Abstract
This article investigates the forms of respect and responsiveness that must be present in the process of practical reason. Drawing upon Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory and his incidental remarks about aesthetics, I identify two modes of respect. The first is the mutual respect and equality that emerges in the process of coming to agreement on proposed norms; the second is the call to infinite responsibility that emerges in opening to the transcendent character of others. However, Habermas makes an error in treating these two types of response as appropriate for different classes of beings when he suggests that mutual respect is appropriate for humans, but asymmetry is appropriate when humans deal with animals or others who are incapable of communicative action. Rather, drawing upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that both responses are always present in all encounters with the world. There is therefore an aporia at the heart of the process of practical reason: the responsiveness required in the exercise of practical reason demands that participants be open not just to another's opinions and claims, but also to precisely that which is not understood, which entails the idea of infinite responsibility. It is the movement between these orientations that enacts the main features of ethical life.
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Notes
The validity of such claims, at this point in my argument, is not really the issue. It is, in any case, a sliding scale. Some of those incapable of speech and action will be closer to fully equal interaction than others. To the extent that they are, they can be entitled to fully moral forms of respect. But my purpose here is simply to investigate how the category of ‘the communicatively incapable’ functions in Habermas’ analysis.
For important criticisms of turning issues of dependency into questions of ethics (rather than of morality), see Eva Feder Kittay (1999, 2001) and Joan Tronto (1993, 2001). Although these arguments are important and interesting, I leave them out of my account because Tronto and Kittay, although they wish to expand the moral domain to include dependency issues and relations of care, still share some fundamental premises with Habermas. In particular, they share the premise that a proper moral response requires that one knows the morally relevant features of the other with whom one is dealing. Their difference is that they think empathy is the proper way to achieve such knowledge, whereas Habermas emphasizes communication. As it will become clearer below, my focus is on the moral response that arises out of a sort of incomprehensibility.
See also Levinas’ formulation in Otherwise than Being: ‘As an exception, and by abuse of language, one can name it me or I. But the denomination here is only a pronomination; there is nothing that is named I; the I is said by him that speaks’ (Levinas, 1981, p. 56).
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Mackin, G. The aporia of practical reason: Reflections on what it means to pay due respect to others. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 58–77 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.38