Moral consciousness and communicative action /

A fine translation of Habermas's Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt am Main), 1983), with an added essay on Kant and Hegel for this English-language edition, this is an excellent addition to the MIT series "Studies in Contemporary Social Thought." These particular essays are important because they directly spell out the implications of Habermas's later theory of communicative action for recent moral theory (see his two-volume set, Theory of Communicative Action; v.2, CH, Sep'88). With his own cognitivist "discourse ethics," Habermas seeks to refute the moral skeptic by replacing Kant's all-too-monological categorical imperative with a procedural theory of justice from which normative claims may be impartially adjudicated by participants in a concrete practical discourse. Anglo-American readers will find his lengthy third essay, "Discourse Ethics," especially helpful. Here Habermas distinguishes his work from that of MacIntyre, Strawson, Toulmin, Hare, K. Baier, Gert, and Rawls. He also takes on Continental "analytic" writers such as Tugendhat and Apel. Readers in both philosophy and the social sciences will like his second and fourth articles in which he reformulates R.L. Selman's account of sociocognitive development as a refinement to Kohlberg's theory of moral development. This book belongs in any collection supporting majors in philosophy and the various social sciences. -R. M. Stewart, Austin College