THE GERMAN TRADITION

Most of the features that define the German tradition are a heritage of Kant s moral philosophy. The relevant aspects are: (a) the deontological foundation of ethics, (b) the distinction between theory and practice in ethics and morality, and (c) the trust in reason as the basis of ethics. The German tradition is, in other words, the continuation of the project of enlightenment. Both of the philosophers of the German tradition who will be analysed here, Kant and Habermas, believe that the moral quality of an action can be verified . For Kant the instance of this verification is reason itself. Habermas develops the idea further and arrives at a kind of cumulative reason in the form of discourse . Neither of the two sees the task of moral philosophy in the judging of everyday actions but in the provision of a theoretical model, which allows the specification of rules and procedures to judge the moral quality of events or actions. Morality concerns the everyday actions and decisions. Ethics on the other hand stands for the theoretical and scholarly dealing with morality. ^[1] In order to arrive at this conclusion, we should now take a more detailed look at the philosophy of the two authors.

Kant s Moral Philosophy: The Foundation of the German Tradition

A lot has been said about Kant s ethics, and this is not the place to repeat it. We will only take a look at Kant s ideas insofar as necessary to prove that the features of German tradition can be found in his writing.

For Kant there is a point of view from which the morality of actions can be judged. This is the viewpoint of pure reason, which shows that Kant meets the last point of my definition of the German tradition, the reliance on reason as the foundation of ethics. Pure reason is in itself practical and gives man the moral law (Kant, 1995a, p. A 57). The moral law in turn is linked to the good. According to Kant there is nothing unrestrictedly good, no other good without qualification but the good will (Kant, 1995a, p. BA 1). The will is good only when it is motivated by duty, which proves that Kant fulfils the first of the three features that we ascribe to the German tradition, namely that his philosophy is deontological. This, of course, comes as no surprise, as Kant is the archetype of a deontological philosopher and usually the first one to be named as a representative of this school of thought.

The idea of duty leads to the core formulation of Kant s moral philosophy, to the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is distinguished from hypothetical imperatives in that it does not have other ends; it is an end in itself. Imperatives are answers to the question What should I do? and differ in the sort of question that they try to answer. An imperative, which presents an action as necessary in itself without reference to anything else is categorical (Kant, 1995a, p. BA 40). Apart from the categorical we can find the technological imperative and the pragmatic imperative. Only the categorical imperative, however, belongs to free action in general, and thus to the realm of morality (Kant, 1995a, p. BA 44). Kant himself offers several different formulations of the categorical imperative which allow for the analysis of important points in his moralphilosophy.Theformulationofthecategoricalimperativethatisprobably best known is:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (Translation: Kemerling, 2000)

This formulation shows some of Kant s central thoughts. One of them is the idea that the content of the moral law can be deduced from generalisation. An act is forbidden if it is against moral law, which is the case if it is either logically impossible or self-contradictory to universalise the maxim or to want to universalise it (Maritain, 1960, p. 146).

Another part of this first formulation of the categorical imperative with importance for us is the use of the term maxim. While the moral law is the principle according to which man should act, maxims are the subjective principles according to which man actually acts (Kant, 1995a, p. BA 16; Rohbeck, 1993, p. 86f). This means that the categorical imperative does not look at single acts or rules but judges the underlying maxims. It is thus clear that Kant distinguishes between several theoretical levels in his moral philosophy. This justifies seeing Kant as a representative of the German tradition since he clearly distinguishes between the practice and the theory of morality, between ethics and morality. ^[2]

Having proven that Kant fulfils the three defining characteristics of the German tradition, we will now proceed to the modern representative of this tradition to J ¼rgen Habermas.

Habermas Discourse Ethics: The Modern Version of the German Tradition

There are several problems with Kant s conceptions of moral philosophy which have led to criticism but also to further development of his deontological ideas. One necessary supposition for the adoption of Kant s stance is that situations are unambiguous. Only in an unambiguous situation is it possible to find out what exactly the agent s duty is according to which he has to formulate his maxims. It has been argued by other authors that the ambiguous situations, which Kant chose to ignore, are exactly the situations in which ethics gain importance.

Another frequently named point of criticism of Kant s theories is the alleged negligence of the results of actions. Since the good of an action is only judged by its compliance to duty, and duty can be deduced from pure reason, it seems that in this theory ethics is indifferent to the actual welfare of concrete human beings. This is one of the points where the theory loses its plausibility since the results of an action are of ethical relevance for most of us. Kant s defenders, however, argue that even though considerations of results are systematically banished from the foundation of ethics, they can be found in the maxims that aim at concrete action (H ffe, 1996, p. 189f).

There are a lot of other points that have been criticised in Kant s writing during the last 200 years . There is Marx s criticism that Kant concentrates exclusively on reason and therefore forgets the historical determinants of ethics. Another argument is that Kant s ethics is nothing but a reformulation of Christian theological ethics in the disguise of humanism (Maritain, 1960, p. 149f; Tugendhat, 1984, p. 4).

