Moral consciousness and communicative action
By: by Jürgen Habermas ; translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson ; introduction by Thomas McCarthy.
Series: Studies in contemporary German social thought
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1990
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 225
Subjects: Ethics; Communication -- Moral and ethical aspects; Act (Philosophy)
Other titles: Moralbewusstein und kommunikatives Handeln.  English
Description: This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society.
Notes: 3