On the Epistemic Grounds of Moral Discourse and Moral Education: An Examination of Jürgen Habermas’s “Discourse Ethics”

Abstract

It is today customary for educators and philosophers to maintain that the learning of certain fundamental normative principles — such as fair treatment, respect for the equality and dignity of individuals as rational persons, the fostering of autonomous and critical reflective judgment, reciprocity of rights and obligations, mutual recognition of informed interests and well-being — comprises an essential form of internalization or appropriation of values that must be aimed at by any genuine form of moral teaching. These principles, it is claimed, are constitutive of the very sense of morality as a normative framework and coming to learn what they mean and do is a requirement of any justifiable conception of the enterprise of moral education. To assert these views is, of course, one thing; to justify them in a noncircular manner is another. The question of justification is philosophically and educationally vital here since we understand the morality of judgment and action to be conceptually linked to the justification of beliefs and conduct in distinctly moral terms. I want to argue here that morality — understood in normative rather than simply descriptive terms — is inescapably and at its core an epistemic enterprise. Minimally, to normatively claim that an action is morally justified is to claim it is the morally right thing to do in virtue of its permissible, obligatory or altruistic character given the circumstances. And to claim moral rightness is to claim that one is justified in making that claim. Hence, to fail to justify the second-order principles and norms appealed to within the justification of first-order beliefs and judgments is to fail to satisfy an essential requirement of both morality and its respectful transmission to others within educational contexts.