An Eclectic Subject 5interactive discourse consists of the type of elucidation and argumentation in which
we suspend immediate action and in which participants, as Habermas puts it, seek to
redeem the validity of claims that have been challenged. Habermas wants essentially to
redeem the universalistic conditions of possible understanding. Thus, implicit within
the pluralism of forms of communication we can detect a general but stubborn claim
to reason that points to the possibility of the argumentative emancipation through
mutual dialogue. There is, in other words, an immanent universal and foundational
telos in our communicative actions that is orientated to mutual understanding. It
transcends all systematically-distorting communication. It can potentially therefore
orientate our collective political practices.
In a slightly different but resonant enterprise—which still focuses on the theme of
foundational immanence—Alan Gewirth advances an ethical (and political) system as
a body of hierarchically-structured descriptive and prescriptive claims, each logically
dependent on one another. For Gewirth, ‘the most important and difficult prob-
lem of philosophical ethics is whether a substantial moral principle can be justified’.
The novelty of Gewirth’s justification is the attempt to derive, logically, normative
principles from what isimmanentin the concept of human action. The main thesis
is, therefore, ‘that every agent, by the fact of engaging in action, is logically com-
mitted to the acceptance of certain evaluative and deontic judgments and ultimately
of a supreme moral principle’. This is ‘The Principle of Generic Consistency, which
requires that he respect his recipients’ necessary conditions of action’. To prove the
thesis, Gewirth maintains that ‘the very possibility of rational interpersonal action
depends upon adherence to the morality that is grounded in this principle. Because
every agent must accept the principle, on pain of self-contradiction, it has a stringent
rational justification that is at the same time practical because its required locus is
the context of action’ (Gewirth 1978: ix–x). Every agent, when acting in the world,
is consequently committed to a determinate normative content. Action, to Gewirth,
has two categorical features—voluntariness and purposiveness. Forced choices are
notactions. The agent necessarily regards his purpose as good, in order to act on
it, even in the most minimal sense, and hence there is an implicit value judgement.
Thus, ‘one cannot refrain...from action except voluntarily or purposively’ (Gewirth
1978: 90–1). Therefore, for action to be action it must be bothpurposiveandvolun-
tary. Action for a purpose is trying to realize agoodor end that constitutes areason
for acting. Thus, ‘action as the voluntary pursuit of purposes commits the agent to
accept certain normative judgments on pain of self-contradiction’. This entails, for
Gewirth, that the ‘very possibility of purposive action is dependent on its having
a certain normative structure. And it is from the judgments that are necessarily con-
stitutive of this structure that the supreme principle of morality is logically derived’
(Gewirth 1978: 48). The upshot of Gewirth’s scheme is that one finds immanent uni-
versal foundational justificatory grounds for moral (and political) principles implicit
within all human action.
Neither Habermas nor Gewirth would describe their arguments as metaphys-
ical or overtly foundationalist. In fact, they would probably be worried by such
an assessment. However, in my reading, this is simply because they focus on the