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Ethical and communicative rationality in Habermas. Universal ism and contextualism in ethics - This article elaborates and criticizes the relation which Habermas proposes to establish between his universalist and cognitive ethics of communication and (his concept of) the life world. Contrary to Apel’s transcendentalism, Habermas is in search of immanent or naturalist foundations of an ethics of dialogue, mostly on the basis of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. This approach, however, lacks such empirical foundations for the sixth and most crucial ’final’ stage. We review the — mostly feminist — literature that argues in favour of a contextualist ethics (Loring, Noddings, Gilligan) which is intrinsically linked to ’particular audiences’ (Perelman) and suggest that such an ethical point of view conforms much better to what a concept of the ’life world’ really means. Consequently, the proposed ’naturalist’ foundation of Habermassian ethics fails, whilst his life-world concept remains non-empirical and idealistic. In the final part we argue that universalism and contextualism are not alternatives to one another but are both contextually induced by the dialectical interconnectedness of forms of life in modern capitalist society.
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How to Cite: Raes, K. (1987) “Ethische en communicatieve rationaliteit bij Habermas: universalisme en contextualisme in de ethiek”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen. 32(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.94955