Discourse ethics

Abstract: Preface. Translator's Note. Translator's Introduction. 1. On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason. 2. Remarks on Discourse Ethics. 3. Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo-Aristotelianism. 4. To Seek to Salvage an Unconditional Meaning Without God Is a Futile Undertaking: Reflections on a Remark of Max Horkheimer. 5. Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen. Notes. Index.

Abstract: Stakeholder dialogue is a cornerstone of many recent developments in corporate social and environmental governance and accountability practices. Two key problems associated with these stakeholder engagement initiatives are: identifying and reaching a wide range of stakeholders; and determining a consensus set of stakeholder expectations from a range of potentially mutually exclusive views held by different stakeholders. This paper addresses both of these issues. It firstly examines the moral consensus building discourse criteria of an ideal speech situation advocated by Jurgen Habermas, and proposes these criteria as a suitable theoretical model for determining a consensus set of social, environmental, economic and ethical responsibilities to be addressed by an organisation. Secondly, it investigates the extent to which the interactivity and wide reach offered by the internet could assist in realising the theoretical potential of an ideal speech situation debate in practice, and thus facilitate democratic debates leading to a greater degree of equity in the determination of corporate social, environmental, economic and ethical responsibilities. This exploration is informed by analysis of Shell's internet based stakeholder dialogue `web forum' against the theoretical consensus building discourse ethics criteria of an ideal speech situation.

Abstract: Jurgen Habermas has developed the theory of communicative action primarily in the context of critical social and political theory and discourse ethics. The essays collected in this volume, however, focus on the theory's implications for epistemology and metaphysics. They address two fundamental issues that have not figured prominently in his work since the early 1970s. One is the question of naturalism: How can the ineluctable normativity of the perspective of agents interacting in a linguistically structured lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of the emergence and evolution of forms of life? The other is a key problem facing epistemological realism after the linguistic turn: How can the assumption that there is an independently existing world be reconciled with the linguistic insight that we cannot have unmediated access to "brute" reality?Truth and Justification collects Habermas's major essays on these topics published since the mid-1990s. They offer detailed discussions of truth and objectivity as well as an account of the representational function of language in terms of the formal-pragmatic framework he has developed. In defending his post-Kantian pragmatism, Habermas draws on both the continental and analytic traditions and endorses a weak naturalism and a form of epistemological realism.