Jürgen Habermas: A Serious Man

T he eminent German thinker Jürgen Habermas died recently at age 96. A liberal secularist and social democrat, he was a towering figure in political philosophy in the post–World War II era, a time during which liberal secularism was dominant in his field.

Born in the waning years of the Weimar Republic, Habermas’s early life was shaped by the rise and fall of Nazism and the subsequent postwar liberal order. Having been a member of the Hitler Youth, he was shaken by revelations at the Nuremberg trials of “collectively realized inhumanity.”

Habermas was influenced early in his adult life by the teachings of Frankfurt School figures such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Ultimately, however, he did not follow his teachers in rejecting liberalism. Instead, he played a central role in the development of liberal secularist political philosophy and helped it to gain ascendancy in European and Anglophone academic circles. He was confident of the possibility of a secular “deliberative democracy” and an “ethics of discourse” in which citizens and their elected representatives deliberated and decided questions by giving and exchanging reasons.

At the height of his influence, Habermas proposed a distinction between “morality” and “ethics.” Ethics, he said, refers to one’s personal beliefs and aspirations, while morality is properly concerned with public matters and “the interests of all.” Political philosophy, properly speaking, is then fundamentally concerned with morality, not ethics; indeed, sound political philosophy prescinds from, and in a certain sense excludes from public deliberation, fundamental questions of meaning and value, questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny.

In Habermas’s categories, abortion and euthanasia, for example, are “ethical” and not “moral” issues — they concern “how best to live,” not “the interests of all.” That’s why, he insisted, abortion and euthanasia should not be forbidden by law or regulated in restrictive ways by government.

Here, to my own perplexity, I must admit, Habermas seemed unable — or perhaps unwilling — to grasp the case made by pro-life citizens against these forms of, let’s be blunt, homicide. The claim these citizens make — I myself am one of them — is that the lives of all human beings count. Our proposition is that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, sex, or ethnicity, to be sure, but also equally irrespective of age, size, stage of development, disability, or condition of dependency, is the bearer of profound, inherent, and equal dignity. And so, the child in the womb, the frail elderly person, and the cognitively disabled individual are among those whose interests are included among “the interests of all.” Just laws protect their interests, as much as they protect the interests of everyone else.

Habermas’s proposition was that pro-life citizens are entitled to their opinions and should, of course, be permitted to follow their consciences in refusing to have abortions or euthanize, say, elderly relatives, but they are bound as a matter of morality (justice) to accept legal abortion and euthanasia precisely because these are ethical (not moral) questions. He held that political morality requires this of pro-life citizens not because their ethical judgments about abortion and euthanasia are unsound, untrue, or unreasonable, but because they fall into the category of the “ethical” and are not concerned with “the interests of all.”

As John Finnis has observed, Habermas’s distinction between ethics and morality “has much the same role as John Rawls’s untenable distinction between ‘comprehensive doctrines’ and ‘public reasons’.” Indeed, Habermas played a role in continental European intellectual life as a defender of liberal secularism closely analogous to the role Rawls played in the United States and more broadly in the Anglosphere: Both sought to answer the question of how citizens with competing understandings of justice and political morality can live peaceably together in a democracy, and both tried to defend liberal policies (like legal abortion and euthanasia) by placing certain issues into categories outside the scope of proper democratic deliberation and regulation.

Rawls argued that pro-life laws would impose an illiberal “comprehensive doctrine” on citizens who do not share the view that abortion is the unjust taking of innocent human life. However, neither Rawls nor Habermas offered a plausible argument for why developing unborn human beings may be excluded from legal protection. Neither even attempted to show by reasons, evidence, and arguments that abortion is something other than the unjust taking of innocent human life. Both sought to resolve the issue of public policy, and resolve it in the conventional liberal secularist direction, without offering so much as a word meant to refute the publicly accessible arguments — the public reasons — adduced by opponents of abortion for their position.

Habermas, unlike Rawls (who died in 2002), lived into an era during which confidence in the liberal secularism these two towering figures championed in the final third of the 20th century has significantly eroded. Rawls certainly had his critics, but they were shooting up at him, and he was shooting down at them. Liberal secularism held the commanding heights. In Habermas’s later life, liberal secularism had become like the “old gray mare [who] just ain’t what she used to be.” It is seriously questioned today not only from the right, but from the left as well. It is no longer the “default position” for young people aspiring to careers in academic political philosophy.

Habermas recognized this erosion and, to his credit, acknowledged the force of critiques offered by opponents of liberal secularism. In recent decades, he found opportunities to engage with secularism’s deepest critics, including his countryman Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). And, despite his unbelief, Habermas did not hesitate to acknowledge the role Christianity had played in forging and advancing values he himself shared. And he wondered aloud whether those values could survive the thoroughgoing secularization of societies.

In a 1999 interview, he observed that Christianity was “more than just a precursor or catalyst” for principles of liberal democracy like individual conscience, human rights, and human freedom. Indeed, they directly sprung from the root of Jewish and Christian ethics. He admitted that neither modern secularism nor postmodernism provided a serious alternative to that “legacy.”

Perhaps this appreciation for the West’s moral inheritance inspired Habermas’s courageous stance against antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, a stance for which he was and continues to be resoundingly condemned by people on the left who once regarded him as their lion.

Habermas’s fullest engagement with a critic of liberal secularism came in 2004 in a noteworthy dialogue with Ratzinger. Despite again acknowledging the Jewish and Christian ancestry of liberal freedoms, he argued that democratic solidarity based on those freedoms is possible without necessarily affirming the original religious assumptions behind them. By way of counterargument, Ratzinger politely asked: Where outside the Judeo-Christian West have these freedoms emerged and enjoyed some significant measure of security? Faith and reason, he insisted, need each other.

Habermas has been widely eulogized as a brilliant theorist and inquisitive teacher, albeit with plenty of caveats from those on the left about his support for Israel. His disciples are right to honor his significance. They would do well to also remember his dialogue with the future pope, one in which the interlocutors agreed on the historical sources of liberal freedoms and in which Ratzinger reminded Habermas of the “ethical” (in Habermas’s sense) truths about the human person that make democracy possible.

Habermas was, to quote Don Corleone, “a serious man.” Requiescat in pace.