Bourdieus kritiek van de morele reden

Samenvatting

Bourdieu's Critique of Moral Reason. In his Meditations pascaliennes (Pascalian Meditations, 1997), Pierre Bourdieu argues that modern theoretical thought is the product of a particular historical development and therefore has an arbitrary origin. To pretend that modern theoretical thought has a universal character is to impose one's provincial academic standards on other people, not only non-Western people, but also the uneducated or poorly educated people in the West. Bourdieu presents John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas as typical representatives of modern theoretical thought, who forget that theoretical thinking is always a concrete activity of a unique person in a particular situation. In contemporary moral philosophy, too, more and more thinkers are criticizing the so-called "hands-off" approaches of Rawls and Habermas and pleading for a more contextualist way of thinking. Bourdieu's theory is very helpful in demonstrating that moral philosophers, even contextualists like Will Kymlicka, Joseph Carens, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor, tend to neglect the differences in life perspectives, social conditions, and intellectual and rhetorical power between different cultural groups (immigrants, laborers, academics, etc). Because of his sociological bias, however, Bourdieu cannot fully acknowledge the deeply rooted human experience of justice and injustice, and is unable to differentiate between "good" and "bad" politics. 35 References. Adapted from the source document.