Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
Abstract
As Axel Honneth has recently noted, the critical concerns of social philosophers during the past three decades have been focused primarily on questions of justice, with ethical issues about the human good being largely excluded. In the first section I briefly explore this exclusion in both ‘Anglo-American’ political philosophy and ‘German’ critical theory. I then argue, in the main sections, that despite this commitment to their exclusion, distinctively ethical concepts and ideals can be identified both in Rawls’s Theory of Justice and in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, taking these as exemplary, representative texts for each theoretical school. These ethical elements, and their implications for the critical evaluation of economic institutions, have gone largely unnoticed. In the final section I indicate the kinds of debates that might be generated, were these to be given the attention they arguably deserve. I focus especially on the significance of empirical issues, and hence on the role of social science in social criticism.
© 2008 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
