The Rawls/Habermas debate dates back to 1995. It was a dialogue between the deaf. Rawls's 'social primary goods' are 'the essential rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, and social bases of self-respect that any rational person would desire to pursue their life plans.' For Habermas, it is the outcome of fair, rational, and inclusive communicative action.
Both were wrong. Why? We only have a right if there is an effective remedy under a bond of law. Suppose I invested all my money with Bernie Madoff. I think I am well off. Unknown to me, Madoff has pissed that money against the wall. Thus, though 'social primary goods' may exist, nobody can be sure that they do. As for 'rational communicative action'- it can result in our society doing stupid shit and thus getting invaded & enslaved.
Rawls, in his response to Habermas, wrote
Of the two main differences between Habermas's position and mine, the first is that his is comprehensive while mine is an account of the political and it is limited to that.
Nobody knows what the limits of the 'political' are. There may be an environmental or invasion threat which we aren't paying attention to. Our politics ought to be about solving that 'collective action problem' rather than deciding who gets which Cabinet portfolio.
The first difference is the more fundamental as it sets the stage for and frames the second. This concerns the differences between our devices of representation, as I call them: his is the ideal discourse situation as part of his theory of communicative action and mine is the original position.
Both only make sense if there is no Knightian uncertainty & thus the Social Contract can be 'complete'- i.e. provide for every eventuality. Sadly, in such a world, there would be no need for language, education or any type of coordinating device. There would be some algorithm which solves the Social 'Transportation problem' in an optimal manner without any resources getting used up in communication.
These have different aims and roles, as well as distinctive features serving different purposes.
Rawls wanted to replace Risk Pooling & Insurance with a rule for redistributing assets to those worst off. This was foolish. There is an obvious moral hazard. Moreover, having an insurance industry creates an incentive for discovering ways to reduce risk & getting Society to implement such mechanisms- e.g. the Fire Insurance company has an incentive to lobby for the creation of a Fire Brigade & fire safety regulations for buildings, etc.
(1) I think of political liberalism as a doctrine that falls under the category of the political. It works entirely within that domain and does not rely on anything outside it.
Even liberal countries need armies to defend themselves. Thus diplomacy & military doctrine are 'political'. But so is Scientific research- e.g. finding out how to split the atom.
The more familiar view of political philosophy is that its concepts, principles and ideals, and other elements are presented as consequences of comprehensive doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral.
Fuck that. What matters is defence & diplomacy & raising productivity so as to pay for more of both.
By contrast, political philosophy, as understood in political liberalism, consists largely of different political conceptions of right and justice viewed as freestanding.
Which would be cool if missiles launched on another continent can't take out our cities within a matter of minutes.
There may be 'freestanding' political issues- i.e. ones which have no economic or national security implications. But they are likely to be trivial. After all, people with different 'conceptions' may agree that the sensible thing is to let smart people make important decisions just as they did in the past.
So while political liberalism is of course liberal, some political conceptions of right and justice belonging to political philosophy in this sense may be conservative or radical; conceptions of the divine right of kings, or even of dictatorship, may also belong to it.
This doesn't matter in the slightest. I may believe God has appointed King Charles III as an absloute monarch but be perfectly content that he continues to 'reign, not rule'. Equally, I might decide that Sir Keir Starmer is actually a Dictator who, for some reason of his own, chooses to appear to wholly lack a spine.
Although in the last two cases the corresponding regimes would lack the historical, religious, and philosophical justifications with which we are acquainted, they could have freestanding conceptions of political right and justice, however implausible, and so fall within political philosophy.
Anything at all can fall within it. I am totes triggered by the fact that girls have to sit down to pee. Compulsory gender reassignment surgery is required.
Thus, of the various freestanding political conceptions of justice within political philosophy, some are liberal and some are not.
In your opinion. Sadly, if you are not for compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males, you are a fucking Fascist.
I think of justice as fairness as working out a liberal political conception of justice for a democratic regime, and one that might be endorsed, so it is hoped, by all reasonable comprehensive doctrines
Sadly, it is anything goes. Just say 'for commodity x to exist income distribution y is required.' Currently even the worst off get some quantity of x. If there was income redistribution, nobody would get any.'
I do not know of any liberal writers of an earlier generation who have clearly put forward the doctrine of political liberalism.
Because it is either stupid or meaningless. Liberalism is about the Taxman not fucking you over. Let 'Welfare Queens' get jobs cleaning your mansion.
Rawls thought Liberalism could be 'freestanding' in the sense of not having to deal with Metaphysics or Theology. The problem here is that willingness to defend the country may depend on a common bond of religion which is itself essentially metaphysical.