However, in spite of the criticism, Kant s system has captured some of the important issues of moral philosophy and turned out to be one of the most important moral philosophies. It had and still has a profound influence on the development of moral philosophy, maybe stronger in German-speaking countries than elsewhere, and it is the base of what is called in this text the ˜German tradition . There have been many attempts to improve on the ideas without changing the basic concepts. One of the actual developments that is popular among (not only German) philosophers is the concept of discourse ethics as developed by Apel and Habermas. Habermas theory will therefore be the second example for a moral philosophy in the German tradition.

Habermas wants to avoid falling back on pre-Kantian notions and losing the level of differentiation between foundation and application of ethics (Habermas, 1991, p. 24). However, he realises that there are several problems with Kantian ethics which have to be overcome . Habermas concedes that the individual is not able to test the universalisability of all of its maxims because it knows neither all of the relevant aspects of reality nor all of the relevant norms in any particular case. Habermas also tries to overcome one problem that Kant himself admitted, the fact that we can never know by experience whether the fulfilment of moral duties is based on moral or other reasons (Kant, 1995a, p. BA 27).

The solution for these problems of Kantian ethics is itself based on a Kantian idea. Kant saw that the notions are one basis of cognition that cannot be obtained intuitively, but only discursively (Kant, 1995b, p. B 92f). Habermas builds on this and uses the recent development of philosophy where language and speech have gained importance in an attempt to remodel the approach to moral philosophy. Discourses in this theory take the place of the categorical imperative. In a description of Mead, which can also be applied to his own writings, Habermas (1981b, p. 145) states that collective objectives and demands can do what the categorical imperative was meant to do. They can serve as a test for the morality of maxims by constituting discourses.

The underlying idea of discourse ethics as Habermas describes it is the notion of communicative action (Habermas, 1981a, 1981b). His theory of communicative action interprets language as a medium of communication and agreement. During the process of communication, the participants refer to a shared world in which they can claim validity for their arguments. These validity claims ( Geltungsanspr ¼che ) can then again be accepted or contested (Habermas, 1981a, p. 148). Within the shared world of all participants, the life world ( Lebenswelt ), the participants communicate in order to reach a consensus (Habermas, 1981a, p. 37). This consensus centres on the inter-subjective acceptance of the validity claims. There are three basic sorts of claims of validity, which correspond to three aspects of the life world. The life world consists of the objective world, which is shared by all of its inhabitants, of the norms and rules that apply to a given situation, and of the speaker s inner world. Accordingly there are three validity claims ”the claims of truth ( Wahrheit ), (normative) correctness ( Richtigkeit ), and veracity or authenticity ( Wahrhaftigkeit ).

Since the purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the importance of the notion of responsibility in the context of ethics and morality, we will now concentrate on the moral implications of the theory of communicative action. One possible starting point for understanding Habermas ethics is the notion of norms. Norms can be found when an agent does not act solitarily but acts within an environment where he can find other agents . Norms express the factual agreement of a social group . All members of the group know what behaviour is to be expected of the others in given circumstances. For the individual agent this clarifies what he is entitled to do (Habermas, 1981a, p. 127). Norms refer to some kind of underlying value and thus to morality. Morality has the purpose of regulating life in a society. In modern societies where the individualisation increases progressively, the individual subject is entangled in a net of reciprocal dependencies, which leads to a growing vulnerability of its identity. The conservation of this identity is therefore one of the goals of morality (Habermas, 1991, pp. 69 & 223). Morality, on the other hand, is also a mechanism used for the purpose of limiting conflicts in order to preserve the social integration of the life-world (Habermas, 1981b, p. 259).

Habermas understands discourse ethics as the successor to Kant s ethics. The difference to Kant is that the process of moral argumentation takes the place of the categorical imperative. Only those norms can claim validity, which could be agreed upon in a practical discourse by everybody affected (Habermas, 1991, p. 12). The idea is that, given valid norms, everybody can accept the results and consequences following from a universal compliance with these norms. Discourse ethics thus abandons Kant s notion of autonomy, which concentrates on the individual s submission under its own laws. Inter-subjective autonomy takes the place of Kant s individual autonomy (Habermas, 1991, p. 25).

Habermas follows Kant s intuition that the theory of morality is universal and can be deduced from reason. He supposes that there is a moral point of view from which questions of morality can be judged impartially (Habermas, 1991, p. 13). However, unlike Kant, Habermas does not think that any one person is able to find and correctly interpret this moral point of view. The place, which the autonomous individual has in Kant s theory, is held by discourse in Habermas ideas. Discourse is the medium for testing whether a norm is impartially justified (Habermas, 1981a, p. 39). Discourses are used to check allkindsofvalidityclaims,andamongthemtheclaimsofnormativecorrectness. Real discourses, however, do not concentrate solely on any single one of the three validity claims, but can deal with several at the same time. This takes care of the problem that ethical differences in many cases are due to differing perceptions of reality and not only to differing views of moral norms.

