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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 431 and continuity over time. But because they are deprived of the opportunity to engage actively in the project of determining the general content and particular form of the principles of justice that fix the basic structure of their society, the validity of those principles must remain in question. 4.3. The Moral Point of View Habermas's most serious criticism is that this lack, in turn, deprives the citizens of the well-ordered society of a genuinely moral point of view, in which everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else and thus to project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended ‘we-perspective' from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice (RT 58; cf. also 68, 81-82) [.] Habermas's conception of the moral point of view thus requires a version of Mead's ideal role-taking,11 in which we enlarge our perspectives beyond the personal, by successively assuming the personal perspectives of all other participants and incorporating them into our own. The ideal end-point of this process is a "universally valid view of the world," in which "what from my point of view is equally good for all [would] actually be in the equal interest of each individual" (RT 57). But the process as Habermas and Mead conceive it require a degree of imagination and insight into the inner lives of others that can come only from extensive experience of and intensive informationgathering about different kinds of people and cultures. Thus it is strongly conditioned by the empirical experience of walking in another's shoes: living in another culture, for example, or visiting a different political milieu, or taking a job outside one's class and education status, or inhabiting for an extended period of time a different social environment, or fraternizing with friends from other subcultures. There is no question that concerted use of the imagination, combined with sensitivity to others' attitudes, curiosity about their origins, and a consequent openness to their contributions to serious discussion can have the similarly salutary effect of opening one's eyes, deepening one's insight into otherness, and raising one's awareness of the subjectivity of the personal values and attitudes with which one began. However, Habermas's optimistic assumption that this process will engender a perspective from which the successive perspectives one has assumed can be unified in a universally valid "we-perspective" holds only in cases in which the perspectives in question are not in fact structurally irreconcilable. See George Herbert Mead, "Fragments on Ethics," in Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 379 ff. 11 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
