This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. (...) He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. (shrink)

An account of the emergence and disintegration of.

This is Jürgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

Post-Normal Science as a theory links epistemology and governance. It not only focuses on problem situations where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent, but also tries to develop epistemic approaches that allow for sound scientific answers. The following article addresses major epistemological challenges within a typical ‘‘wicked-problem situation’’, i.e., risk assessment of emerging technologies. Such challenges include epistemological problems intrinsic to the task of proving the absence of risk, problems related to the multi-sited production of (...) evidence and the multitude of epistemic cultures involved, the incompatibility of the various implicit objectives and the complex actor-constellations, that shape not only the way scientific knowledge is translated into action, but also which kind of knowledge is produced and which experts are listened to. To illustrate and discuss these characteristics, the article draws on an empirical study of risk research in the fields of agri-biotechnology and telecommunication technology in Germany. It concludes that although some aspects of PNS are already part of current epistemic practices in these fields, a state of ‘‘functional post-normality’’ depends upon a meaningful co-evolution between post-normal science and post-normal governance that has not yet been achieved. (shrink)