The Right to Justification by Rainer Forst
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | Seyla Benhabib,Matthias Fritsch,Rainer Forst,Jeffrey Flynn |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591715607259 |
| Subject Matter | Review Symposium |
research-article2015
Review Symposium
Political Theory
2015, Vol. 43(6) 777 –837
The Right to Justification
© 2015 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591715607259
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Seyla Benhabib, Jeffrey Flynn, Matthias Fritsch,
and Rainer Forst
The Uses and Abuses of Kantian Rigorism. On
Rainer Forst’s Moral and Political Philosophy
Seyla Benhabib
Rainer Forst is one of Germany’s outstanding contemporary scholars of
moral, political and social thought and a prominent member of the most
recent generation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. We share
deep commitments to the Habermasian program of a discourse theory of eth-
ics and are indebted to the intense, but short-lived, exchange between the
Rawlsian and Habermasian paradigms of justice, democracy and human
rights. The following comments on Forst’s The Right to Justification are
offered in the spirit of a critical conversation against the background of
deeply shared premises.1 If what follows may sound too much like a querelle
de famille (a family quarrel), I plead guilty. But as we all know from experi-
ence, such quarrels can also be the most intense ones!
This article will focus on three points: (1) First, I will outline Forst’s con-
struction of “the right to justification” in the light of the principles of reci-
procity and generality and will offer a critique of his understanding of these
criteria; (2) second, I will examine Forst’s construction of the relationship
between the moral and the ethical; and (3) finally, I will turn to Forst’s pro-
gram of “political constructivism” and assess his interpretation of the rela-
tionship between human rights, justice and democracy.
Yale University
Corresponding Author:
Seyla Benhabib, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 115 Prospect Street,
Rosenkranz Hall, New Haven, CT 06520-8.
Email: seyla.benhabib@yale.edu
778
Political Theory 43(6)
Underlying all these complex questions is an overmoralization of the ethi-
cal and the political. For Forst, “the right to justification” becomes a supreme
principle of practical reason, a lynchpin for all reflection on ethical, social
and political contexts. I think that this places a burden on his theory that it
cannot bear, and because this principle is extended so thin, it cannot really
include all that we may wish to see included nor exclude all that we may wish
to see excluded.
I. The Right to Justification
In the Introduction to his first major book in English, Contexts of Justice.
Political Philosophy beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism,2 Rainer
Forst wrote: “The analysis of the debate between supposedly ‘context-
forgetful’ liberal-deontological theories and ‘context-obsessed’ communitar-
ian theories thus leads to a differentiation of four normative contexts in which
persons are ‘situated’ as members of various communities; that is to say, they
are intersubjectively recognized and are authors and addressees of validity
claims in various communities; communities of ethical, constitutive bonds
and obligations; a legal community that protects this ‘ethical identity’ of a
person as a free and equal legal person; a political community in which per-
sons are the authors of law and mutually responsible citizens; finally, the
moral community of all human beings as moral persons with the right to
moral respect. A theory of justice is at the same time context-bound and con-
text-transcending insofar as it takes these normative dimensions into consid-
eration, without absolutizing any particular one. According to this theory, the
society that unites these contexts in the appropriate manner can be called
just” (CT, 5). Forst has backed away from the salutary pluralism of this early
vision toward an “absolutization” of the moral right to justification in his
later book. The interplay among these different contexts of interaction and
justification “in the appropriate manner” (CT, 5) was the challenge of his
early project. In the collection of essays which are assembled in The Right to
Justification, spanning a decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, this
program of a non-relativist contextualism has been replaced by a Kantian
rigorism.
