Moral justification

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In more recent philosophical anthropologies, moral justification denotes the acceptance or legitimation of a person or their behavior through the social relationship to other people. This concept of justification moves within the framework of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations , according to which people accept what corresponds to their way of life as justification. This use is to be distinguished from the concept of justification in the more recent systematic epistemology (which deals with the reconstruction of reasons for holding opinions to be true; in English, epistemic justification ), as well as the ethical justification of a single action within a theory of normative ethics . The anthropological use of the term outlined below is linked to the doctrine of justification of Christian theology , which understands by "justification" the redemption of man from original sin or from his individual sinfulness, as it is, according to the majority opinion of the Catholic and Protestant tradition, not through human works but through God Grace can happen.

Concept history

Theological justification was anthropologically transformed by Immanuel Kant in Religion within the limits of mere reason within the framework of the legal metaphor of reason . Since man is afflicted by “ radical evil ”, according to Kant, individual actions cannot be sufficient to justify a person. It can never be said whether an action was carried out out of moral convictions or whether it was merely acted out of selfish motives in accordance with moral norms. Therefore, for Kant, the deduction of the idea of ​​a justification of man depends on a supplement through belief in the eternal righteousness of God.

Even William James in 1897 in The Will to Believe the Protestant justification by faith in a pragmatic justification of faith transformed, with the conviction corresponds to the truth of the structure of religious belief. The pragmatic identification of justification and belief beyond logical justification stands for the transformation of epistemology into philosophical anthropology, which understands human beings as being in need of justification. In this sense, Hans Blumenberg uses the expression anthropodicy (justification of man) in analogy to theodicy (justification of God).

Modern sociology has described social ties, both public and private, with the concept of justification discourses within the framework of the individualization thesis. In his Apology of the Accidental, Odo Marquard traced the need to justify in all areas of modern life to the loss of religious belief. According to Marquard, this explains why philosophical anthropology is looking for a concept of justification that is richer in content and that preserves the Christian theological dimension of the concept.

In existentialism , which allows existence to precede essence, the concept of justification moves to the center of the conception of man. Following the Protestant doctrine of justification, Sören Kierkegaard interpreted authentic self-being as recognition of man's dependence on God as the "absolutely other". Kierkegaard's subjectivist individualism and his concept of fear as existential were adopted by existential philosophy in the 20th century. According to Martin Heidegger , people's self- image is shaped by their fear of nothing and that makes them a being in need of justification. The ego cannot justify his person on its own, but is dependent on the understanding of other people. Under these conditions, justification becomes a hermeneutical category of intersubjective understanding.

Jean-Paul Sartre comes to the conclusion in his novel The Disgust that no other person can justify us, since the other is a permanent threat to our freedom. In his main philosophical work Das Sein und das Nothing , too, it says that the existence of humans is “unjustified and unjustifiable” (SN 108) ( injustifié et injustifiable , EN 76). However, as Peter Kampits has pointed out, in his analysis of erotic desire Sartre attributes the power of justification to love. Without love, man is an "unjustified and unjustifiable protuberance ". Only when we are loved do we experience freedom of choice: “That is the reason for the joy of love, if it exists. Feeling justified that we exist ”(SN 649f.).

Simone de Beauvoir , too , who in "For a Moral of Ambiguity" (1954) replaces universal norms of action with situation-related rules of self-realization , attributes freedom to the will to justification: “Man can justify his existence only in the existence of others Find people. He needs such a justification, he cannot escape it "(103f.)

Jürgen Habermas interprets the dependence of the individual on a supra-personal power in a pragmatic way as participation in structures of inner-worldly communication. In "Truth and Justification" (1999) he decoupled the rational discourse from the truth as a logically compelling justification and related it to forms of justification through life-world experiences and convictions. With this he says goodbye to the intellectualism of discursive rationality and opens his theory of communicative action to motives of situation semantics . Whether a “right to justification” can be derived from this as a basis of human rights, as Rainer Forst claims, is questionable.

Recognition as a justification is developed by Axel Honneth following Hegel and in a critical continuation of Habermas. For Honneth, recognition is constitutive for self-realization. Recognition at all levels of social life depends on conditions that are subject to anonymous structures of power and cannot be completely rationalized. With regard to the morality of personal relationships, especially love relationships, the reasons for recognition remain an open question. Recognition and justification are therefore not congruent.

Ferdinand Fellmann speaks of an “erotic justification” of human beings in the context of couple bonding. In contrast to justification through rational discourse, erotic justification is based on mutual trust between lovers. The justification instance is the relationship itself, in which the partners participate and which gives them an emotional certainty that is not based on logically compelling reasons. The concept of justification used here is not only applicable to intersubjectivity , it can also be understood as a model of dialogical knowledge of nature .

See also

literature

  • Sophie Loidolt: Claim and Justification . Dordrecht 2009
  • Immanuel Kant : Religion within the limits of bare reason . Akad. Edition Vol. X, Berlin 1968
  • William James : The will to believe . In: Texts of the Philosophy of Pragmatism. Stuttgart 1975
  • Jean-Paul Sartre : L'être et le néant (EN). Gallimard, Paris 1943; dt .: being and nothing (SN). Reinbek near Hamburg 1962
  • Simone de Beauvoir : For a moral of ambiguity . In: Should one burn de Sade? Three essays on the morality of existentialism. Munich 1954
  • Jürgen Habermas : Truth and Justification . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999
  • Axel Honneth : Fight for recognition . Frankfurt a. M. 1992
  • Ferdinand Fellmann : The couple. An erotic justification for humans . Berlin 2005
  • Sören Kierkegaard : The sickness to death. Reinbek near Hamburg 1962
  • Sören Kierkegaard : The concept of fear. Reinbek near Hamburg 1960

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hannes Ole Matthiesen, Marcus Willaschek, justification, epistemic, in: Enzyklopädie Philosophie, Hamburg 2010.
  2. ↑ Art. Justification, in: RGG Vol. 7, 2008, 98–117.
  3. ↑ Texts of the Philosophy of Pragmatism, Stuttgart 1975, 128.
  4. ↑ Cf. Georg Simmel, Goethe, Leipzig 1921, 264: “But height and distress of man are compressed into the formula that he has to justify his being”.
  5. ^ Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of Modern Times, Frankfurt a. M. 1968, 75ff.
  6. ^ Ulrich Beck, Risk Society. On the way to a different modern age, Frankfurt a. M. 1986.
  7. ^ Odo Marquard, Apology of the Random, Stuttgart 1986, 11f. and: justification. Gießener Universitätsblätter 1980, 78-87.
  8. ↑ Martin Heidegger, What is metaphysics? Frankfurt a. M. 1943.
  9. ^ Peter Kampits, Jean-Paul Sartre, Munich 2004, 68.
  10. ^ Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification, Frankfurt a. M. 2007.
  11. ↑ Axel Honneth and Beate Rössler (eds), From Person to Person. On the morality of personal relationships, Frankfurt a. M. 2008, 15.
  12. ↑ Ferdinand Fellmann, The Couple. An erotic justification for humans. Berlin 2005, 51ff.