Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas and Honneth: A Deconstructive Perspective

257 Pages·2013·0.781 MB·English

by  Miriam Bankovsky

Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas
and Honneth
Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy
Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship
in the field of political philosophy. Making available the latest high-quality
research from an international range of scholars working on key topics
and controversies in political philosophy and political science, this series
is an important and stimulating resource for students and academics work-
ing in the area.
Titles include:
The Concept of Justice, Thomas Patrick Burke
Morality, Leadership, and Public Policy, Eric Thomas Weber
Nozick’s Libertarian Project, Mark D. Friedman
Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism, Eric Thomas Weber
Rousseau and Revolution, edited by Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel
Thorup
Perfecting Justice in Rawls,
Habermas and Honneth
A Deconstructive Perspective
Miriam Bankovsky
Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy
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© Miriam Bankovsky 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-2696-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bankovsky, Miriam.
Perfecting justice in Rawls, Habermas, and Honneth: a deconstructive perspective/
Miriam Bankovsky.
p. cm. – (Continuum studies in political philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 227) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-9541-8 (hardcover)
1. Justice. 2. Rawls, John, 1921-2002--Criticism and interpretation.
3. Habermas, Jürgen–Criticism and interpretation. 4. Honneth, Axel, 1949–
Criticism and interpretation. 5. Deconstruction.
I. Title. II. Series.
JC578.B35 2011
320.01'1--dc23 2011037474
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1. Perfecting Justice: An Art of the Im/Possible 1
Part One: Justice as Fairness: A Project to Pursue
2. Rawls and the Possibility of ‘Ideal Theory’ 41
3. Rawls and the ‘Undecidability’ of the Original Position Procedure 72
Part Two: Rational Consensus: Open to Contestation
in Principle
4. Habermas and the Possibility of Popular Sovereignty 101
5. Habermas and the Perfectibility of Deliberative Outcomes 127
Part Three: Perfecting Recognition Relations
6. Honneth and the Possibility of Mutual Recognition 151
7. Honneth and Moral Progress in the Quality of 178
Recognition Relations
8. Im/Possibility and the Cultivation of Deconstructive 203
Civic Attitudes
Notes 221
References 227
Index 241
Acknowledgements
In preparing this work, I have received support and assistance from a
number of friends and colleagues. Instrumental to its completion was the
intellectual and personal generosity of Paul Patton and Catherine Malabou.
I also received constructive criticism, editorial suggestions, linguistic assi-
stance and strategic advice from Alexandra Bourré, Hervé Bruneau, Rosalyn
Diprose, Claudia Gutiérrez, Marc Jones, Paula Keating, Christian Lazzeri
and the centre SOPHIAPOL, David Owen and Lasse Thomassen. I am also
very grateful to Alexandra Day for her professional editorial, proof-reading
and indexing work, as well as her flexibility. This assistance was supported
by a grant from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe
University. Finally, I thank Continuum for committing to this project.
On a personal level, I warmly thank all of my family and friends, particu-
larly my parents, Barbara and Yanek Bankovsky. I especially thank Sean
Bowden, for his love, friendship and support over the years, in different cities
and countries, and I dedicate my first book to him.
Chapter 1
Perfecting Justice: An Art of the Im/Possible
It is true to say, provided it is rightly understood, that successful politics is always
‘the art of the possible’. It is no less true, however, that the possible is very often
achieved only by reaching out toward the impossible which lies beyond it.
Max Weber, Selections in translation, 1978, p. 89
Framed by a deconstructive approach to justice, this book examines the
theories of justice formulated by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Axel
Honneth. Each theorist sketches the content of an ‘art of the possible’, a
conception of justice that is realistic and practicable, the standard against
which public institutions are to be judged. Designed to respond to the
problems that individuals face within their collective lives, each theory
assigns a concrete content to the normative idea of justice, allowing the
needs, interests and claims of distinct individuals to be compared and
assessed through the lens of impartiality.
Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s account of justice’s demands, this book
develops two positions. Its primary assertion is that justice requires, but is
not exhausted by, an ‘art of the possible’. On the one hand, a practical
commitment to the possibility of constructing justice is necessary, as Rawls’s
rhetorical question suggests: ‘If a reasonably just society which subordinates
power to its aims is not possible and people are largely amoral, if not
incurably cynical and self-centred, one might ask with Immanuel Kant
whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth’ (Rawls,
1996, p. lxii). Simply put, we cannot pursue the worthwhile ideal of justice
without first assuming its possibility. On the other hand, justice is not
exhausted by the determined content that Rawls, Habermas and Honneth
assign to it. No local determination can ever fully reconcile the conflicting
demands that Derrida believes our historical concept of justice includes –
namely, responsibility for the unique person and impartiality among all.
Deconstruction requires the pursuit of the constructive strategies that
Rawls, Habermas and Honneth defend while, conversely, drawing attention
