Responsibility Dilemmas
4.2. Two positions of responsibility in ethical discourse discourse
4.2.3. Responsibility as a transcendental-pragmatic categorycategory
At this point I will present the second of the views mentioned in the introduction, i.e. transcendental-pragmatic. This will be done in two steps. First, I will present its fundamental concept of communication community, then I will bring under closer examination the basic assumptions of the transcendental-pragmatic view of moral responsibility.44
4.2.3.1. The concept of communication community
In presenting the tools with which I intend to offer insight into moral responsibility as transcendental-pragmatic, I will refer to Jürgen Habermas.45 Key in his project is the distinction between the legitimation crisis and motivation crisis of an individual to act within an institution.46 The this distinction illustrates two problems, the first concerning the legitimacy of expert actions on the social plane (legitimation crisis), and the second focuses on the concept of an individual’s self-awareness as a member of society or an institution (the individual’s motivation crisis).
43 Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth. Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also: Barankiewicz, W poszukiwaniu modelu standardów etycznych w administracji publicznej w Polsce, pp. 104–106.
44 More on this subject in Kaczmarek, Tożsamość prawnika, chapter IV.
45 Jürgen Habermas, Teoria działania komunikacyjnego, vol. 2. Przyczynek do krytyki rozumu funkcjonalnego, trans. A.M. Kaniowski, trans. revised by M.J. Siemek (Warszawa: PWN, 2002).
46 Karina Stasiuk, Krytyka kultury jako krytyka komunikacji. Pomiędzy działaniem komunikacyjnym, dyskursem a kulturą masową (Wrocław: Uniwersytet Wrocławski, 2003), pp. 76–79; Andrzej M.
Kaniowski, “ ‘Postawa krytyczna’ a etyka. Problem uniwersalizacji,” in Racjonalność współczesności.
Między filozofią a socjologią, eds. Helena Kozakiewicz, Edmund Mokrzycki, Marek J. Siemek (Warszawa:
PWN, 1992), pp. 71 et seq.
In response to these two problems, Habermas outlines the concept of an ideal communication community, whose rules of action are to be recognised and understood by society. This recognition is to be the factor raising trust in law.47 For this reason, as the German social philosopher stresses, law should be, at least to some extent, understandable to the addressee. Meeting this ethical postulate, Habermas sees regarding the rules of discourse as the basis of law.
The acceptance of this assumption is to allow an individual to secure their rights and pursue them. It may be said that, in the intricacies of legal regulations, to draw attention to the formal dimension of law, and through this gaining its recognisability in the public sphere, is to provide democratisation of law-making and execution.48 The expression of the adopted presumption is the formation of the vision of law in which procedures play the role of democracy watchdog, and serve to bring to fruition the common good.49 This presumption seems to have a key influence on the emerging image of the legal community as the ideal communication community. In this view, the image of a participant in legal practice is founded on the transcendental concept of a communication community which sets the way of action.
Using the established rules of action therefore becomes the condition of law’s recognisability, not only in the social dimension but also institutionally.
In this context, the discursive dimension of ethics is a tool by which to prevent the replacement of the power of argument with the argument of power. For this reason, the actions of discourse participants are determined by the requirements of correct communication, which Habermas defines as conditions of the “ideal speech situation,” meaning the rules or clearness, truthfulness, honesty, freedom of argument, providing the discourse participants with equality and eliminating all forms of coercion. The concept of discourse thus understood is based on the assumption of communication competence, and the mutual acknowledgement and honesty of its participants. They form a communication community based on legitimate rules of discourse.
4.2.3.2. Responsibility of the communication community
In communication, responsibility is transcendental-pragmatic, and is oriented to justify rules of discourse which are to validate the way of
47 Jürgen Habermas, Posłowie, Faktyczność i obowiązywanie. Teoria dyskursu wobec zagadnień prawa i demokratycznego państwa prawnego, trans. A. Romaniuk, R. Marszałek (Warszawa: Scholar, 2005), p. 575.
