Habermas’ Ethics of Intersubjectivity

  • Elvis Imafidon
Chapter

Abstract

The dawn of enlightenment, the modern age, was expected to bring with it the potentials needed to guarantee the individual’s liberation and emancipation from the pre-modern — in the guise of myths, religious ideologies, objectification of reality and authoritative domination. However, the primary potential that enlightenment had in the pursuit of such emancipation — reason — in no time became a further tool for the entrapment and domination of the subject, chiefly through the advances in science, technology and economic capitalism. This contradiction of enlightenment is one major factor for the theorization of the Frankfurt school in general and Jurgen Habermas in particular. With particular reference to moral discourse, the question for Habermas is: How can moral norms be validated and justified in the modern age without recourse to already disenchanted pre-modern authorities? As he puts it the questions include,

… whether the cognitive content of a morality of equal respect and solidaristic responsibility for everybody can still be justified after the collapse of its religious foundation. … how much of the original intuitions a discourse ethics salvages in the disenchanted universe of post-metaphysical justification and in what sense one can still speak of the cognitive validity of moral judgments and positions. … whether the content of a morality that results from the rational reconstruction of traditional, religious intuition remains bound, in spite of its procedural character, to its original context.1

Keywords

Moral Judgment Communicative Action Moral Norm Discourse Ethic Moral Consciousness 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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© Elvis Imafidon 2015

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