SOLIDARITY AND MORAL COMMUNITY
Karl Hostetler
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Habermas, Rorty, and Gadamer all stress the importance of solidarity
as a feature of a moral community. Each recognizes the same basic
distinction between moral solidarites that demand our allegiance.
On the one hand, there is solidarity as a restricted
“we-consciousness”;
on the other, solidarity of a wider sort, ultimately encompassing
all human beings. Prominent in these writers’ work is a common
concern to address the moral tensions these allegiances involve.
The tensions become visible when we consider the task of fostering solidarity and moral community among students in schools. In particular, what might solidarity mean for students who have little or no clear experience of broader solidarity and its benefits, who consistently experience injustice in our schools and society? What connects them in solidarity with those who treat them unjustly? Does morality demand that students look beyond that injustice to seek a basis for solidarity with their oppressors? For these students, is solidarity even relevant as an idea that should guide their moral lives? If it is relevant, perhaps it makes more sense as a guide for their relationships with people who share their conception of a worthwhile life and support its pursuit, as opposed to those people who would seem to hinder their pursuit of a good life. On the other hand, how clear is it that such parochialism is morally acceptable?
Habermas, Rorty, and Gadamer each have significant and importantly different suggestions regarding such tensions, and this paper aims to consider what some of these suggestions are. In a short paper it is impossible to do justice to all the intricacies of these writers’ views. Even so, it may be possible to identify themes basic to each writer’s account of solidarity and moral community; at least, that is what this paper attempts. I’ll suggest that the differences among these writers revolve centrally (though not exclusively) around the issue of the extent and form of consensus that is required for a moral point of view. I’ll argue that Gadamer comes out on top here, that he appears to offer the best response to the problem of injustice posed above and to the project of enlarging solidarity in general. A major implication is that ethnocentrism must be the basis from which broader solidarities are created.
For Habermas, solidarity is necessary for an autonomous morality as the “reverse side” of justice.1 Solidarity expresses concern for the integrity of the shared life context, which includes concern for the particular human community to which one happens to belong. Habermas considers this latter “we-consciousness” important for several reasons.2
Even so, he contends that in an autonomous morality solidarity is transformed so that it loses its “merely particular meaning.”3 Morally valid norms are those “which could find acceptance by all those concerned as participants in a practical discourse.”4 To be able to recognize those interests that could be accepted by all, people must be impartial. Impartiality “constrains all affected to adopt the perspectives of all others in the balancing of interests.”5 Ultimately, morally relevant solidarities extend to “all subjects capable of speech and action.”6 Final moral authority rests with this broad human community, not the local one.
So, for our case, Habermas would appear to suggest that morality requires students to seek solidarity with affected persons outside their particular community, which would seem to include those who oppress them. As will be suggested below, there may be reasons for students to take their oppressors’ perspective. It is difficult to see, though, how this is a requirement of morality in this case. It’s been charged that Habermas’s discourse ethics presumes a discourse where participants “never experience hatred or animosity, only polite differences of opinion.”7 It is unclear how well Habermas’s discourse ethics serves the moral interests of students who suffer from injustice. Certainly, everyone has an interest in free and equal dialogue. Gadamer and Rorty concur with Habermas in that. But what does morality require of students when conditions of freedom and equality do not exist for them?
Habermas is sensitive to this problem of course, and he does not claim that morality demands consensus with oppressors on their conception of human good. He does insist, though, that morality demands fair procedures for debating questions of human good, and even if morality does not require students to ignore their particular interests, it does demand that they consider their interests at a level of greater generality and aim for consensus at that level.
While such distancing from particular interests may be a reasonable course of action at times, it is difficult to see how morally it must be more reasonable than a decision to simply abjure the search for consensus with one’s oppressors. Habermas attempts to undermine the reasonableness of that latter course by appealing to universal presuppositions of communicative action. On pain of being caught in a “performative contradiction,” any person who engages in a process of reaching understanding with others must recognize conditions of freedom and reciprocity that are presupposed in that process. And any long-term attempt to avoid communicative action is self-destructive.8
The weight of these claims depends on Habermas being right about the universal presuppositions of communicative action; it is not clear that he is.9 Even if he is right, and even though freedom and reciprocity are morally desirable, why must these principles be morally decisive for students in a situation where these principles are not operative for other affected persons? Habermas himself suggests that choosing against communicative action may be possible in individual cases.10 However, he could also argue that such a choice puts one outside the realm of moral action, or at least outside the realm of morally enlightened action. But why must that be the conclusion?
In sum, Habermas can be questioned on two counts: first, on the ability of his moral theory to offer considerations that could be recognized by students as reasons for enlarging solidarity;11 and second, on the usefulness of universal consensus as the test of moral validity. Rorty has similar doubts about Habermas, but there are problems with his views, too.
