Jürgen Habermas 
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action 

In this important book Habermas develops his views on a range of
moral and ethical issues. Drawing on his theory of communicative
action, Habermas elaborates an original conception of ‘discourse
ethics’, seeking to reconstruct a moral point of view from which
normative claims can be impartially judged.

Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social
action via an examination of research in the social psychology of
moral and interpersonal development. He aims to show that our basic
moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal
than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative
presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire
of competent agents in any society.

Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action confronts
directly a variety of difficult and controversial problems which
are at the centre of current debates in philosophy and social and
political theory.

Table of Content

Introduction by Thomas Mc Carthy.

Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter.

Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences.

Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical
Justification.

Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.

Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply
to Discourse Ethics?.

Index.

About the author

Jürgen Habermas is the author of numerous books
including The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Polity,
1988), The Theory of Communicative Action (Polity, 1988) and
Postmetaphysical Thinking (Polity, 1992).