The Concept of Universality in Jurgen Habermas’ Moral Theory

Abstract

This paper deals with the conception of universality in Jurgen Habermas’ moral theory. My basic presupposition here is that the concept of universality (which is often supposed to have to be one of the necessary features of any moral judge­ment or norm) is highly problematic not only due to a variety of possible prob­lems arising from how it functions in specific moral theories, but also – and chiefly – due to the fact that it is far from easy to give it a unified and fixed meaning. The works of R.G. Apresyan and A.V. Prokof’yev show the systematic ambiguity not only in the way this concept is used, but in the very way it is un­derstood quite well. Examining Habermas’ conception of universality is a partic­ularly interesting task. On one hand, in his philosophy two main traditions of thought on the problem of moral universality meet each other – as he is both the most influential follower of Immanuel Kant (who is for all practical reasons responsible for introducing the problem of moral universality into ethical discus­sions) in modern German ethical thought and an active participant of a discus­sion with modern Anglo-American cognitivist ethics (which following the works of R.M. Hear has been quite actively engaged in discussions of universality). On the other hand the range of the ways Habermas uses universality-talk in his works on moral theory is astonishingly wide and extremely convoluted. Clearing up the specific details of the conception of universality that Habermas uses, will be my main task in this paper (pt. 2). However, to give a reader some context I will start with an overview of Habermas’ moral theory (pt. 1).