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Habermas on Truth and Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Philip Pettit
Philip Pettit
Affiliation:
University of Bradford
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Extract

The problem which motivates this paper bears on the relationship between Marxism and morality. It is not the well-established question of whether the Marxist's commitments undermine an attachment to ethical standards, but the more neglected query as to whether they allow the espousal of political ideals. The study and assessment of political ideals is pursued nowadays under the title of theory of justice, the aim of such theory being to provide a criterion for distinguishing just patterns of social organization from unjust ones. The main rivals in the field represent justice respectively as legitimacy, welfare and fairness. Marxism does not put forward a distinctive conception of justice itself and the question is whether the Marxist is free to choose as he thinks fit among the candidates on offer

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 14: Marx and Marxisms , September 1982 , pp. 207 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1982

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References

1 See my Judging Justice: An Introduction to Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar

2 See Judging Justice, Chapter 4.

3 The problem is nicely described in a passage from MacIntyre, Alasdair, Against the Self-images of the Age (London: Duckworth, 1971 ), 92–93.Google Scholar ‘Marx originally indicted capitalist values as well as capitalist methods. His belief that any appeal to the exploiters on a moral basis was bound to embody the illusion of common standards of justice governing human behaviour made him suspicious of all moralizing. But when Eduard Bernstein attempted to find a Kantian basis for socialism, the defenders of Marxist orthodoxy Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxembourg were forced to reopen the question of the nature of the moral authority of the Marxist appeal to the working class. This question, as the experience of Luxembourg and of Lukács, of Trotsky and of Guevara shows, was never satisfactorily answered’.

4 See Connerton, Paul (ed.), Critical Sociology (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1976)Google Scholar, and Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1973).Google Scholar

5 For a comprehensive introduction to Habermas's thought see McCarthy, Thomas, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978).Google Scholar Richard Bernstein has a useful shorter account in The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1976).Google Scholar Books of Habermas which have appeared in English are: Towards a Rational Society (London: Heinemann, 1971)Google Scholar, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1972)Google Scholar, Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974)Google Scholar and Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1976).Google Scholar For a bibliography see McCarthy.

6 ‘Wahrheitstheorien’ in Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Walter Schulz zum 60 Geburtstag (Pfullingen: Neske, 1973), 226–227.Google Scholar We speak of justice where Habermas uses the word ‘Richtigkeit’.

7 ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, 219. It is doubtful whether Habermas has any good reason for not speaking of evaluative truth. For a discussion of the case for ascribing truth-value to evaluate assertions see Wiggins, David ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, Proceedings of the British Academy 26 (1976)Google Scholar, and my own ‘Evaluative “Realism” and Interpretation’ in Holtzmann, S. and Leich, C. (eds), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).Google Scholar

8 The main source on Habermas's theory of truth, and indeed also on his theory of justice, is the still untranslated paper ‘Wahrheitstheorien’; this will henceforth be referred to as ‘W’ and any quotations from it will be in my own translation. McCarthy provides a faithful commentary on Habermas's views on truth and justice in the book mentioned under reference 5. For a critical commentary on his theory of truth see Hesse, Mary, ‘Habermas's Consensus Theory of Truth’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978, 2 (1979).Google Scholar Reprinted in Hesse, Mary, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Hassocks: Harvester, 1980).Google Scholar

9 Habermas also holds that there is a truth claim implicit in non-assertoric speech acts, as there is held to be a claim of each of the other sorts mentioned later. See ‘Was heisst Universalpragmatik?’ in Apel, K. O. (ed.), Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).Google Scholar What he has in mind seems to be a claim to the truth of the existential presuppositions of such acts.

10 On the four claims see ‘Was heisst Universalpragmatik?’. The claim to intelligibility is not so much a claim as an assumption. The other claims might be suitably rendered as claims to knowledge, honesty and authority.

11 See W 213–215: notice Habermas's supposition that every assertion is true or false.

12 W 241ff. See Toulmin, Stephen, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

14 W 223–226. Cf. ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’ in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973), 170.Google Scholar

15 W 215–219.

16 W 239.

17 W 247. See Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, and Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975).Google Scholar

18 W 219.

19 See W 258 and Kultur und Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 381.Google Scholar

20 ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’, 170.Google Scholar

21 W 240.

22 Peirce, C. S., ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ in Wiener, P. P. (ed.), C. S. Peirce: Selected Writings (New York: Dover, 1958), 133.Google Scholar For an interesting comment on the value of Peirce's definition see Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 123–124.Google Scholar Richard Bernstein discusses Habermas's interpretation of Peirce in his introduction to the German edition of his book on Praxis and Action: Praxis und Handeln, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975).Google Scholar

23 For criticism of this illusion see Putnam, Hilary, ‘Realism and Reason’ in Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).Google Scholar

24 See the works of Kuhn and Feyeraband mentioned under reference 17.

25 W 255. Compare the model of theory selection presented in Hesse, Mary, ‘Models of Theory Change’Google Scholar in Suppes, P. et al. , Logic, Methodology & Philosophy of Science (Amsterdam, 1973).Google Scholar

26 W 255.

27 W 255–256. Cf ‘Was heisst Universalpragmatik?’.

28 W 219. See reference 18.

29 See Theory and Practice, 28.

30 W 220ff. See reference 10.

31 W 227–228.

32 W 228–229.

33 W 229.

34 W 242–244.

35 W 245.

36 W 226–227 and 239.

37 See my Judging Justice, mentioned under reference 1, Chapters 8–10.

38 W 251.

39 W 226.

40 W 255.

41 W 250–251.

42 W 226.

43 Such a distinction is more or less explicit in Theory and Practice, 32ff.Google Scholar

44 W 251.

45 See my Judging Justice, mentioned under reference 1, Chapter 13.

46 Legitimation Crisis, henceforth LC, 108. The italics are in the original.

47 LC 108.

48 Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 85.Google Scholar Cf. Theory and Practice, 150–151.Google Scholar

49 Theory and Practice, 151.Google Scholar

50 LC 89.

51 LC 108.

52 ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’, 171.Google Scholar

53 LC 108.

54 LC 108.

55 Notice that Habermas mentions self-reflection and artistic experience as sources of enlightenment about one's real needs in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, 344–345.Google Scholar

56 I am grateful for comments received when this paper was read at university seminars in Cork and Leeds. I received helpful remarks from Zygmunt Baumann, Thomas MacCarthy, Albrecht Wellmer and David West.