Rorty characterizes each side of the tension of narrow and broad solidarities as concerned with a different legitimate question: “Do you believe and desire what we believe and desire?” and “Are you suffering?”12 In his attention to the latter question, Rorty shares Habermas’s concern about the dangers of parochialism. Nevertheless, Rorty urges us to do more to acknowledge the place of “we-consciousness”. “Our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as `one of us,’ where `us’ means something smaller and more local than the human race.”13 Furthermore, these local solidarities are sources of real moral obligations. That the norms of local communities might not be acceptable to all other persons or communities that are affected does not entail that those norms are ethically invalid.
Basically, Rorty’s response to the problems noted in Habermas’s views is to urge us to recognize limitations to the need for consensus. Habermas errs by attempting to synthesize the realms of our public lives. He contends that solidarity in terms of universal consensus is always relevant to determination of the moral quality of actions and norms, and in that sense encompasses all other narrower, morally legitimate, solidarities. Rorty resists such a synthesis, suggesting that while we have an obligation to humanity to try to recognize suffering and alleviate it, our obligation need not extend much beyond that. Having met that obligation, we should be free to pursue whatever private or parochial interests we have that do not infringe on our obligation to humanity. The sort of separation Rorty posits for private and public realms would seem to hold for narrower and broader realms within the public domain. Our redescriptions of other persons or groups is none of their business so long as these are not relevant to our actions in the broader public realm.14 “Humanity” has no place in approving or disapproving our actions that do not pertain to the universal interest of alleviating human suffering.
There are problems with Rorty’s account. First, while Rorty’s appeal to human suffering as the ground for extending solidarity might hold more promise than Habermas’s appeal to universal conditions of communicative action, it still is problematic. Even if we grant that a common interest in avoiding suffering can be identified, what sort of ground does this provide? It is one thing to expect that students try to identify with the suffering of distant others who are oppressed. But why should students be expected to identify with the suffering of those who do the oppressing? Now Rorty does say that people cannot be socially irresponsible to communities of which they don’t consider themselves members.15 Thus it would seem that students need not identify with the suffering of oppressors. But this raises a problem from the other direction: Is there then nothing that links these people in solidarity?
I do not contend that no other avenue for connection is available to Rorty. However, I do want to explore an important sense in which solidarity is not an aim for him. As noted above, Rorty wishes to maintain a separation between narrow and broad solidarities. On Rorty’s view, it seems that students need not get any encouragement to seek consensus with their oppressors on issues that pertain only to the particular interests of the classroom community. A basic interest of a student group such as the one we are considering is self-creation, and self-creation is a matter of poetry, irony, and metaphor, of considering alternative vocabularies that would permit them to redescribe themselves and their situation in worthwhile ways. This private self-creation is not a matter of consensus with other groups but of developing their own vocabulary. Contrary to Habermas, the moral validity of this vocabulary is not a matter of universal consensus.
This response to the problem of validity is unsatisfactory. The task of individual and communal self-creation is not merely to create a new self-description but to create one that serves people well. For Rorty, a basic criterion for the acceptability of a self-description is its ability to help us cope with our problems, but this does not go far enough, for there may be a number of such descriptions that enable us to cope, but that does not entail that they all do this equally well. Thus, there is sense in conceiving the task as one of seeking the “right” vocabulary, contra Rorty’s objections to this notion.
On the other hand, at least in places, Rorty would appear to concur in that sense of seeking the right vocabulary. Where he does attack the notion of the “right vocabulary” the principal objects of his attack are particular ways of conceiving rightness and its proper pursuit. At least in the domain of self-creation, consensus is not the proper pursuit, it seems.
This is a problematic claim. While Rorty’s suspicions of Habermas’s synthesis of solidarities in universal consensus are well-taken, so are Habermas’s suspicions about the restricted scope of relevance Rorty allots for consensus.
