Dialogic Foundations 291this argument immediately addresses the issue of any plurality of goods in society.
He is content to indicate that as long as the basic processes of open communication
are followed, he is satisfied. Different cultures and historical societies will construct
their own substantive structures, but the procedural conditions in which they do
actually construct, will universalize (not contextualize) the content. Rules implicit
within communication and argumentation will act as procedural constraints on all
such discourse. However, Habermas believes that these rules do not violate historical
communities or cultures.
The above argument also accounts for his general response to John Rawls’ work.
He envisages his own communicative theory in relation to Rawls as a ‘familial’
dispute within the broad church of neo-Kantianism—although in his own case a neo-
Kantianism modified by Hegelianism. Both want to ‘preserve the intuition underlying
the Kantian universalization principle’ (Habermas 1995: 117). He sees Rawls as com-
mitted, correctly, to rejecting radical conventionalism, value scepticism, and moral
systems such as utilitarianism. Rawls is also committed to an implicitly intersubjective
perspective. Habermas therefore comments that he ‘admires’ Rawls’s basic project,
‘shares its intentions’ and regards ‘its essential results as correct’ (Habermas 1995,
110). Both theorists are responding, in their own ways, to the problems of pluralism,
contextualism, and universalism. The difference between Habermas and Rawls hangs
upon the way the procedural impartiality and universalization are achieved. In Rawls,
contextualism and pluralism are defined out through artificial devices such as the
‘veil of ignorance’. However, Habermas sees impartiality arising from the ‘inner work-
ings’ of communication and discourse. As he comments, ‘Rawls imposes a common
perspective on the parties in the original position through information constraints
and thereby neutralizes the multiplicity of particular interpretive perspectives from
the outset. Discourse ethics, by contrast, views the moral point of view as embod-
ied in an intersubjective practice of argumentation which enjoins those involved to
an idealizingenlargementof their interpretive perspectives’ (Habermas 1995: 117).
Participants in such a discourse can critically assess and reassess, for themselves, their
moral intuitions. He notes, therefore:
In my view, the moral point of view is already implicit in the socio-ontological constitution of
the public practice of argumentation, comprising the complex relations of mutual recognition
that participants in rational discourse ‘must’ accept (in the sense of weak transcendental neces-
sity). Rawls believes that a theory of justice developed in such exclusively procedural terms
could not be ‘sufficiently structured’. (Habermas 1995: 127)^22
One additional feature of Habermas’ communicative theory here—which blends
with his belief that a new knowledge-based constellation may well be arising—is that
he clearly believes that his own theory may well be part of (what he refers to as) an
empirically-based social evolutionary process. There is strong hint of philosophical
hubris here. He further contends that there may well be some empirical evidence
to support his philosophically-based arguments. He thus enlists, for example, the
work of Kohlberg on moral development to underpin his view of universal pragmat-
ics and discourse ethics (see Habermas 1979: 69–94). Communicative competence is