Of Gods and demons

Habermas and practical reason

Steven Lukes

pp. 134-148

in: John B. Thompson, David Held (eds), Habermas, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982

Abstract

"Practical questions", according to Habermas, "admit of truth":¹ "just (richtige) norms must be capable of being grounded in a similar way to true statements".² Truth, on his view, means "warranted assertibility": this is shown when participants enter into a discourse and "a consensus can be realized under conditions that identify it as a justified consensus".³ If, he writes, "philosophical ethics and political theory are supposed to disclose the moral core of the general consciousness and to reconstruct it as a normative concept of the moral, then they must specify criteria and provide reasons: they must, that is, produce theoretical knowledge".⁴ Thus for Habermas judgements about moral and political questions can be rationally grounded and differences about such questions can be rationally resolved.

Cited authors

Habermas Jürgen