Competent Need-Interpretation and Discourse Ethics

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas has argued that the justification of moral norms requires a maximally inclusive process of argumentation among real individuals under ideal conditions. As he is well aware, there is a tension here. If the critical and epistemic force of the process of moral justification is to be retained, it must not be reduced to the de facto conditions, given how distorted they often are. But if the justificatory process he terms “practical discourse” is to avoid the presumptuousness of imagining what others would find acceptable, it must retain the requirement of actual dialogue. In his attempts to address this tension, Habermas typically focuses on idealizations involving unlimited time, unrestricted participation, and sameness of meaning, but he has said little about requirements regarding the competence of participants. In this essay, I focus on one set of capacities that participants in practical discourse clearly expect of one another, namely, the capacity to perceive and express their own needs, desires, interests, feelings, and concerns. Habermas is very clear that “need-interpretation” is an essential aspect of practical discourse, but less clear about what I propose to call “need-interpretive competence.” Once it is recognized that participants in practical discourse demand this set of capacities of one another, the tension between the real and the ideal reemerges. This puts pressure on Habermas to revise his discourse ethics in a way that better appreciates the pragmatic nature of the presuppositions of practical discourse. I begin by reconstructing an account of need-interpretive competence, on the basis of what Habermas says about need-interpretation and about the idealizing presuppositions of practical discourse. I then note several unwelcome implications of this requirement, focusing on what I call the “trilemma of inclusive and stringent consensus.” I go on, in section 3, to consider several attempts that Habermas could make to avoid this trilemma, none of which succeeds. I then reexamine the three horns of the trilemma and argue that although two of 2 them should be avoided, the third horn is not a threat to discourse ethics, although it does involve reconceptualizing the idealizing presuppositions of discourse in a way that is normative all the way down.