Mark Garrett Longaker's Classes

So how would the categorical imperative work politically? Under a Hobbesian sovereign, I suppose that the categorical imperative would be practical in that the sovereign isn't theoretically supposed to be swayed by rhetoric; i.e. he is supposed to be disinterested, therefore he would only see citizens as ends and not means. But how could we apply this to, say, our current political system, in which every citizens vote is, for a candidate, a means to the end of election, of of staying in office? It seems that Kant might find democracy as practiced in America today pretty immoral, What about free market capitalism, which is driven by self-interest--but takes as justification the idea that self-interest applies to everyone universally, and will be beneficial to all who see it as their duty to prosper?

Yes, it is too obvious, but Kant directly states that to preserve one's own life without the desire to live is moral: "If, by contrast, adversities and hopeless grief have entirely taken away the taste for life, if the unhappy one, strong of soul, more indignant than pusillanimous or dejected over his fate, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear, but from duty: then his maxim has a moral content" (probably not your edition, p.14).
So, if one were not to preserve one's life, one would not be acting from duty, and hence one would be immoral. To use whatever rhetoric to convince someone that it is okay to take his own life, or okay to help another take his own life, one would be acting contrary to the duty of the preservation of life. Dr. Kevorkian's actions would be unethical becuse he would convince someone to act contrary to his moral duty.
However, there is a bit of a problem. Dr. Kevorkian would not be taking his own life, so he would not be acting contrary to duty. The duty, according to my translation, is not to preserve life in general, but only to preserve one's own life. Hence, the unethical qualities of an assisted suicide argument exist solely in the person who has been convinced, not the person who has done the convincing. Because of the divide between Kevorkian and the suicide as two completely different beings, the argument (or rhetorical practice, or whatevs) is NOT unethical, it is only the action that is unethical.
One could attempt to make the argument that Kevorkian would have to lie to the potential suicide in order to convince him that it was okay to take his own life, which would potentially violate moral laws (or would it if the will were good?). Kevorkian himself would retort that the suicide was already convinced before Kevorkian assisted, and hence no lying was necessary.
Kant might, however, find a lie in the general argument for assisted suicide anywhere in the world, if one is told that it is okay to violate one's moral duty to continue living simply due to despair.

