Research On Habermas’s Logic Of "Moral Justification"

This paper is intended to analyze the relevant ideas about discourse ethics proposed by Jurgen Habermas, an important representative figure of Frankfurt School, and to further expound under what circumstances its argument strategy which is used to break through crisis and dilemma in the context of modern moral crisis exists rationality, as well as under what circumstances it still needs further clarification. Since the birth of discourse ethics, the discussion conducted by various researchers has already formed a basic consensus that discourse ethics is a utopian theory adhering to moral universality and intellectual in the modern pluralism value. However, it is not clear to tell under what circumstances Habermas believes his discourse ethics has a tendency to utopia. When it is dismissed as a utopian dream by the researchers unanimously, few people noticed such a more fundamental problem, namely, how can discourse ethics justify its core appeal, rather than what is its appeal. Since the beginning of its creation, discourse ethics has clearly endowed itself with argument task, which reveals the basic moral practice in daily life, then explained and justified the basic moral intuition which plays a role constantly in our daily life. And eventually achieve the basic goal of extolling the enlightenment spirit and conquering modern moral crisis. Under this issue of consciousness regulation, Habermas uses linguistics turning to the domain of meta-ethics approach, which combined with the way of continental philosophy to reveal the basic logical structure of ethical reasoning process. Therefore, the study of discourse ethics cannot be regarded as Utopia without realistic possibility. Instead, the core of the argument which is concealed should be recognized on the premise of restoring its comprehensive view of various arguments, in order to understand the meaning of its utopian orientation and the core implication of discourse ethics.The basic point of this research paper is that discourse ethics is a kind of ethics theoretical construction, setting the justification process of clarifying normative proposition as the core, moral universality and intellectual as appeals, and thus responding the moral crisis emerged after enlightenment as basic issue of consciousness. That construction strategy has longitudinal inherited factors and transverse critical factors, so we cannot simply talk about discourse ethics in the popular mode, such as what basis is on account of, what argument is cited, and what conclusions are drawn. Instead, we should endow it with a consistent core and reveal argument rationality from analysis and criticism of many moral argument strategies. This argument rationality itself rather than its appeal is the specific subject of discourse ethics utopia’s concept we are talking about.In the research, the author proposes "the core of consistent", which means the logical structure analysis of inferential model that "moral justification" concept contains. It simply reflects in the following implied logical structure of form analysis, and the basic moral propositions for argument are shown below.To be justified proposition:"A’s practice is wrong"(C).Justifying this normative propositions needs to be quoted by a specific reason and divided into two steps, namely:Step1:the reason is "A lied"(D);The reason must follow the corresponding rules.Step2:"lying is wrong"(W).Based on the basic idea, the overall structure of this study can be divided into four themes, which are relatively independent parts:The first part of the research consists of Chapter1and Chapter2, which mainly sets the basic problems that discourse ethics has to face and wants to solve in a dialectical relationship with crisis and justification. Modern morality is an inherited enlightenment discontinued consciousness, and a self-argument moral, with self-choice, self-development and self-improvement which espoused by enlightenment and other human autonomy appeals as the core spirit of enlightenment. With this self-consciousness, the modern moral disintegrates crisis tendency. By analysis of the interpretation of the enlightenment from Kant’s essay "Answering the Question:What is Enlightenment?", we can separate the crisis into two basic forms:justificatory crisis and factual crisis. The basic method of being a state of enlightenment set by Kant is to freely public use one’s own reason, however, in contrast is rational private use. Two ways of rational use are misunderstood by modern moral philosophers and the general public. Freely public use is seen as individual freedom, and non-freely private use is regarded as tool purpose reason, which results in justificatory crisis and factual crisis respectively. Faced with such crisis background, justification core of discourse ethics gives the argument strategy, which, of course, mainly refers to justificatory crisis. Habermas’ discourse ethics based on the reflection of reality crisis turns to "moral justification" logic analysis. According to this analysis, if the modern ethics wants to overcome its crisis, it must first expound inference structure of ethics from justification perspective. This reasoning bases on metaphysics of linguistic, procedural, as well as fallible cognition. Therefore, the logical inference structure has to be expounded from meta-ethics perspective, if you want to identify the process of "moral justification". The structure is the logical inferring relationships among W, D. and C in "the core of consistent" we are talking about.The second part of the research consists of Chapter3, Chapter4and Chapter5, which mainly expounds logical structure of "moral justification", and does reconstruction work towards it. This part is mainly for three successive advance basic issues:rule justification, internal justification and external justification. Rule justification is to justify the intentional rules of consciousness, which mainly from language implied basic rules in daily application. Thus, Rule W from the "moral justification" will get some inevitability which contained in language application. In the process of the justification, through a linguistic analysis of communicative action, first, we regard the communicative action as meaning-oriented and rule-following social communication model, and the idealized form of this model is moral action in the world of human life. In the meanwhile, the