ABSTRACT
Born in 1929, Jürgen Habermas, eighty-eight as continues a vigorous public life as the unofficial philosopher laureate of the German Federal Republic – of, indeed, the European Union as a whole. The Enlightenment, he observes, is the 'unfinished project of modernity'. He accepts that the two, as he calls them, 'pathologies' identified by his predecessors do indeed characterize the modern age and are indeed the product of rationalization. Good rationalization consists in what Habermas calls 'communicative rationality'. Ideal speech situations can be concerned with extra-moral matters of fact or with morality. Where the topic is the latter what occurs is 'discourse ethics'. Discourse ethics, is then, afflicted with serious problems. Its conception of the 'discourse' that determines morality is a philosophy professor's self-congratulation, and while it claims to generate morality in general, the best it can actually generate is a very small subset of moral norms.