48 This is pointed out by Marek Czyżewski, see: “Wprowadzenie do wydania polskiego,” in Jürgen Habermas, Strukturalne przeobrażenie sfery publicznej, trans. W. Lipnik, M. Łukaszewicz (Warszawa:
PWN, 2007), p. IX.
49 Jürgen Habermas, Posłowie. Faktyczność i obowiązywanie, p. 587.
understanding and acting in institutional practice.50 Such interpretation is proposed by Karl-Otto Apel, when speaking of moral responsibility in relation to the ideal communication community.51 For Apel, responsibility lies with an individual as a member of the communication community.
In the presented view, responsibility takes the form of the deontic rule of discourse, which provides the participants in an ideal communication community with the readiness to solve conflicts in accordance with a binding, intersubjective model of action. Responsibility thus understood, viewed as a value, is reduced to respecting the discourse rules, for which one becomes co-responsible by being a participant. Hence, moral responsibility has a primarily institutional dimension and it may be interpreted in the context of a claim to legitimise discourse rues within the communication community.52
Moral responsibility is formed on the transcendental idea of the communication community. Bearing this image of responsibility in mind, it is worth mentioning the possible situation of conflict between institutional and personal morality. In this context, Apel states unequivocally that the concept of responsibility “can neither be reduced to individual accountability nor allows for the individuals unburdening themselves from personal responsibility, by, e.g., shifting it onto institutions or social systems.”53
It may be said that Apel, by revealing the conflict between institutional morality and individual feeling, simultaneously proposes intersubjective ethics whose validity may be sought in discourse rules. Hence, the key becomes the notion of the communication community, and institutional morality determines the form of the professional role. Thence, the problem of validating the discourse becomes so crucial.54 This claim is grounded on the adopted method represented by the transcendental dimension of pragmatics in the view presented by Apel.
Contrary to classical pragmatism, the transcendental view stands firmly by the claim for the legitimisation of a discourse. Transcendentalism as a method relies on searching for grounds, foundations, which are sought in discourse rules, so that what is determined on their basis gains legitimisation. In this way
50 Karolina M. Cern, Bartosz Wojciechowski, “O związkach między dyskursem prawnym a moralnym,” Principia 2011, vol. LIV–LV.
51 Karl-Otto Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung, Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), pp. 318 et seq.
52 Bartosz Wojciechowski, Interkulturowe prawo karne. Filozoficzne podstawy karania w wielokulturowych społeczeństwach demokratycznych (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2009), chapter 3.1; Skuczyński, Status etyki prawniczej, chapter 3.6.
53 Karl-Otto Apel, “Uniwersalistyczna etyka odpowiedzialności,” trans. Z. Zwoliński, Etyka 1996, No. 29, p. 9.
54 Ewa Kobylińska, “Etyka w wieku nauki (o transcendentalno-pragmatycznej etyce dyskursu K.-O. Apla),” Kultura Współczesna 1993, No. 1, p. 27.
the requirement that every discourse participant confirm their belonging to a communication community through the fact of accepting its rules and acting according to them acquires the form of a regulatory idea determining the way of functioning within an institution.55 Legitimisation of this condition on the ethical level determines the image of moral responsibility as transcendental-pragmatic.
On the basis of the above findings, it may be said that moral responsibility as transcendental-pragmatic is founded on the concept of the communication community. Responsibility thus understood is first of all intersubjective.
In this view, responsibility is legitimised as a result of consensus within the communication community. The ethicality of responsibility thus understood is defined and complemented by the notion of the communication relation. On these grounds, it may be said that responsibility has an institutional dimension while morality is sociological. Contrary to responsibility as ontological-ethical, this view concentrates on the problem of the self-knowledge of a subject acting within an institution. The exposition of subjective agency in the institutional structure is the hallmark of responsibility as ontological-ethical. Therefore, the subject’s identity is presented as being created due to potential tension between what is intersubjective and what is subjective.