The view from everywhere 2

[This post is excerpted and slightly amended from a review I wrote a few years ago of The Transformation of Political Community by Andrew Linklater. It follows on from this one in setting out at greater length the argument I made two days ago here. My discussion of The Transformation of Political Community first appeared in the Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, January 1999.]

I here attempt a resolution of the question I have said Andrew Linklater fails to resolve. I explore four possible bases, on the terrain as he maps it, of a thin universality. Two of these bases he himself seemingly allows us, one he forbids us, and one he perhaps ambiguously allows us. This last, I will contend, is the best of the four, but it leads back from discourse ethics - taken strictly not loosely, as earlier explained - back, not to Kant exactly but, in the way I shall argue for it, to a semi-rationalist rather than proceduralist universalism and in that limited sense one defensive of Kant.

First, Linklater might be wanting to suggest that the thin universality that supports discourse ethics just comes, in Rortian spirit, from 'where we are'. It comes, in other words, from trends in our culture and, as it happens, in some other cultures. This is what he sometimes appears to say (100, 101, 102-3). But it is no good; it is just a way of speaking. It is no good because where we are is never only one place. As well as thin universality, from where we are I can get also obscene polarities of wealth and social marginalization or destitution; or I can get that the relatively affluent and contented of the world look on more or less inactively at the most appalling hardships and tragedies for much of the rest of its population; I can get residual and not so residual strands of racism and other poisonous social forms. And this is certainly not what Linklater means by 'where we are'. What he means is something like 'where we have good reasons for being'. Hence his usages in this connection: 'one of the most advanced moral themes', 'spurious reasons for the exclusion of outsiders', 'more advanced moral codes', 'the highest normative ideal' (90, 104, 123, 176). He plainly means something along these lines, too, because taking into a dialogue with others a bare where-we-are, to be met with an equally bare where-they-are, isn't going to make for much of a dialogue when one is looking, as Linklater indicates we should be, for 'the force of the better argument' (92, 97, 99).

Therefore, second, let us take seriously the possibility that Linklater means the procedure itself, the dialogic outcome, to be authoritative. But this leads straight to a contradiction. For if outcomes are truly open, then we could get outcomes in which some people are henceforth permanently excluded from the discussion, irrespective of whether it affects their interests or not, and it goes against the whole tenor of Linklater's book that he could accept that: that, let us say, the blind, or the Belgians, might no longer be permitted to take part. One could just hope here against such outcomes and for thin universalist ones, as being the only kind that are to be recognized as fully valid. But then it is clear the validity comes from somewhere else than the unalloyed procedure, since this only confers its moral stamp on what we (universalists) already favour.

There are further problems. For example, the procedure's social and economic preconditions, needed for it to be an adequate one, a dialogue on equal terms - are these judged outside the dialogue in order to legitimate it, or only within the dialogue by the discussants themselves? In the first case, the procedure is, again, not self-validating and comprehensively authoritative; in the second case it is, but uselessly so from a thin universalist point of view, since it can validate conditions of enslavement in a discourse that is not - as it is required to be - 'domination-free' (220). Moreover, when Linklater contrasts to its disadvantage a Kantian-style test of universality through individual reason with a Habermasian one based on open dialogue (91-2), the distinction is overdrawn. Granted, there is no individual reason without social identity and social interaction, no sound private judgement without benefit of a broader interpersonal, and at bottom long historical, dialectic. In any given dialogic process, however, since I do not know its outcome for certain when I make my own contribution to it, I cannot, in deciding how to try and influence the outcome, take this outcome as already-authoritative for me. What else could I rely on here but my personal powers of judgement? Why indeed regard a dialogic outcome as carrying any authority if the individual judgements composing it have no authority of their own?

Are we thrown back then, third, upon an Archimedean moral standpoint? No, we are not. Linklater is right that this is unavailable to us. It is unavailable, as I see it, for at least two reasons. One is that when it comes to fully elaborated conceptions of the good, in all their detail and specificity, all their thickness, there is indeed a rich plurality of them. The other is that within this plurality of conceptions of the good there is an ineradicably subjective component, in that the axiomatic values at the heart of each one, and their inter-relationship there, their ordering, are not matters of objective confirmation, of demonstration or proof; they are matters of a variable choice. So there can be no singular, much less any absolute, certainties in this domain.

We are driven back, consequently, on what Linklater may sometimes speak as though he thinks to reject, but which I believe the logic of his own case compels him to retain and which is there in his text, if only ambiguously, whenever he makes appeal to the thin universalist presuppositions of discourse ethics itself. We are driven back on the resources of reason, plain universal human reason, that faculty which socialized members of our species share even across the cultures which differentiate them. It is a faculty which never operates unencumbered, pure or simple. It operates always within a body of belief, a set of cultural assumptions, distinctions, blockages and so forth. Nevertheless, this no more rules out all common content to it, across cultures, than does the fact of wide social and cultural difference more generally tell against the existence of some shared human traits: some common needs, capacities and values. The very idea, in fact, of discursive engagement, of communication communities reaching across the division lines of culture and moral outlook, presupposes at least a rough inter-translatability between the considerations and arguments, the logics of persuasion and contestation, to be exchanged.

I repeat, this does not mean the possibility of reasoning towards a single, definite moral truth. However, it does mean the possibility of reasoning together on the basis of shared human experiences and of certain shared values within these, whether having to do with mortality, illness, grief, pain or other suffering, with well-being, love, dignity, integrity or flourishing. There is not a view from nowhere. But there is, speaking broadly, a view from everywhere. There is a view we can argue for in any language, and by laying out reasons and values that can be made sensible in the terms of other cultures as well as in those of our own. This is the basis, the best that we have, for a thin universality, and it is worth more than an open-ended procedure that could conclude against it. And this, to be as clear as can be on the point, is not a matter of claiming intellectual certainty by the back door. It is - thin universality - just a moderately persuasive hypothesis on the historical evidence we have, when conjoined with certain values to which very large numbers of our species have shown themselves to be attached one way and another.