ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Habermas’s meta-ethical system: discourse ethics. I will claim that it fails to provide a full account of morality for four reasons. The first is that Habermas’s plausible claim that communication requires a presupposition that all taking part are aiming at consensus (in matters to do with the right) does not establish that such a consensus is inevitable. The second, related to the first, is that Habermas needs to be able to distinguish cleanly matters of the right from matters of the good, but this distinction cannot be drawn sharply. The third problem is that Habermas must assume that every participant in the ideal discourse would have access to an identical ideal rationality, and I will argue that this is not true. Fourthly, Habermas fails to establish his claim that discourse ethics has a purely formal basis, and does not need to rely on some preexisting substantive norms. In addition, we will consider the charge that Habermas assumes too easily that the actual consensus reached in real discourse tracks fairly closely the consensus that would be reached in an ideal discourse.1
