Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action

ive achievement has a double effect: under a strict deontological point of view, moral questions are taken out of their contexts in such a way that mora] solutions retain only the rationally motivating force of insights. 179 Moral Consciousness Communicative Action Moral issues are never raised for their own sake; people raise them seeking a guide for action. For this reason the demotivated solutions that postconventional morality finds for decontextualized issues must be reinserted into practical life. If it is to become effective in practice, morality has to make up for the loss of concrete ethical life that it incurred when it pursued a cognitive advantage. Demotivated solutions to decontextualized issues can achieve practical efficacy only if two resulting problems are solved: the abstraction from contexts of action and the separation of rationally motivated insights from empirical attitudes must both be undone. Every cognitivist morality will confront the actor with questions both of the situation-specific application and of the motivational anchoring of moral insights. 56 And these two problems can be solved only when moral judgment is supplemented by something else: hermeneutic effort and the internalization of authority. The notion of a "stage" of contextual relativism rests on a misconception of the basic problem of how ethical life and mora1ity are to be mediated. Carol Gilligan fails to make an adequate distinction between the cognitive problem of application and the motivational problem of the anchoring of moral insights. Accordingly, she tends to make the distinction between p'g.~.~­ conventional formalism and postconventional contextualism in te"rms of the d\stlnctio~ bet~eenIlfPollietlcar-alia"a~lsitu­ ations. She ignores the fact that the question of whether what I ought to do is the same as what I would do concerns only the motivational side of the problem of mediation. The other side of the problem is cognitive in nature: In a given situation) how is one to interpret a universal command, which says merely what one ought to do, in such a way that one can then act in accordance with the command within the context of the