Like Rorty, Gadamer gives moral primacy to the ethos of particular communities.16 Unlike Rorty, Gadamer does not propose a radical split between domains of consensus. Central to a Gadamerian response to the tension within solidarity is the notion of experience (Erfahrung). Experience, say of a poem, means being drawn into an event. Implied is “an encounter with the work of art itself.”17 Experience requires openness to what the other has to say. Although one can never completely step out of one’s own vocabulary, to simply impose one’s own vocabulary on the experience defeats the point of the encounter. Rorty would perhaps agree with this much,18 but Gadamer’s further claim is that consensus is the measure of genuine understanding here. Rorty disparages this sort of project as motivated by “metaphysics” or a yearning for comfort. He associates Gadamer with “weak textualists” who believe that “each work has its own vocabulary, its own secret code.” They want “all the comforts of consensus,” while the “strong textualist,” in contrast, “has his own vocabulary and doesn’t worry about whether anybody shares it.”19
We have reason to share Rorty’s worry about the conformism suggested in Gadamer’s urge for consensus. However, Gadamer is ambiguous on the matter. At least in some places, he speaks of understanding in terms of a “fusion of horizons.”20 This conception of understanding does not entail consensus as substantive agreement. Understanding the perspective of one’s oppressors does not require that one achieve substantive agreement with them on such things as generalizable interests. Even so, in fusing one’s own horizon with that of others
the view that results is more developed than the one with which one began…. [Participants] are able to see the worth of different considerations, incorporate different examples and defend themselves against different criticisms. In this way they acquire a greater warrant; they are less blind and one-sided and, to this extent, more rational than they previously were.21Thus, solidarity with others’ perspectives is reasonable in light of students’ interests in rationality and education (Bildung).22 This doesn’t mean that that interest will be obvious to students, any more than the other grounds for solidarity we’ve examined. Still, it seems reasonable to suppose that being open to the views of oppressors is important for students’ self-understanding and their task of effectively resisting and overcoming oppression. To that extent, there is a point to solidarity even with the perspectives of one’s enemies.
This is not to say that such solidarity is morally sufficient. On the one hand it is too narrow because it does not account for one’s relationship with enemies as human beings over and above one’s relationship with their opinions. On the other hand, it is too encompassing as a principle of moral self-creation. If we are to think of experiences with differing views as offering guidance for moral self-creation, there is a problem when these encounters occur in an atmosphere of conflict. Only friends can advise each other, Gadamer says, and friendship requires union in seeking what is right.23 While conflict with one’s oppressors might be attributed to divergent beliefs in a common search for moral right, it is not clear that that is always the case. Furthermore, even if we might conclude that there is a genuine common concern for what’s right, it is unclear whether a commonality so abstractly conceived is sufficient or whether there must be more substantive “normative and common solidarities that let practical reason speak again.”24
These points speak to the need for establishing classroom communities where friendship can exist, where there are common normative solidarities, even if these solidarities must be restricted in order to accomplish that. This is not to say that friendship can only exist in such communities, nor that friendship will exist there. But if educators are to meet students where they are, and if normative solidarities are needed if practical problems are to be intelligible and dealt with rationally,25 that sort of “we-consciousness” must be the aim.
Habermas objects that this yields up morality to irrationalism. If morality is based in the ethos of particular communities, justification can only be circular. Without an objective basis, moral discourse can never get off the ground, for reflection, such as it might be, would then be based on community-specific norms whose legitimacy must always be doubted.
Gadamer contends that conventional morality can be transcended, even though ethos is primary. Conventional morality reigns where norms cannot be justified, which is the case when solidarity has broken down. When norms are rooted in a sense of community, there is a concomitant sense of common good. And then judgment of right and wrong can be expected of people; they can be expected to justify their actions. This awareness of the common good, the “common sense” provided by tradition, and the dialectic of theory and practice in practical reason provide the grounds whereby conventional morality can be transcended.26 Of course, this presupposes that critical reflection is an integral part of the ethos. Such reflection is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment from which we have no route back.27
In light of Habermas’s claim that moral validity requires universality, this response is inadequate. We should question that requirement, though. Perhaps the point of seeking universal consensus is not to establish the validity of norms but to test the universalizability of norms whose validity is first established at the local level.28 Certain norms may serve student communities quite well, say in the moral task of helping them preserve their human dignity through resistance to oppression, even if we would also insist that such norms are not generalizable to other contexts and that it is important that these communities come to realize that. The point of fusing with horizons that differ is not necessarily to question the validity of such a norm but to determine whether its validity is more general. Of course, in these encounters communities should be prepared to revise their claims that certain norms are valid. Some of their notions may be wrong. Nevertheless, we are not compelled to question a norm’s moral validity just because it cannot pass the universalizability test.
Rorty is right when he says that “[w]e have to start from where we are.”29 The creation of broader solidarities, for victims of injustice and students generally, needs to begin from a normative “we-consciousness.”30 Considered from that perspective, recent calls for Afro-centric schools and curricula can be supported. But so can Euro-centric schools and curricula, and so can solidarities that cut across ethnic or racial lines. There may be reasons for prefering certain solidarities over others, but in any event students must first solidify some conception of their moral lives made intelligible and post-conventional in its placement in a tradition of reflective inquiry into questions of moral life. The intelligibility of moral life and solidarity must be established if we are to expect students to see the point of expanding that solidarity and bringing others into their moral world. That intelligibility is not established by appeal to some ready-made universal standpoint of humanity.
