Jari Niemi

While positivism as a theory of rationality is considered---at least among professional philosophers---to be moribund, if not dead, no unified theory of reason has emerged in its place. Reactions to this lacuna have generated three distinct responses. First, there are those content with this state of affairs who argue both for the impossibility and the undesirability of a universal, ahistorical theory of reason. Reason cannot have, and does not need, theoretical, systematic underpinnings because of its necessary situatedness in history and sociocultural forms of life. Also, the very pursuit of a universal conception is undesirable due to its potentially repressive effects. Second, the legacy of positivism has inspired a resurgence of instrumentalist theories. Such theories continue the positivistic inspiration by relegating certain aspects of practical reason to the domain of irrationality. In light of this, instrumentalism has turned its attention to expanding and refining itself. Third, those dissatisfied with the vacancy left after positivism contend not only for the possibility of a unified theory of reason but also for its desirability. They accept the sociocultural critique of reason but argue nevertheless that such acceptance does not signal the end of reason. ;I would like to defend this last position by explicating and evaluating Jurgen Habermas's linguistically grounded theory of communicative rationality. I regard Habermas's theory to be one of the most sophisticated attempts at articulating a postpositivistic, postmetaphysical concept of reason that both avoids instrumentalism as well as the unnecessary undertheorization so prevalent in many postmodernist writings. If my defense is successful, the theory opens up crucial dimensions of reason that restore the cognitive nature of politics and morality. This is accomplished by reconstructing the universal, pretheoretical conditions necessary for knowledge and action. The redemption of the theory, then, would negate the need to consign moral and political questions into the realm of subjective preferences. This, in turn, would at least give us hope for attaining a rational consensus concerning the practical control of our ends

In this paper I pursue a possibility that some versions of arguments addressed against the libertarian notion of self-ownership have some definitive implications regarding the equalisandum debate carried out by egalitarians. I have in mind specifically the kind of approach that challenges self-ownership as a morally fundamental value through some inventive counterexamples. So, while I shall argue that the negative arguments against self-ownership are conclusive, my primary attempt is to demonstrate that such arguments can be employed to say something interesting about the equalisandum debate itself; namely, that resources cannot function as the desirable equalisandum, and that there are some reasons for preferring capabilities over welfare as the desired currency for egalitarianism.

At the heart of Jürgen Habermas's explication of communicative rationality is the contention that all speech acts oriented to understanding raise three different kinds of validity claims simultaneously: claims to truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness. This paper argues that Habermas presents exactly three distinct, logically independent arguments for his simultaneity thesis: an argument from structure; an argument from criticizability/rejectability; and an argument from understanding/reaching understanding. It is further maintained that the simultaneity thesis receives cogent support only from the Argument from understanding/reaching understanding, and only if the notion of 'understanding' is expanded to that of 'agreement'.

In this paper I pursue a possibility that some versions of arguments addressed against the libertarian notion of self-ownership have some definitive implications regarding the equalisandum debate carried out by egalitarians. I have in mind specifically the kind of approach that challenges self-ownership as a morally fundamental value through some inventive counterexamples. So, while I shall argue that the negative arguments against self-ownership are conclusive, my primary attempt is to demonstrate that such arguments can be employed to say something interesting about the equalisandum debate itself; namely, that resources cannot function as the desirable equalisandum, and that there are some reasons for preferring capabilities over welfare as the desired currency for egalitarianism.