moral action refers to the validity requirement which necessarily refers to in the process of verbal communication, thus, the validity requirement determines the form and orientation of the modern moral, as well as its validity target to justify. In terms of internal justification, the problems it has to face are the core part of this study. Through the step of internal justification, the logic structure of "moral justification" has been reconstructed, that is, we cannot easily get C inferred from D, by using Rule W, because it also needs to accept regulation and filtration of the principle of universality (U). Only in this way can W get justification. The bridging role which played by Principle U in "moral justification" reasoning logic has become an important issue, and we will show that the bridging is "Be" and "ought to Be" of Hume’s problem which is hard to communicate. Finally, in terms of external justification, although Principle U has obtained the justification based on language and logic, by interaction rules analysis of universal pragmatics and reconstruction of reasoning logical structure, in terms of moral social attribute, its objects are still human relations of social actors in the social world. Therefore, we must seek rationality basis from the social perspective, which Habermas using some related theories of social psychology and cognitive development psychology, thus, the Principle U of discourse ethics gains outside internal logic external rationality. The above three steps constitute a successful logic of argumentation procedures which are about "moral justification" logical structure.The third part of the research consists of Chapter6and Chapter7, which mainly explains there is the tension relationship between justification and application. The expression of this tension relationship is that justificatory discourse expounds how dose ethics have validity logically, which abstracts away all the empirical and contextual factors, answering such a moral knowledge issue as "what should I do". However, justificatory discourse doesn’t explain morality, a contextual characteristic in action system, in the meanwhile, we need to answer "What action should I make" as well. When actors’moral action is limited to a certain situation, they have to recognize which specification is applicable to the context, that’s to say, which specification is appropriate, not to answer which specification is universal. Habermas accepts this distinction, but he fails to realize how to use the theory to define the relationship between justification and application. Through analysis we can recognize that, in terms of logic, justification which he insists is superior to application. In essence, it is still a kind of justification rather than parallel relation, which results in a further issue, namely, the introduction of the application dimension does not resolve the issue "What action should I make", because even if setting specific ethics which is appropriate for the specific context through applicable discourse, we still cannot guarantee the actors are bound to act in accordance with the specification, which means there is existence of separation between the moral knowledge and moral action. In order to bridge the tension relationship between justification and application, we must use the coercive power of the modern legal institution to provide external protection for moral weakness of knowledge systems. The reason why law can play this role is modern law and modern ethics is a kind of homologous complementary relation based on discourse logic. Modern law has characteristics of operational, concrete and mandatory which moral doesn’t have. Through these characteristics, on one hand, modern law ensures the impetus of transformation from knowledge to action based on extrinsic punishments, on the other hand, it provides complementary and assistance for areas which moral cannot involveThe fourth part of the research is the Conclusion, which mainly proposes criticism about Habermas’s "moral justification" logic in the sight of the critical, and questions reasonableness of argument activities restored from moral actions by discourse ethics. As for discourse ethics "moral justification", there is a basic argument that authenticity of factual proposition and validity of normative propositions own a similar logical structure. Habermas demonstrates the structure by determining the similarities from two propositions with the same predicates form. However, the "moral justification" is not a logical discussion at the sight of this simple proposition. Instead, it oriented reasoning logic composed by different propositions. Then there is another issue, namely, the internal subject-predicate logical relation of the proposition cannot be legally transited to reasoning logic structure. When we set a specific situation to study the reasoning structure of moral proposition, this kind of asymmetry will become more obvious, because the factual propositions can not be limited by situational factors, on the contrary, normative propositions have to be limited by them. Therefore, there is no similar procedure between factual propositions and normative propositions. In addition, the logical schema of "moral justification" does not contain Principle D, while, Habermas regards Principle D as a fundamental principle, which is superior to Principle U. From the perspective of pragmatics as the whole theoretical basis, Principle D should be closer to outline the premise of communicative idealism discourse, which should be universal and logically applied to all the people. But in terms of Habermas’ expression of the content, principle D is a principle which can be modified by conditional clauses, and the principle is not a necessary and sufficient condition for specific ethics, but only a sufficient condition. Finally, a significant consequence is caused by Habermas’ understanding of modern ethics from "moral justification" meta-level perspective, that is, ethics is restored to be a pragmatic argument process based on language. In terms of its role, ethics adjusts the basic conflicts among people. Therefore, it is not a simple rational argument process. Validity requirements contained in the use of daily language communication can’t be directly equaled with moral actions. The person who is good at using rational argument to get a consensus among people is not necessarily a moral person, and vice versa.