As a seminal figure in the 18C British Dissenting tradition, Joseph Priestley began many of the scientific, literary, and philosophic movements that we tend to associate with other figures. His circle of friends included poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, novelist Helen Maria Williams, radical writers William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays, as well as the century’s most notable scientists like James Watt and George Cuvier. Many trace the origins of Unitarianism, Necessitarianism, and Utilitarianism to Priestley’s theological work. He is even credited with discovering oxygen in 1774. The extensive network of British and Continental literati was only part of Priestley’s story, as he moved to Philadelphia in the last part of his life (1794-1804) and witnessed his influence on the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom represent the revised American tradition to Humean skepticism through Priestley’s material theology. With such a varied and prolific career, it is no surprise that the Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (1762) are so thorough-going and resistant to the common Enlightenment notions of language.
The nineteen lectures attempt both a global theory and a history of language development that compare the languages “chiefly which a liberal education among ourselves brings us acquainted with”: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and English (9). Notably, the footnotes have a running commentary that includes Welch which might stand as representative for Priestley’s attention to dialectal variation and an even-handed, nonprescriptive analysis. In this vein, he begins his first lecture on Articulation by considering the phenomena of communication common to all animals. The communication process relies on an instrument such as the vocal chords and a medium such as air. Fish, for example, have no ears and cannot converse like humans but still find means to communicate. “They can give to one another by motion, perceived by the fight or feeling” (12), though all other animals rely partly on sounds received by the ear. The most brutish of animals can even be said to experience “joy, sorrow, suprize, with the various subdivision of those passions, hope, fear, love, anger, jealousy, and the like” (13). Humans, however, have a higher level of complexity that is attributable to their articulation. As some might find important, Priestley throughout the text continues to categorize by species and thinks of us as a certain kind of animal; as such, he limits his use of gendered pronouns.
Lecture II traces the potential origins of language, with the question of whether God transmitted language to humans being left open for speculation. Priestley will note that the oldest Eastern languages have no vowels; in fact, the development of widely different grammars across cultures will become one of his chief themes. He regards this linguistic diversity as a result of geographic isolation and rarely makes the expected move of ranking these differences according to civilization. (The notable exception being an implicit privileging of the Hellenic over the Hebraic, whose static culture prevents Hebrew from changing significantly over time). Lecture III continues to consider how non-Western languages emerge, with Priestley turning to written language for the remaining lectures. The Chinese representation of words relies on picture-writing and prefers the metaphorical to the nominal or abstract. A character representing eternity would resemble “a serpent biting its tail; impossibility, by two feet standing upon water” (33). Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, these images develop to become more stream-lined, so that their representations now have little resemblance to their metaphoric origins (35). The Western system based on a collection of “arbitrary marks” (34) known as the alphabet and the numbers is an innovation first developed by the Phoenicians (37). In terms of sign systems, Priestley sees a remarkable consistency across languages in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. For all their variation, every language relies on an agreed-upon convention that allows for these arbitrary signs to become words crafted by writers with no actual contact. Thus, the developmental possibilities allow for language to create more precise means of articulation. Take punctuation: it begins with simple dots or accents and proceeds to more particular symbols denoting various ways of pausing (46-7). Alongside this developmental possibility comes the potential for divergence between speech and written language, utility and form. A historical residue of prior language practices often persists in writing, meaning that the “p” in “the word receipt is not pronounced; but it shews the derivation of the word recipio in Latin” (44). In this way, Priestley gets at some insights about language’s capacity for a concomitant grammar and contradiction several centuries before linguists would grapple with the problem.
The following lecture Priestley theorizes the bedrock of his language conceptualization which assumes two categories of words: “either the names of things and qualities (the ideas which exist in the mind) or words adapted to denote the relationship they bear to one another; or lastly, a compendium for other words, with or without their relations” (66). In the first category are things (nouns, adjectives, pronouns) the verbs that describe their relation. The second category consists of prepositions, conjunctions, and adverbs, or those words that relate one word to another. Lectures V-VII dwell on the former category while Lecture IX describes the latter. In one notable moment Priestley considers the development of gendered nouns. By conjecture, he says that the choice of which words will be masculine and which feminine is based on a rude determination of strength. Nouns like lion are masculine in many languages because the animal is associated with power, while an object with diminutive qualities is more likely feminine. As one instance in which English is given normative status, Priestley questions “the absurdity and additional intricacy attending this practice” (73). In other words, since English does not rely on gendered nouns, the apparently arbitrary system of languages like Latin is unthinkably useless. His better moments consider the relation of dialects to dominant language communities, with variety given precedence to standardized language practices. The strength of Greek is located in its scattered city-states that required more flexible linguistic custom to accommodate the many needs of a sea-faring trade community. Indeed, there is a subtle association throughout the lectures between Greece’s linguistic prowess as a sea power and Britain’s strength as a dialectal menagerie (135-39). It is always shocking to see an otherwise neoclassical text describe “very ancient languages (as the Hebrew, Arabick, Welch, and even the Greek)” (19). Welch’s unusually high status for Priestley appears often, as when he works through why formerly autonomous languages like Breton (and Welch) are overtaken by French and English (221). The persistence of these local tongues becomes important for Lecture X, “On Syntax.”
As language develops in unpredictable ways, it remains consistently tied to the conservatism of custom. Speakers won’t change their linguistic patterns even when coerced—it must always be in response to describing new things (147). Priestley uses English as an example: while the ancient language of Britons was supplanted by Latin, Saxon, and finally Norman French, the resulting language (English) kept the same syntax throughout this transformation (150-3). Language’s composition style too tends to change with the slowness of custom (Lecture XI). The change however, and “mere custom” as he calls it, is arbitrary and unpredictable, so that “to describe a priori, or beforehand in what it must consist, were impossible” (153). As a process, it does tends towards complexity and progression (Lecture XII), though Priestley prefers the classical notion of cyclical time to depict language rise into perfect, decadence, and degeneration. His striking metaphor is the oak: “Trees, in the most proper foil and climate, grow but to a certain height; and when arrived to their full size, all the redundant juices serve only to nourish various excrescences, as funguses, mosses, &c. which deform and waste them” (177). In this light, the remaining lectures that revert to arguments about complexity and worth can be understood for their contingency.
Lectures XII and XIII concentrate on the state of languages in their most complex state. Eighteenth-century English and French is (of course) the height of linguistic complexity and usefulness (185). Still, Priestley fears that English’s degeneration has already begun. The last Lecture hints that the full scale mobilization of English through Enlightenment philosophy (302) may be as good as it gets. Just as Greek and Latin gradually broke, sinking “into modern [Greek] and the ancient Latin into Italian, French, and Spanish”, so too would English realize its potential and decline (212). One might draw several conclusions from Priestley’s endpoint. First, his sense of language accords with his place as a Dissenting preacher. Of course language must change its custom when needed and be discarded when overly decorous—that is just the process of revelation that Dissenting theology relied on. More crucially, Priestley ends with a comparison of the various strengths in each language considered and then praises their linguistic variety. Nonchalantly, he shoots down the Tower of Babel explanation—one may conclude from Priestley’s linguistic theory that his liberal tolerance is very close to the dominant feelings about language in the academy today (288).

