Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse 9781501722547

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Reasonable Democracy

Reasonable Democracy Jiirgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse SIMONE CHAMBERS

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 191}6 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, Simone. Reasonable democracy : Jiirgen Habermas and the politics of discourse I Simone Chambers. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-2668-5 (alk. paper) (cloth) ISBN o-8o14-833o-I (alk. paper) (paper) 1. Habermas, Jiirgen-Contributions in political science. 2. Democracy-Social aspects. 3· Discourse analysis. I. Title ]A76.C479 1996 po'.o1-de2o 95-45577 Printed in the United States of America @ The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements

of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984.

To the memory of my father, Egan Chambers, 1921-1994

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments I.

IX

Justice, Rationality, and Democracy

I Proceduralism without Metaphysics 2. 3· 4·

What Is Proceduralism? Proceduralism and the Recovery of Moral Intuitions Interpretive Deontology

17 30 43

II Contract or Conversation? 5· John Rawls and the Freedom and Equality of Citizens 6. Thomas Scanlon and the Desire for Reasonable

59

Agreement J iirgen Habermas and Practical Discourse 7·

78 90

III Discourse and Modernity 8. 9· 10.

Universalism in Reconstructive Science Defending Modernity Universalism in Morality

109 123 139

CONTENTS

Vlll

IV Discourse and Politics II. From the Ideal to the Real 12. Justice and the Individual 13· Approximating Discourse 14. An Illustration 15. Culture and Politics

Index

155 173 193 212 228

247

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father not only because I miss him and know that of all the people I have been fortunate enough to have rooting for me, he was my biggest fan. It is dedicated to my father also because what I have to say in these pages, my father already said in a public life committed to justice, rationality, and democracy. Indeed, the public careers of both my parents have taught me more about discursive politics and the power of reasonable argument than all the books I have read. While on the subject of family, I must also mention Susan, Glenn, Geoffrey, Michael, Bill, and Rona. For the unwavering support, love, and encouragement you have given me throughout the writing and rewriting of this book but above all for never failing to argue with me, I thank you all. While at Columbia University, I was fortunate to have the friendship and intellectual guidance of Robert Amdur, who taught me, among many other things, that common sense is the most important asset in good scholarship. I must also mention Anita Mercier, who has always been willing and able, with love and affection, to help me through my philosophic and my personal muddles. My year in Frankfurt as a graduate student was invaluable in clarifying many of my ideas, and I thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support and Jiirgen Habermas for his generous hospitality. I am grateful to Kenneth Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocyba, Andrea Maihofer, and the other participants in Habermas's colloquium for many hours of intense and exhilarating conversation and helpful suggestions. Special thanks are due to Matthew Gibney for all his help. IX

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since coming to the University of Colorado I have benefited from the support and goodwill of my colleagues and from generous financial support in the form of two research fellowships. In particular, I thank David Mapel whose confidence in the book kept me going in the darkest hours of the writing process and whose comments and criticisms of innumerable versions kept me philosophically, not to mention grammatically, honest. Horst Mewes has also earned my gratitude by being a good friend and providing intellectual support while I was writing this book. Individual chapters, sections, and arguments have been read and criticized by various people including Vicki Ash, Bill Chambers, Gretta Chambers, David Goldfischer, David Johnston, Charles Larmore, Mark Lichbach, Donald Moon, Brent Pickett, Alain Noel, Charles Taylor, and David Van Mill. I thank them all. Parts of Chapters I I, I 2, and I 3 draw on material that appeared as "Talking about Rights: Discourse Ethics and the Protection of Rights," Journal of Political Philosophy I.3 (October I993), reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishers; "Feminist Discourse/Practical Discourse," reprinted from Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, edited by Johanna Meehan (I995), with permission of the publisher, Routledge NY; and "Discourse and Democratic Practices," in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, edited by Stephen K. White, Cambridge University Press, I995, reprinted with the permission of the publisher. The review process at Cornell University Press has been invaluable. I thank the anonymous reviewers whose disagreements with my argument proved just what I needed. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Stephen White for the confidence he expressed in this project from the very beginning and for his helpful suggestions for revision. Roger Haydon has been a very patient and supportive editor,. and I thank him along with Teresa Jesionowski and Judith Bailey for their rigorous copyediting. Finally, I thank my husband, Jeffrey Kopstein, who bravely married me two years ago in full knowledge that my manuscript was unfinished. I could never have finished the book without him, and I still do not know how I got as far as I did before I met him. His love, encouragement, sense of humor, and willingness to enter endless discussions about justice and democracy at any time of day or night has been the best part of the whole process.

s. c. Boulder, Colorado

Reasonable Democracy

1

Justice, Rationality, and Democracy

The central political thesis of this book is simple: the more we employ noncoercive public debate to resolve our deepest collective moral, political, and social disputes, the better. In being simple is this thesis also trivial? After all, few would deny that talking through our differences is better than fighting over them. We tell ourselves that we are civilized. We no longer settle our disputes by bashing each other over the head, or, at least, we no longer think that bashing each other over the head is an acceptable method of dispute resolution within liberal democracies. Nevertheless, the readiness with which most of us would say that dialogue and persuasion are better than force and coercion is not evidence that we are all saying the same thing or have figured out what this seemingly obvious piece of common sense means. PERSUASION VERsus CoERCION

For example, consider the question, Are dialogue and persuasion always better than force and coercion? We might want to answer, and indeed I would wager that a great many people would answer, by saying something like, "Well, in principle, yes, dialogue and persuasion are definitely better than force and coercion, but the sad fact of the matter is that we often need to use force." But what does it mean to say "in principle yes but in fact no"? 1 What principle is being appealed to, and why and when should contingent facts overrule it? 1.