2 Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas and Honneth
to the pragmatic implications of the impossibility of exhausting justice’s
demands in the form of laws, principles and procedures.
The second position of this book is that justice sustains its critical function
for the present precisely because it is not exhausted by its determination,
however realistic and practicable this might be. As Derrida puts it, this
position should not produce insensitivity towards injustice but rather
responsibility for the concrete effects of determined accounts of justice
(Derrida, 2002a, pp. 228–298). Were justice to be determined and achieved
once and for all in a present context, it would no longer play the critical
role we want it to fulfil. The inadequacy of the ideal and the actual effectively
motivates the ongoing effort to seek justice in the present, a fact that is
implicitly recognized by Rawls, Habermas and Honneth alike when
acknowledging the revisable, transformable and perfectible character of
their accounts of justice. Rawls, for example, comes to affirm that outcomes
of the original position procedure are necessarily revisable (Rawls, 2001,
p. 86). To his account of rational consensus, Habermas adds the procedural
condition that participants affirm that their agreement remains open to
contestation in principle (1990a, p. 97). In a similar manner, and to protect
his method of reconstructive internal critique from the problems of value
relativism, Honneth also affirms the existence of a constitutive gap between
historical norms and transhistorical standards, committing to a ‘robust’
conception of moral progress (Honneth, 2002, p. 517; 2001, p. 180;
Bankovsky and Honneth, 2012, pp. 36–37). From a Derridean point of view,
the non-adequation of the idea of justice with its determined forms is not to
be regretted but rather affirmed as the very condition that allows us to call
on justice to critique the determinations of the present. Consequently,
justice is perfectible, a project to be pursued: the ideal of justice motivates
the critique of its determined forms.
The theories of Rawls, Habermas and Honneth may be loosely referred to
as ‘constructive’ in orientation, although each theorist understands this
term in different ways.1 Rawls lays stake to it explicitly, explaining the
general features of a constructive approach and the manner in which his
theory satisfies these (Rawls, 1999a, pp. 340–358). First, its task is practical:
its principles are framed to meet a particular social problem; namely, value
pluralism within liberal democracies or the existence of reasonable
disagreement between people about the values to regulate their public
lives. Second, the method begins with the standpoint of the persons
implicated by the practical problem, now considered as agents constructing
the solution for themselves. Finally, and a consequence of constructivism’s
practical character, its content is coherentist. To respond to its practical task,
Perfecting Justice: An Art of the Im/Possible 3
it must generate an appropriate public basis for justification, both cohering
with and clarifying the considered reflections of real persons about what is
just and unjust.
These general features of the constructive orientation also apply to the
theories of Habermas and Honneth, although each philosopher successively
attempts to complicate Rawls’s understanding of the practical problem.
Using the term ‘rational reconstruction’ to define his method, Habermas
sets out to resolve the practical problem of disagreement about the moral
validity of norms of action in specific contexts (Habermas, 1990a, pp. 94–
98). Consequently, his problem is at once broader than Rawls’s, applying to
the problem of general disagreement across all contexts and times, while
also narrower in attempting to make sense of specific forms of disagreement
dividing people in those local contexts – sporting associations, Churches,
unions and so on – that Rawls excludes from consideration (see Chapter 4).
Habermas discovers a solution in the rational presuppositions that allow
interacting agents to lay claim to moral validity, presuppositions by virtue of
which norms are intersubjectively judged to be valid or invalid. For
Habermas, these presuppositions themselves comprise the public basis for
justification, allowing real persons, in all contexts, to submit their particular
moral reasons to the rational judgement of others.
Preferring the term ‘normative reconstruction’ or ‘reconstructive internal
critique’, Honneth deepens Habermas’s account of the problem still
further, making visible deep-seated normative expectations that are rarely
articulated in Habermas’s language of rational argumentation or in Rawlsian
public reason (Honneth, 2008a; 2008b; 2010, p. 57; 2000, p. 36 & p. 59; see
also Rössler, 2000, p. 10). The broad practical problem is, on the one hand,
defined as the set of all possible experiences that might prevent people
from realizing healthy forms of subjectivity. On the other hand, the problem
is only visible in specific forms of social pathology, where certain moral
expectations embodied in a particular reality are not satisfied by actual
norms. Take, for example, a sentiment of low social esteem experienced by
public-service parking inspectors whose valuable contributions are often
publicly disrespected. It is with such specific forms of social pathology that
Honneth begins, ‘tak[ing] the idea of eliminating obstacles as our starting
point’ (Honneth, 2001, p. 188). Again, this reconstructive method begins
with the standpoint of those implicated by the problem. After reconstructing
the norms implied by the duties and rights that are customarily accepted,
one then designates as ‘ethical’ only those that ‘enjoy a sort of reciprocal
interaction’, evidence of the mutual realization of individual freedom in
intersubjective relations (Honneth, 2000, p. 59). The problem is thus