ABSTRACT
‘The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its nature autonomy and responsibility are posited for us’. 1 So runs Habermas's boldest and most frequently cited thesis. The human claim to a moral identity, Habermas is saying, does not rest on contingently occurring wants. The happening and satisfaction of wants, in humans or other animals, is intelligible as an event in disenchanted nature. However, if Habermas is right, the interest in autonomy and responsibility has a quite different kind of intelligibility. For language beings, autonomy and responsibility are posited irrespective of what nature holds for them. There is something about the structure of language as such, Habermas is claiming, that situates the beings who use it in moral space. It is as occupants of that space, as bearers of autonomy and responsibility, that humans are raised out of the realm of more or less efficiently satisfied contingently occurring interests. And it is a non-contingent fact about language that those who use it are so situated.