...Habermas's position, on the other hand, is a comprehensive doctrine
a silly one which comes down 'it's nice to talk things over & get everybody to agree. Hitler's big mistake was to beat people & send them to gas chambers. He should have bored them to death instead.'
and covers many things far beyond political philosophy. Indeed, the aim of his theory of communicative action is to give a general account of meaning, reference, and truth or validity both for theoretical reason and for the several forms of practical reason.
Since the time of Ancient Greece, there have been highly selective criteria for eligibility & accountability (dikomasia & euthnoi) which gets narrowed down as the importance of the issue being decided increases.
It rejects naturalism and emotivism in moral argument
though both are persuasive
and aims to give a full defense of both theoretical and practical reason.
None can be given save their relative success. But that is a contingent matter.
Moreover, he often criticizes religious and metaphysical views.
You should hear what Religion & Metaphysics say about him.
Habermas does not take much time to argue against them in detail; rather, he lays them aside, or occasionally dismisses them, as unusable and without credible independent merit
though there have been plenty of successful polities founded on Religion. There have been none founded on his stupid shite.
in view of his philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse and communicative action. I mention two passages in Faktizitdt und Geltung. From the preface: 'Discourse theory
useless shite
attempts to reconstruct this self-understanding [that of a universalistic moral consciousness and the liberal institutions of the democratic state] in a way that empowers its intrinsic normative meaning and logic to resist both scientific reductions and aesthetic assimila- tions..
You can't 'reconstruct' my self-understanding save by the means I myself took. You may say you have arrived at the same conclusion as I have done by some different method. Thus my self-understanding is that I am a teenaged cheerleader who slays Vampires. I came to it by watching Buffy & noticing that Sarah Michell Gellar looks just like me. Well, not quite, but I have the very same frock she wore in Series 2, Episode 4. By contrast, you come to the conclusion that I am a teenaged Vampire Slayer by studying the Mochijuki proof of the abc conjecture. At least, that's what I hope will happen.
.After a century that more than any other has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason are destroyed.
The Germans had a shitty first half of the century. Then, they were conquered & an occupying Army enabled them to rise up.
Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies,
in which case it knows how it came about- i.e. it possesses omniscience.
depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reason that puts itself on trial.
Procedural reason does no such thing. Law courts use it. The Judge is not put on trial.
The critique of reason is its own work:
No. It is stupid shit done by some useless tosser in the Philosophy Dept. Nobody talks to him. He takes to drink & then tops himself. Sad.
this Kantian double meaning is due to the radically anti-Platonic insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal-
Sure there is. STEM subject mavens are discovering more and more about it.
we who find ourselves already situated in our linguistically structured forms of life (FG 11).
We who teach stupid shite to morons while smart peeps do STEM subjects.
Now, read as not appealing to religious or metaphysical doctrines, political liberalism could say something parallel to this passage regarding political justice,
i.e. unjust redistribution of hard earned money
but there would be a fundamental difference. For in presenting a freestanding political conception and not going beyond that, it is left entirely open to citizens and associations in civil society to formulate their own ways of going beyond, or of going deeper, so as to make that political conception congruent with their comprehensive doctrines.
Also citizens and associations can discover a worm-hole which takes them to a parallel dimension where I am a teenaged Vampire slayer.
Political liberalism never denies or questions these doctrines in any way, so long as they are politically reasonable.
Political liberalism stupid shite.
That Habermas himself takes a different stand on this basic point is part of his comprehensive view. He would appear to say that all higher or deeper doctrines lack any logical force on their own.
That is a question for mathematical logic which these two cretins were too stupid to understand.
He rejects what he calls an essentialist Platonic idea of reason
like the one Godel had?
and asserts that such an idea must be replaced by a procedural reason that puts itself on trial and is the judge of its own critique.
I am the judge of my own shit. This doesn't turn it into chocolate cake.
In another passage in chapter 5 of Between Facts and Norms, after an explanation of how the ideal discourse situation proceeds, he stresses that the principle of discourse requires that norms and values must be judged from the point of view of the first-person plural.
More particularly if that first-person plural is a bunch of kittens.
The practice of argumentation recommends itself for such a jointly practiced, universalized role taking.
Kittens can be very argumentative more particularly with a ball of yarn.
As the reflexive form of communicative action,
e.g. telling Habermas he has shit for brains & should kindly fuck the fuck off
it distinguishes itself socio-ontologically, one might say, by a complete reversibility of participant perspectives, which unleashes the higher-level intersubjectivity of the deliberating collective.
This would only be the case if 'origins' were 'recoverable'- i.e. the underlying process was non-dissipative & no impredicativity supervened.
In this way, Hegel's concrete universal [Sittlichkeit]
Sittlichkeit is the practical application of the concrete universal.
is sublimated
it can't be sublimated or sublated. It merely is what is currently happening in 'ethical life'.
into a communicative structure purified of all substantial elements (FG 280).
