The Challenge of ‘Most Reasonable for Us’

Abstract

How can we purge from a liberal polity’s regnant conception of rightness or fitness in politics all traces of ‘modern universalism’ (natural law), while still maintaining a liberal commitment to government by consent among free and equal persons? Joining with Alessandro Ferrara in pursuit of that question, this chapter by Michelman draws heavily from Michelman’s 1999 commentary on work of Jürgen Habermas, where Habermas (by Michelman’s reading) showed how an experience of the universal and unconditional bindingness of a certain set of reasons for action can be salvaged from the effect of a philosophical ‘linguistic turn’, according to which a people’s morality is a particular product of its language broadly understood. Michelman reads Habermas to show how a people can share a wholly valid experience of the unconditionally obligatory in social relations, through a moral conception that is nevertheless language dependent and so not necessarily accessible from within every human form of life.