Felmon Davis

The article addresses the question of the respect owed to believers and their faiths and states that a demand for respect for the person of the believer does not imply a demand for respect for their faith. However, being 'respect' a complex and ambiguous notion, the article studies some arguments that go in the direction of justifying the move from respect for persons to respect for their beliefs. According to Habermas, there is a respect citizens of a democracy owe each other that requires taking each other's opinions seriously, including their religiously motivated opinions. What is more, Habermas claims that we all have something to learn from each other. The articles argues against this line of thought and states there is no obligation to respect anything about people's moral claims except their right to make them. The article argues against Habermas's approach by showing its epistemological and ontological inconsistency and concludes that respect for persons as moral reason-givers or as fellow-citizens does not lead to any substantial respect for the contents of their claims.

A "practical discourse" is a collective deliberation organized in such a way as to guarantee optimally unrestrained exchange of arguments; the result should be a decision, e.g. acceptance of a collectively binding norm of action, expressing a rational consensus. Juergen Habermas argues that the choice of entering a "practical discourse" in order to resolve conflict is not arbitrary but is rather "rationally motivated"; speakers of any language whatsoever "unavoidably" share certain normatively binding presuppositions, amongst which is that they expect of one another that they will enter "discourse". ;The present essay is an attempt to test the grounds for the claim that general conditions of communication make "discourse" "unavoidable". It excavates arguments that Habermas rather suggests than explicitly presents, and attempts to give them clear form suitable for critical evaluation. There seem to be about three arguments for his claim: from the nature of "speaking subjects"; from the general conditions of "communicative action"; from the alleged promissory force of illocutions of everyday language. ;Critical evaluation shows that these arguments are insufficient to establish the "thesis of unavoidability". The thesis itself is fatally ambiguous ; the arguments often beg the question. Habermas also fails to distinguish between the project of describing language-use and the project of justifying its rationality for, granting that we had the reciprocal expectations of which he speaks, further argumentation would be required to show that we were rational, let alone moral, for having such expectations. ;Finally, it is determined that Habermas' theory of "communicative action" is itself inconsistent with the project of grounding an obligation to "discourse" in the conditions of "communicative action". According to the latter, obligations must be justified in "discourses"; thus, no argument showing speakers share normative expectations would ipso facto show those expectations are obligatory of "normatively valid"