ABSTRACT
A twofold claim underlies Habermas’s assertion that discourse ethics provides a procedural reconstruction of the moral intuitions of competent subjects; namely, that discourse ethics presents a theory of morality and that this theory is situated at the post-conventional level. First, moral intuitions are those that tell us “how best to behave in situations where it is in our power to counteract the extreme vulnerability of others by being thoughtful and considerate. 1 This idea of extreme vulnerability refers to the notion of the person or subject of discourse ethics. Emerging out of a communicative engagement with many voices, the subject of discourse ethics “exists in relation.” It depends for its very being on the lives and experiences of those around it. The fragility and insecurity of the self results from the fact that our very identities require relationships of mutual recognition for sustenance. Moralities protect both of these—the dignity of fragile individuals and the mutual ties and relationships in which individual identities are constructed and situated. Second, the claim for post-conventionality refers to the idea that the ethics of traditional and religious communities can no longer tell us what we should do and how we should live. Traditional beliefs no longer have the binding capacity to anchor us within a given social world. In a disenchanted and pluralized age, considerations of duty and obligation, of virtue and the good life, present themselves as so many unanswered questions always in need of justification. So, if our moral intuitions are not merely remnants of an earlier age, the rationality of norms must itself be proven. We have to understand if and why norms deserve 206respect, why we should follow them. Arising from the presuppositions which competent speakers have to make when they engage in action oriented toward reaching understanding, discourse ethics provides a way to answer these questions via a procedure for the testing of normative validity claims. As such, it endeavors to break beyond the boundaries of the substantive ethics of particular communities to suggest a formal and universal theory of morality. In so doing, it retreats from the ethical concern with the good life, confining itself to issues of justice as those moral questions answerable on the basis of good reasons. Post-conventionality, then, involves an acceptance of the limits of morality understood in terms of the conditions under which norms can be said to deserve recognition.