Kant explores this very same issue in "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in

2

JUSTICE, RATIONALITY, AND DEMOCRACY

Which "facts of the matter" dictate the use of force will depend on what sort of principle is appealed to in the first place to defend the idea that, ceteris paribus, dialogue and persuasion are better than force and coercion. For example, one possible and popular answer to the question of why persuasion is better than coercion appeals to a principle of rational self-interest. 2 Dialogue and persuasion are constitutive of peaceful cooperation, and peaceful cooperation creates a secure and stable environment in which to pursue our life plans. The costs of force and coercion are too high. They breed violence, discord, disruption, and conflict, which add up to an uncertain and insecure climate for pursuing whatever it is that we choose to pursue. But notice that this answer attaches a condition to the superiority of noncoercive talk, for the principle being appealed to here goes something like this: It is better to talk through our differences peacefully when not doing so would result in violence, discord, disruption, or conflict. What about situations in which coercively suppressing an opponent would not result in violence, discord, disruption, or conflict? In situations where one's opponent is powerless, with few or no resources to cause disruption, coercive suppression might very well be in one's self-interest, not to mention the most efficient way of resolving the dispute. The desirability of peace over conflict cannot tell us why we should be listening to the grievances of those who do not have the power to disturb our peace. The intuition that talking is better than fighting would be misrepresented if we translated it as talking is better than fighting when fighting would be inconvenient. What exactly is wrong with the rational self-interest line of reasoning I just outlined? One way to describe the misgiving to which it gives rise is to say that it is not really fair that those with the power to disrupt our life plans get a hearing and those without this power do not. So perhaps we want to say that dialogue and persuasion are better than force and coercion because talking to people, canvassing their opinions, searching for compromise or agreement, and so on are ways of dealing with them fairly, and pushing them around is not. This, of course, does not answer the question. We still want to know why we should be treating people fairly if it is not always in our self-interest to do so. Furthermore, we still need a principle, let us call it a principle of Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice,"' in Kant's Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 61-92. 2. See, for example, David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Justice, Rationality, and Democracy

3

legitimacy, which can tell us when force and coercion are appropriate. We certainly do not want to say that all force and coercion are unfair. A stronger justification of the superiority of persuasion over coercion might appeal to an idea of respect. 3 Here we might want to say that the reason why we should engage in noncoercive dispute resolution with people who do not have the power to inconvenience us is that we owe it to them. Dealing with people discursively instead of coercively recognizes that we each deserve to be consulted, to be offered an explanation, and to be given the chance to object to actions that affect us. We each deserve these things because above and beyond our particular differences and contingent disputes stands a more fundamental commonality: equal worth. Conceptions of mutual respect or equal worth are notoriously more difficult to defend than rational self-interest. 4 One of the appealing features of the first explanation was that it rested on a "fairly" incontrovertible premise: People with life plans want to pursue those life plans and therefore do not want things that will hinder that pursuit. But the premise that each individual is deserving of (some level of) respect is not at all obvious. It is not obvious why people are deserving of respect or what it means to confer that respect. The most famous secular formulation of the principle of respect is found in Kant's account of human dignity: "Now I say that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will. "5 The intuitive idea being expressed here is that people should not treat each other as things, that is, as objects to be used for private (or collective) purposes. Kant maintained that each of us must acknowledge that in some fundamental sense we are free, self-directing agents. An honest (and rational) self-examination confirms that we are put on this earth not merely to serve other people's purposes but to pursue our own freely chosen purposes even if those freely chosen purposes involve serving others. Thus, even the very religious must acknowledge that the dignity of their service to God resides in their having freely chosen it. If rational, we will see ourselves as ends (i.e., as free) and not as means (i.e., as instruments~ 3· For an interesting discussion of the relationship between respect and persuasion, see Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 55 -66. 4· Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 2 3Q-39· 5. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metapbysic of Morals, translated by H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1¢4), p. 94·

JUSTICE, RATIONALITY, AND DEMOCRACY

4

From this recognition comes a second: If I am an end by virtue of my rational capacity to direct my life, then all other rational agents are ends by virtue of their rational capacity to direct their lives. Thus, we are all not only free but also equal in this freedom. The conclusion of this line of thought, according to Kant, is the recognition that you must "treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."6 The idea that individuals are not things and should not be used like things has great intuitive appeal for the modern mind. Robert Paul Wolff, echoing a great deal of modern moral theory, describes the passages in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals where Kant defends the dignity of each person as "one of the few truly sublime passages in the corpus of Western moral philosophy. m Against the Hobbesian notion that worth, including the worth of a person, is simply the price that one is willing to pay, Kant insisted that persons have no price. 8 This idea of dignity then became "the supreme limiting condition of every man's freedom of action. "9 A respect for individuals as ends in themselves, that is, as self-directing rational agents, represents a line we may not cross in the pursuit of our own private goals, wishes, and life plans. And one way to respect individuals as ends is to consult them, to offer them explanations, and to give them a chance to object to actions that affect them. Despite the great appeal of the idea of human dignity, Kant's defense rests on metaphysical arguments that many today find unpersuasive. It is not clear, for example, that we all do or must see ourselves as ends in the Kantian sense, that is, as radically free and therefore equal. In order to defend the thesis that rational beings are autonomous selfdirecting agents, Kant relied on the metaphysical doctrine of the two worlds. The idea here is that within the observable world our behavior and actions must be understood as determined and shaped by outside forces. The observable world is structured and understood through causal relations; every effect, including human behavior, must have a cause. The source of autonomy, the~, can be found only in a world beyond the observable. Thus, Kant claimed that we are free and equal in a metaphysical sense; only in this mysterious other world, known as the noumenal, are we free and equal. But we live in what has been 6. 7· 8. 9·

Ibid., p.