ABSTRACT
In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas raises a series of questions which effectively launches his discourse ethical investigations. ‘If world views’, Habermas asks, ‘have foundered on the separation of cognitive from socially integrative components’, if such world views ‘today belong irretrievably to the past’, what else can fulfil ‘the moral-practical task of constituting ego- and group-identity?’ How can a morality without roots in ‘cognitive interpretations of nature’, as Habermas puts it, still ‘secure the identities of individuals and collectives?’ 1 To be sure, in their original context, these are primarily sociological questions. Habermas's main concern there is to explore the empirical hypothesis that the separation of cognitive from socially integrative components of the lifeworld precipitates legitimation crises in late capitalist societies by unleashing the forces of instrumental reason. 2 But in his more recent work the same questions reappear in a more philosophical light. Habermas's various programmatic elaborations of a discourse ethics are attempts at a justification of the rationality of the moral point of view understood as both independent of cognitive interpretations of nature and as compatible with the diverse and decentred individual and group identities of the modern lifeworld.
