The Value of Sincerity

Preliminary definitions:

Discourse Theory of Ethics: is the attempt to establish norms of critical judgement for everyday communication

Communicative Action: commitment to a rationalist account of intersubjective agreement. It appropriates the notion of the lifeworld (a collection of unquestioned cultural norms derived from differentiated value spheres, which contain sources of validity claims). It strives for understanding on the basis of non-coercive forms of argumentation.

Habermas has argued that moral theory should clarify the ‘universal core of our moral intuitions’ and ‘refute value scepticism’. Trust is a fundamental value in this kind of model of argumentative exchange, because, in trying to convince my conversation partner of the legitimacy of my arguments, I cannot rely on coercion; rather, I must trust the neutral force of the better argument to function as the ground of my validity. Argumentative competency also derives from my ability to differentiate between diverse modes of thinking, and to apply the proper form of judgement to each domain of thought.

There are three types of validity claim:

Domains of Thought	Classes of Speech Acts	Domains of Focus
Cognitive Interactive Expressive	Constative Regulative Representative	Truth Rightness (justice) Sincerity (taste)

NB: note how ‘truth, rightness, and taste’ correspond to Kant’s division of pure, practical and aesthetic reason.

Though Habermas spends a considerable amount of time discussing how shared propositional knowledge and normative accord are amenable to consensus, he never explains why consensus ought to be the goal of communicative exchange. His account seems to miss out discussion of mutual trust, yet the sincerity derived from mutual trust is a fundamental aspect of our argumentative competency and a condition for intersubjective participation; in other words, when I enter into an exchange, I must be sincere in my beliefs, in my commitment to justification and in my desire for consensus. Moreover, we must be sincere about the ways in which we exercise power, for, as Habermas argues, agreement that is ‘brought about by manipulating one’s partner in interaction…cannot even be considered an agreement’.

Habermas is committed to non-coercive discourse, yet the structural role of sincerity remains unacknowledged as a feature of the ethics of communication. We engage in dialogue in order to reach agreement and because we trust our conversational partner; sincerity guarantees mutual trust. As such, issues of trust (and truth) can erupt in any dialogical encounter, and must be settled by sincerity acting as a guarantee of the validity claim at stake, as well as being an attribute in making any validity claim in the first place.

Performative contradiction can be both positive, as the principle guaranteeing non-coercive communication, and negative, as an indirect corrective for speech participants. The performative contradiction implies a certain ‘moral know-how’ built intot he structure of communication, which asserts its normative status when thinking goes astray. The performative contradiction is thus invoked as a standard of legitimacy, for in order to speak properly and have what one says considered to be valid, one is required to speak as though one is telling the truth oneself in public. Thus the ethical part of communication is the promissory obligation that what I say reflects what I truly think. By not holding anything back, participants satisfy the criterion of sincerity (imposed by the performative contradiction) and thus engage in communicative rather than strategic action.

Nonetheless, can sincerity by prompted by untruthful motivations, such as protecting one’s reputation against the accusation of lies or manipulation? And does this jeopardise the grounds of successful communication? It is striking that Habermas’s model looks surprisingly monological, when viewed from this angle, for, as Davide Panagia argues:

‘Though it is not absolutist in principle, the aesthetic features [performative contradiction] of communicative action make it so that there is only one possible mode of successful communication, namely, argument [rather than conversation]. The alternative is, indeed, contradiction and miscomprehension; an alternative that is, by its very nature, anathema to Habermas’s understanding of communicative action as “the unforced force of the better argument [that] determines the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses of the participants”.’ (835)

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Political Morality

‘Fables about Freedom’

Richard Vernon begins his opening chapter with a short historical analysis of the concepts of liberalism and democracy. He identifies Isaiah Berlin‘s two questions as indicative of the concepts’ dualism:

1) ‘What is the area within which the subject…is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’;

2)’What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’

Adherents of the former question are called theorists of negative freedom. They [liberals] are characterised by: a desire for the ability to act without obstruction; seeking protection against all authorities, including democratic ones; resisting deliberate obstruction by states. The British generally fall under this concept of freedom.

Adherents of the latter question are theorists of positive freedom. They [democrats] are characterised by: a desire for the capacity of a person or group to be self-determining; rejection of the restraints on government which prevent individuals or groups from exercising their self-determining power; pursuing a more metaphysical path. Continental thinkers generally fall under this concept.

But is there really any ‘great logical distance’ (Berlin) between the two concepts? Are they merely semantic devices, around which traits and ideologies have developed?

Benjamin Constant formulated a distinction between the ‘Liberty of the Moderns’ and the ‘Liberty of the Ancients’; he explained their relationship in terms of the supersession of one by the other: ‘the liberty of self-determination, or of “exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty”, was “what the ancients called liberty” – the complete subjection of the individual (“Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in his private relations”). Modern liberty, though, ‘resides in freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of expression, freedom to choose a profession and to dispose of property, freedom of conscience…’ (Vernon)… “Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence” (Constant)

Vernon outlines another perspective, from C.B. Macpherson.

Democracy, in its modern from, proceeded after liberalism, however the pre-existing liberal character of Western societies has so far prevented the full realisation of the democratic ideal: “before democracy came in the Western world, there came the society and the politics of choice, the society and politics of competition, the society and politics of the market” (Macpherson, 1965). Freedom in the liberal sense is forced upon people via the compulsion to adopt market behaviour.

Macpherson recognises that commercial society wanted and needed a certain kind of responsive politics that would head off tyranny and ensure that important interests were taken into account. The achievements of democracy may have been only to provide a maturing capitalist economy with the welfare provisions ad regulatory mechanisms that it needed anyway. Democrats have not, therefore, altered in any fundamental way the exploitative logic of capitalism: until that is accomplished, democratic egalitarian principles will remain unfulfilled.

Self-development [rather than self-determination]: the idea of self-development provides a link between the ideals of democracy and another side of liberalism, a humanistic side which, however, is overshadowed by the dominant market model (Macpherson).