In his recent work, Jürgen Habermas signals the abandonment of his earlier claims to justify human rights and universalist morality. This paper explains the above shift, arguing that it is the inescapable result of his attempts in recent years to accommodate pluralism. The paper demonstrates how Habermas’s universal pragmatic justification of modern normative standards was inextricably tied to his consensus theory of validity. He was compelled by the structure of that argument to count on the current or future availability of (...) a unified framework within which all can potentially articulate their needs and interests. With his abandonment of the justification Habermas has rid discourse theory of this controversial assumption. In weakening its defense of human rights and universalist morality against the charge of ethnocentrism, he has strengthened his theory’s foothold in the lived pluralist world. Key Words: argumentation • ethnocentrism • Habermas • human rights • justification • legitimacy • pluralism • rational consensus • Rehg. (shrink)

Although stability is a central notion in several academic disciplines, the parallelsremain unexplored since previous discussions of the concept have been almostexclusively subject-specific. In the literature we have found three basic conceptsof stability, that we call constancy, robustness, and resilience. They are all foundin both the natural and the social sciences. To analyze the three concepts we introducea general formal framework in which stability relates to transitions between states. Itcan then be shown that robustness is a limiting case of resilience, (...) whereas neitherconstancy nor resilience can be defined in terms of the other. Hence, there are twobasic concepts of stability, both of which are used in both the social and the naturalsciences. This congruence in the concepts of stability is of particular interest forendeavours to construct models that represent both natural and social phenomena. (shrink)