close to or distant one feels from him or her. Moral empathy thus has gone through the filter of justificatory reason, not the other way around, for it recognizes the moral status of others as equals and thereby abstracts from the different ways in which we empathize with others as an empirical and emotional fact. That does not mean that moral respect only regards others as ‘generalized others’, as Seyla Benhabib once called it4; rather, it asks us to respect others as ‘concrete’, finite and needy, and yet still through a generalizing lens, not giving priority to some persons that could not be justified to all others as equals. As moral persons, we are all equal authorities in the realm of reasons. But I am leaping ahead. In order to do justice to Sangiovanni’s rescue efforts and in order to try to save him from Humeanism in return, 3 For the different ways to understand what it means to ‘ground’ morality, see my The Right to Justification, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012a, 22f. (henceforth RJ). 4 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992, ch. 5. See also the exchange between Rainer Forst, ‘Situations of the Self: Reflections on Seyla Benhabib’s Version of Critical Theory’,Philosophy & Social Criticism 23 (1997), 79–96, and Benhabib, ‘On Reconciliation and Respect, Justice and the Good Life: Response to Herta Nagl-Docekal and Rainer Forst’, ibid., pp. 97–114. 172 Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification I will start from the basic tenets of Sangiovanni’s fine reconstruction of constructivism. There is much I agree with here, such as the thesis about the ‘stance-dependence’ of moral claims (31), yet I would emphasize the non-arbitrary, rational character of that stance, being guided by principles of practical reason. (I will come back to my notion of reason and that of Sangiovanni, for there one of our basic disagreements seems to lie.) Sangiovanni is also correct in locating my constructivism in the camp that makes no strong metaphysical investments – I call it a ‘practical’ and not a ‘metaphysical’ form of constructivism.5 That means that the reconstruction of reasonable principles of construction can remain agnostic about whether in following these principles moral reasons are ‘produced’ or ‘discovered’. In a further important step, Sangiovanni emphasizes that construc- tivists believe that the proper procedure of construction (or justification) generates categorical moral reasons and norms which ‘bind us whether or not we desire to be so bound or have an interest in being so bound’ (33). As I said above and as Sangiovanni affirms himself (59), this is no small burden for any form of constructivism that aims to settle on Scottish turf. Furthermore, Sangiovanni rightly stresses, as do I, that Kantian constructivists in particular need to explain the strong normativity of the constraints and principles of the justification procedure. And since this form of normativity obviously cannot be generated through the procedure which it is to ground, Sangiovanni sees a dilemma there: either one refers to an independent set of moral values to justify the procedure and thus includes a heteronomous normative element or one looks for non-moral grounds and then lacks moral reasons to engage in the procedure in the first place. This is indeed a problem that has haunted many discussions of constructivism6; and it has led to 5 RJ, p. 50. 6 See, for example, Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason. Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, chs 3 and 11. Christine Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency. Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, ch. 10. Justifying Justification: Reply to My Critics 173 different versions of it that Sangiovanni calls – following Susan Street – ‘restricted’ and ‘unrestricted constructivism’ (34). In that connection, I have criticized Habermas’s constructivist discourse theory for not providing adequate moral grounds for the normativity of the discourse principle.7 My own suggestion tries to avoid that dilemma by interpreting the principle of justification in moral contexts as a moral principle of practical reason, thus going back to Kant’s essential thesis that the categorical imperative is a moral principle of practical reason.