Quoted: "Situating the Self" by Seyla Benhabib

Chapter 2. Autonomy, Modernity and Community
Communitarianism and Critical Social Theory in Dialogue

The Critique of the "Unencumbered" Self
and the Priority of the Right over the Good

"The intersubjective constitution of the self and the evolution of self-identity through the communicative interaction with others has been a key insight of Habermas's work since his early essay ... ... Habermas often formulates this insight concerning the intersubjective constitution of self-identity in the language of George Herbert Mead. The "I" becomes an "I" only among "we," in a community of speech and action. Individuation does not precede association; rather it is the kinds of associations which we inhabit that define the kind of individuals we will become." (p.71)

"Whereas Rawls distinguishes between justice as the basic virtue of a social system and the domain of moral theory at large in which a full theory of the good is at work, Habermas is committed to the stronger claim that after the transition to modernity and the destruction of the teleological world-view, moral theory in fact can only be deontological and must focus on questions of justice. Following Kohlberg, he insists that this is not merely a historically contingent evolution, but that "judgments of justice" do indeed constitute the hard core of all moral judgments. Habermas writes: "Such an ethic ... stylises questions of the good life, and of the good life together into questions of justice, in order to render practical questions accessible to cognitive processing by way of this abstraction." It is not that deontology describes a kind of moral theory juxtaposed to a teleological one; for Habermas, deontological judgments about justice and rights claims define the moral domain insofar as we can say anything cognitively meaningful about these phenomena. (p.72)