This is nonsense even by the low standards of German pedants. Remove 'substantial elements' from a 'communicative structure'- e.g. all the words from a sentence- and you are left with nothing at all.
Thus, according to Habermas, the substantial elements of Hegel's view of Sittlichkeit, an apparently metaphysical doctrine of ethical life (one among many possible examples), are-so far as they are valid- fully sublimated into (I interpret him to mean expressible, or articu- lated, by) the theory of communicative action with its procedural presuppositions of ideal discourse.
In other words, actual morality & ethical behaviour disappear completely because there is no need for them under ideal conditions.
Habermas's own doctrine, I believe, is one of logic in the broad Hegelian sense:
i.e. nonsense or a cascade of intensional fallacies. Did you know dogs are sublimated into cats? That's why cats say 'Moo!'
a philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse (of theoretical and practical reason) which includes within itself all the allegedly substantial elements of religious and metaphysical doctrines.
Mathematical logic is a 'rational discourse'. Does it include 'substantial elements' of karma or the doctrine of incarnation? No. But it could have 'oracles'.
His logic is metaphysical in the following sense:
it is shit emanating from the asshole of his asshole.
it presents an account of what there is.
That's not 'beyond physics'. It is descriptive shite of some stripe.
And what there is are human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld.
Human beings have spent a lot of time ignoring the fuck out of me in my life-world. Is it coz I iz bleck? No. It is because I am very flatulent.
As to what 'substance' and 'substantial' mean, I would conjecture that Habermas intends something like the following: people often think that their basic way of doing things- their communicative action with its presuppositions of ideal discourse, or their conception of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens as free and equal- needs a foundation beyond itself discerned by a Platonic reason that grasps the essences, or else is rooted in metaphysical substances.
People communicate for utilitarian reasons or merely a result of mimetic drives. Plato's 'methexis' may be relevant in the sense that we want to 'participate' in good things- e.g. share happiness if our team won the match.
In thought we reach behind, or deeper, to a religious or metaphysical doctrine for a firm foundation.
Only if that is what we are paid to do and we are too stupid to understand STEM subjects.
This reality is also expected to provide moral motivation.9 Without these foundations, everything may seem to us to waver and we experience a kind of vertigo, a feeling of being lost without a place to stand. But Habermas holds that "In the vertigo of this freedom there is no longer any fixed point outside the democratic procedure itself- a procedure whose meaning is already summed up in the system of rights" (FG 229).1
Nonsense! Parliaments have procedures. But political parties or action committees may not. You tend to moored in your party & don't feel vertigo when you get elected to Parliament because you are still moored in that same party.
The preceding comments bear on Habermas's last two paragraphs (131). Here he says we each see our own views as more modest than the other's. He sees his view as more modest than mine, since it is purportedly a procedural doctrine that leaves questions of substance to be decided by the outcome of actual free discussions
not free at all. You are elected to represent a particular constituency & you may belong to a particular party which has made pledges of a binding type in its manifesto.
engaged in by free and rational, real and live participants, as opposed to the artificial creatures of the original position.
In the original position, rational people refuse to sign a social contract because it is null & void save for the passing of immediate consideration. Rawls had shit for brains.
He proposes, he says, to limit moral philosophy to the clarification of the moral point of view
of which, being a fucking Kraut, he knew nothing
and to the procedure of democratic legitimation,
see above
and to the analysis of the conditions of rational discourses and negotiation.
ditto
In contrast, my view, he thinks, takes on a more ambitious task, since it hopes to formulate a political conception of justice for the basic structure of a democracy, all of which involves fundamental substantive conceptions, which raise larger questions that only the actual discourse of real participants can decide.
Suppose we have to decide whether cats say bow wow. I think we will decide that cats don't say bow wow because that is the fact of the matter. You may say 'we can't say that. First there must be a public discussion. Only after everybody agrees that cats don't say 'bow wow', can be affirm that such is the case.
The contrast between Habermas & Rawls is that Rawls thinks we will agree, if behind a 'veil of ignorance', that cats say bow wow. Habermas feels not enough time has been wasted on this matter. Why not bring everybody together so they can agree cats say bow wow?
At the same time, Habermas thinks I see my view as more modest than his: it aims to be solely a political conception and not a comprehensive one. He believes, though, that I fail in doing this. My conception of political justice is not really freestanding, as I would like it to be, because whether I like it or not, he thinks that the conception of the person in political liberalism goes beyond political philosophy.
That's true enough.
Moreover, he claims that political constructivism involves the philosophical questions of rationality and truth. And he may also think that, along with Immanuel Kant, I express a conception of a priori and metaphysical reason laying down in justice as fairness principles and ideals so conceived. I deny these things.
I merely think cats say bow wow. My cat bites the postman. Would it do so if it didn't say bow wow? I think not. Harsanyi may disagree but he is stoooopid.
2 comments:
Post a Comment