A norm can claim to be valid when everybody who could be affected by it agrees that the norm is valid (Habermas, 1983, p. 76). Even though the aim of a discourse is to produce consensus, this does not mean that everybody has to share the same view of the world. The participants of a discourse can also find that they disagree on certain topics. In this case the validity of speech acts would refer to an acceptance of the disagreements (Habermas, 1998a, p. 34).

Even though discourse ethics tries to sort out moral differences and thereby help us coordinate our lives, it cannot tell us what to do. It only offers a procedure to judge morally relevant conflicts from the impartial moral point of view. Discourse ethics can therefore only be formal (Habermas, 1983, p. 113) and is unable to generate practical norms or, in our terminology, to generate morality. Discourse ethics is unable to produce a list of duties or a hierarchy of norms; it burdens the subjects with the task of making their own judgments (Habermas, 1998a, p. 147). It cannot even give criteria for telling whether something was judged from the impartial point of view, as this can only be decided by the affected parties due to the lack of external criteria (Habermas, 1998b, p. 565).

Habermas discourse ethics can be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile Kant s abstract autonomy and Hegel s substantial morality (cf. Bienfait, 1999). It corresponds with Kant s ethics in that the basis is a formal principle, which is also universal. Moral validity, and this leads us back to the German tradition, is based on a rational procedure (Wellmer, 1986, p. 8).

The rationality of a statement in the case of Habermas stands for its capacity of being criticised and justified, in other words for the validity claims (Habermas, 1981a, p. 27). Unlike Kant, Habermas does not limit rationality to the individual who then would have to decide which action or maxim can be morally justified. Communicative rationality or reason is no source of norms (Habermas, 1998a, p. 18); it only allows the rational discussion of adequate behaviour and norms.

So far we have seen that Habermas ethics fulfils two requirements of being put into the category of the German tradition. It differentiates between theory and practice of moral questions, and it is based on reason. The third point, the fact that the German tradition is fundamentally deontological, is certainly not as clear in Habermas theory. It would be wrong to put him into the same category as Kant, for whom the only thing good without further qualification is the good will. It is justified, however, to say discourse ethics is deontological because it is not exclusively based on consequentialism. That is to say the good will, the intention of the agent, is of importance for the moral evaluation of an act. Veracity, as we saw, is one of the validity claims, which is taken into account in discourses. The deontological aspect of ethics can therefore be said to hide in the discourse. Deontological and teleological aspects are not easily divisible since both play their part in determining what is right or wrong. This may be seen asanalogoustotheimpossibilitytodistinguishbetweenmoralandfactualclaims in a discourse. Both refer mutually to each other.

There is a lot more that could be said about the implications of both moral theories introduced so far. Questions of realization, of sanctions, of ethics and politics or society could be discussed. Since the aim of this book is the analysis of the notion of responsibility, we will leave it here. One thing that may strengthen the claim that there is something deserving to be called a German tradition is the fact that the aforementioned features can be seen in the writings of many contemporary authors dealing with problems of applied ethics. Especially the distinction between ethics and morality along the lines of theory and practice is commonplace in contemporary German discussions about applied ethics (for similar definitions, see Bayertz, 1993, p. 18; Ulrich, 1997, p. 43; Steinmann & L hr, 1994, p. 8; Homann & Blome-Drees, 1992, p. 16). The other two points, the dependence on rationality and the deontological aspect, can also frequently be found in these and other texts .

A different view of the content and relationship of ethics and morality is reflected in another school of thought, which, due to the fact that the following examples come from a French background, will be called the ˜French tradition .

^[1] The distinction of morality (moral) and ethics (ethik) as practice and theory of moral dealings is a defining feature of German moral philosophy. However, there is a problem with the consistency of the use of these two notions. The distinction, as we just introduced it, can be found in many works of modern thinkers of practical philosophy. Unfortunately the use of the terms is ambiguous, and neither Kant nor Habermas use them exactly in the way just explained. In the case of Habermas, the terms even have an inverse meaning, with moral (morality) standing for the universal ethical considerations. The different concepts behind the notions are nevertheless visible, and we will stick to the distinctions because it is widely spread in German philosophy today. It also facilitates the discussion of the value of the notion of responsibility later on.

^[2] Kant s philosophy is, of course, more complex than it appears here. The maxim is not easy to assign either to morality or to ethics, since it has a practical side but also is a theoretical construct. For our purposes it will suffice, however, to demonstrate that the distinction between ethics and morality exists since this distinction leads to problems, which the notion of responsibility is to overcome.