(Citations from 1762 edition, available on ECCO, biographical detail from Dictionary of National Biography)

In “What is Universal Pragmatics?” Jurgen Habermas introduces a general theory of communication (hereafter UP) that is geared toward finding and developing “universal conditions of possible understanding.” For Habermas, reaching an understanding is fundamental for the basis of all forms of communicative action and thus all social actions such as conflict, competition, and strategic action (1). Therefore, an inquiry into precisely how conditions of understanding are met can be seen as an attempt to form a basis for examining and evaluating social actions. In this essay, however, Habermas concentrates less upon the social implications of UP than he does upon the more foundational aspects of interpersonal communication which underlie other social experiences.

The foundation of Habermas’ claim resides within the argument that “anyone acting communicatively must…raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated” (2). Thus, the speaker claims to be (a) uttering something comprehensible, (b) offering a true proposition (or propositional content), (c) expressing his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can trust the speaker, and (d) choosing an utterance that is “right so that the hearer can accept the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background” (2-3). In addition, Habermas argues that communicative action can only occur correctly if the above validity claims are justified (respectively) in terms of “comprehensibility,” “truth,” “truthfulness,” and “rightness” (3). Habermas holds that full agreement of these four validity claims is not necessarily a “normal” state of communication, but the process of coming to an understanding is one that reaches toward an agreement between hearer and speaker in terms of these claims and hence UP is “aimed at reconstructing the universal validitiy basis of speech.”

So, what does it mean to “reconstruct” the universal validity basis of speech? At the center of Habermas’ theory is the principle of “Rational reconstruction,” a term that seems to suggest that we can use the language material (sentences, utterances) that we receive empirically and derive from them knowledge about the underlying rules for understanding and the practical use of language. In a sense, Habermas is developing universal criteria for examining communicative actions, and yet since the research mission of UP has to do with rules derived from empirical experience (vs. synthetic a priori cognitions) it is both a break from and continuation of Kantian universal metaphysical principles. In the section “Universal Pragmatics versus Transcendental Hermeneutics,” for example, Habermas highlights the similarity and difference between what would be a Kantian transcendental apriori approach and his own: “On the one hand,” Habermas argues, “the rule consciousness of competent speakers is for them an a priori knowledge; on the other hand, the reconstruction of this knowledge calls for inquiries undertaken with empirical speakers.” Thus the term “transcendental” is unsuited for describing a practical research strategy such as UP (25).

I am weak in recapping the Searle-onward conception of speech acts that Habermas presents in the intervening investigation of the usage of utterances, however the upshot of the following approach lies within the fact that “truth claims are…a type of validity claim built into the structure of possible speech in general” (52) and that communicative utterances are always embedded in an examinable reality. Accordingly, Habermas argues that “Grammatical sentences are embedded by way of universal reality claims, in three relations to reality, thereby assuming the corresponding pragmatic functions of representing facts, establishing legitimate interpersonal relations, and expressing one’s own subjectivity.” Because language is the medium for these utterances, it can be seen as the medium for inter-relating the “external world,” the “social world” and a “particular inner world,” and thus comprising “the totality” of a speaker’s “intentional experiences” (66-68). Additionally, since every communicative action is thus “embedded” in the reality created by language, every utterance can be examined in terms of being “true or untrue, justified or unjustified, truthful or untruthful” (68). Since this opens up communicative utterances for evaluation in these terms, it would seem that communication can always be subject to an investigation in terms of ethics as well as truth/falsity. Thus, UP seems to be posited as a method for examining whether or not one could find whether an act is ethical/moral in a manner that holds true for every contingency of reality mentioned above (Kant, on the other hand, seems to look for morals that transcend these contingencies). More modestly, this plan could also be used to demonstrate that the same speech act could be “justified” or “unjustified” depending upon different conditions of reality or experience.

Although Habermas’ problems with post-structuralism are well-known, it stands to be mentioned that the principles of UP, which posit a rational structure that foregrounds all communication that is made to be understood, seems to be part of his beef with the poststructuralists (it may indeed be fitting to call Habermas a “reconstructionist”). If, as Derrida argues, utterances always break with their contexts (c.f. Signature, Event, Context and Limited Inc.), then Habermas’ attempts to find a universal mode of understanding that is dependent upon the attainability of an understanding of context is in serious contradiction with that theory. Given the fact that Habermas’ claims that UP can be used to examine the ethical validity of social actions, his suspicions about deconstruction seem to be all the more (dare I say?) understandable.