So, Habermas does not provide educators with the means to take the curse off ethnocentrism. Unlike Rorty’s liberals, though, neither can educators take the curse off by appeal to the contingent fact that their classrooms or schools constitute liberal communities or are embedded in liberal communities. We cannot assume that classroom communities share the liberal community’s distrust of ethnocentrism because some such communities have not participated in, or benefited from, a liberal polity and have found whatever fulfillment they have enjoyed from their ethnocentric community. It is not ethnocentrism they distrust, but the value of “enlarging” themselves.
Why, then, is it reasonable for these and other communities to embark on the creation of broader solidarities? Any answer to that question is context-dependent. The context-dependence does not make commitment to the task irrational, though it does make the legitimate reasons to which one might appeal necessarily plural. However, we should not overestimate the context-dependence in the way that Rorty does in his claims about socio-historical contingencies. Gadamer suggests that all students have an interest in rationality and education that prompts contacts outside the local community. Our judgment of the value of this education is not a mere cultural artifact but stems from the progress in reason that emerges through such an education.31
We must be aware, too, though, that this education is not an absolute good. Reflection can destroy ethical knowledge.32 Gadamer’s suggestions about education do not rid us of concern for this tension, but perhaps he helps us by making us aware of it and by showing that moral education need not question the moral knowledge of students even if it might prompt us to question its universalizability. Educators need not give up the universal intent of morality, but they do need to respect the moral knowledge of their students and work from it.
For a response to
this essay, see Kohli.
1 Jurgen Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity,” in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 47.
2 See “Justice and Solidarity,” and Jurgen Habermas, “Morality and Ethical Life,” in his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
3 “Justice and Solidarity,” 47.
4 Ibid., 40.
5 Jurgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 65; emphasis in the original.
6 “Justice and Solidarity,” 48.
7 Adi Ophir, “Beyond Good—Evil: A Plea for a Hermeneutic Ethics,” in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, 114.
8 “Discourse Ethics,” 102.
9 See Michael Kelly, “MacIntyre, Habermas, and Philosophical Ethics,” in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, 70-93.
10 “Discourse Ethics,” 102.
11 Of course, Habermas would contest this criticism that his considerations are inadequate as reasons, but could also object that, even if there is an inadequacy here, that is not a criticism of his moral theory, because providing “substantive principles” for particular persons is not its job (see “Discourse Ethics,” 86). This raises the issue of the role of moral theory. I do not claim that moral philosophy can aspire to motivate persons, but as practical philosophy it can and should aim to help people reconstruct and improve the practice of their own ethical lives. To that extent, the ability of a moral theory to offer considerations that can be reasons for people is a criterion of its adequacy.
12 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 198.
13 Ibid., 191.
14 Ibid., 91.
15 Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 197.
16 For a discussion of the primacy of ethos in Gadamer’s moral theory see Ronald Beiner, “Do We Need a Philosophical Ethics? Theory, Prudence, and the Primacy of the Ethos,” The Philosophical Forum 21 (1989): 230-243.
17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 100.
18 Certainly, Rorty counsels being open to alternative vocabularies, but he can be criticized as a “perspectivist” who, in MacIntyre’s words, would “temporarily adopt the standpoint of a tradition and then exchange it for another.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 367. The point is that such dabbling in alternative vocabularies provides an inadequate basis for learning and rational judgment. This criticism would be echoed by Gadamer.
19 Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 152-153.
20 For example, Truth and Method, 306.
21 Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 170.
22 Gadamer does not consider this the sole basis for solidarity. See his “What Is Practice?” in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 85-87. Rorty, too, might appeal to these same interests in rationality and education, but he would dispute that “rationality” and “education,” rather than simply “we,” justify such interests. For a Gadamerian critique of Rorty’s ideas on rationality and Bildung, see Warnke.
23 Truth and Method, 323.
24 Gadamer, “What Is Practice?”, 87.
25 MacIntyre’s argument in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is that they are needed.
26 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 19-34; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), translator’s note, 36.
27 See Michael Kelly, “Gadamer and Philosophical Ethics,” Man and World 21 (1988): 341; and Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 163-164.
28 Michael Kelly, “The Gadamer/Habermas Debate Revisited: The Question of Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 (1988): 374.
29 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 198.
30 To be clear, this is not merely a pedagogical point. Habermas might concur in the need for this sort of beginning given his Kohlbergian ideas about moral development. My contention is that this is not merely a stage toward a morally valid perspective but can itself be a morally valid perspective.
31 Warnke, 166.
32 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 148,167; and Beiner, “Do We Need a Philosophical Ethics?” 237-238.