Of Gods and Demons: Habermas and Practical Reason

Abstract

‘Practical questions’, according to Habermas, ‘admit of truth’:¹ ‘just (richtige) norms must be capable of being grounded in a similar way to true statements’.² Truth, on his view, means ‘warranted assertibility’: this is shown when participants enter into a discourse and ‘a consensus can be realized under conditions that identify it as a justified consensus’.³ If, he writes, ‘philosophical ethics and political theory are supposed to disclose the moral core of the general consciousness and to reconstruct it as a normative concept of the moral, then they must specify criteria and provide reasons: they must, that is, produce theoretical knowledge’.⁴ Thus for Habermas judgements about moral and political questions can be rationally grounded and differences about such questions can be rationally resolved.