Jurgen Habermas' Ethics of Communicative Action

Jurgen Habermas is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. I was first introduced to his ideas way back when I was a philosophy student in college. According to wikipedia, Jurgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher who was born on June 18, 1929 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Habermas is known for many notable ideas such as Discourse Theory, Theory of Truth and Knowledge and the Theory of Communicative Action among others.

What attracted me most to Habermas' ideas are his thoughts on Communicative Action, especially as applied to ethics. In communicative action, participants "coordinate their action and pursuit of invididual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy." In addition, "communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior." Therefore, "communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors 'mobilize the potential for rationality' given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement."

Habermas' Ethics of Communicative Action (ECA) is therefore a social endeavour, played by the influence of thte populace over social institutions which in turn actualize what is the acceptable or unacceptable standards of conduct. In Habermas' ECA, we find the dynamic and social nature of standards of conduct, the only difference of ECA with religious based ethical standards is that in religious based morality, stability and inflexibility results as it insists on its perpetual applicability and demandability. Cursory check however of religious based morality reveals that it is itself based on the social norms and peculiarities of the culture in which it is based and has in fact in most cases been influenced by the prevailing social norms of the time or in certain cases, as a rejecting reaction against it.

What is therefore the implications of Habermas' ECA in modern life? ECA ensures that social issues, as they become ever more complex, variegated and requires the involvement multiple disciplines, are looked at from and analyzed through multiple lenses of scrutiny. Indeed, modern human life is not as simple as it once was, we can no longer afford to pigeon-hole social problems into cleanly separate bins of categories. Religious based morality therefore has to be slowly relegated to make way for a more open, responsive, democratic, and inclusive meta-framework which will serve as a skeleton as we ponder on the pressing ethical conundrums of modern life.