In a chapter titled “Moral Autonomy and the Autonomy of Morality,”
Forst spells out his reformulation of the Kantian project of morality: “My
own proposal,” he writes, “starts from the assumption that the analysis of the
moral point of view should begin with a pragmatic reconstruction of moral
validity claims and, proceeding recursively, inquire into the conditions of the
justification of such claims and of the construction of norms. If practical rea-
son can be understood as the faculty of finding justified answers to practical
questions, then the principle of justification which states that answers to
Review Symposium
779
practical questions must be justified in accordance with the precise kind of
claim to validity they raise, is a valid principle of practical reason. . . . In the
moral context, norms which state that every person has a duty to do X, or to
refrain from doing X, raise a claim to categorical, unconditionally binding
validity. . . . [If], starting from this validity claim, we inquire recursively into
the conditions under which it can be redeemed, then the validity criteria of
reciprocity and generality take on the role of criteria for discursive justifica-
tion” (RJ, 48–49; my emphasis).
We begin then—to use a felicitous phrase of Ken Baynes’s—“with the
speech-immanent obligations” of speakers and hearers in support of the
validity claims raised in their respective utterances.3 These “speech-imma-
nent obligations” entail a right on the part of speakers and hearers to respect
each others’ capacity to agree or disagree with one another on the basis of the
validity of reasons one accepts or rejects. I call this the capacity for “com-
municative freedom,” and I assume that “all human beings who are potential
or actual speakers or a natural or symbolic language are capable of commu-
nicative reason, that is of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to an utterance whose validity
claims then comprehend.”4 Forst calls this “the fundamental right to justifica-
tion” (RJ, 21) and postulates “a corresponding unconditional duty to justify
morally relevant actions” (RJ, 21). Elsewhere he refers to this as a “substan-
tive individual moral right to justification,” and writes: “This is, if one
prefers, the fundamentum inconcussum that is indispensable even in a post-
metaphysical age and must be reconstructed with appropriate means” (RJ, 5).
If one accepts the fundamental moral right to justification as the precondi-
tion for making sense of any validity claim, then recursive analysis estab-
lishes reciprocity and generality to be criteria of discursive justification.
Although Forst is not explicit here, I take it that by “recursive analysis” he
means something like a “weak transcendental argument” through which we
discover those conditions without which a practice such as reason-giving
could not make sense in the first place. At an earlier point, Habermas had
controversially claimed that the sum total of those speech-immanent obliga-
tions corresponded to “an ideal speech situation.”5 According to this formula-
tion, equality of speech acts was the first precondition: that is the equal
chance of each participant to initiate and to continue communication, and the
equal chance to make assertions, recommendations, and explanations, and to
challenge justifications. Furthermore, it was said that all must have equal
chances to express, their wishes, feelings, and intentions, and lastly, that the
speakers must act as if in contexts of action there is an equal distribution of
chances “to order and resist orders, to promise and to refuse, to be account-
able for one’s conduct and to demand accountability from others.” In part as
a consequence of the intense criticism which the notion of “an ideal speech
situation” encountered as being totally implausible—in Raymond Geuss’s
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Political Theory 43(6)
caustic words as “a transcendental deduction of a series of non-facts”6—Forst
has chosen a more parsimonious construction of those conditions, narrowing
them down as reciprocity and generality. “Reciprocity” is defined somewhat
equivocally throughout the various chapters and is said to have one compo-
nent called “the reciprocity of content,” and another, “the reciprocity of rea-
sons.” (See (c) below). “Generality” prevents the exclusion of those “possibly
affected and confers the authority of the moral community on the individual”
(RJ, 20).
Two more steps are necessary in order to complete the architectonic of
Forst’s theory: moral constructivism and political constructivism. “Moral
constructivism,” writes Forst, “answers the question what norms the adher-
ence to which moral persons owe one another generally, and correlatively,
which rights they have in moral terms” (RJ, 111; emphasis in the text). Moral
constructivism poses the task for autonomous persons of constructing an edi-
fice “upon a morally impartial foundation and of using only those materials
and proceeding only according to those plans that they can accept as design-
ers and builders who also represent the subsequent inhabitants” (RJ, 111).
Political constructivism, which is distinct from but fundamentally related to
moral constructivism, is...
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