Muguerza, Javier - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

96 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human Valuesof human rights to be approved, but on condition they not beasked Why? that is, For what “reason”?).In which case, Bobbio’s trust might well be betrayed, and hewould risk the charge - a charge that contemporary ethics of discourse,or “communicative ethics,” levels at any conventionalistposition more or less inspired in the tradition of the social contract- that no factual collective agreement, not even a true consensusomnium gentium, can contain its own rational grounding,since the factuality of such agreements would never by itself be aguarantee of their rationality. As is well known, the cultivatorsof this communicative ethics tend to believe that a factual consensusof this sort can be considered “rational” only to the extentthat the means of obtaining it approximate those that the membersof an ideal assembly-presumably less subject to spuriousconsiderations than the United Nations General Assembly -would have to follow to obtain, in uninhibited communicationand by no other means than “discourse” or cooperative discussion,a similarly ideal and even counterfuctual consensus, one whoserationality would be above suspicion. For - as is also wellknown - discourse or communicative ethics is extremely sensitiveto the “theory of rationality,” and with good reason, since itattempts to offer itself as a theory of practical reason, which iswhat ethics amounts to for many of us.If we wish to put it this way, the “theory of consensus” thatthis sort of ethics of discourse or communicative ethics defends,tries in some sense to go “beyond the social contract,” 41 as theseextracts from the chef d’oeuvre of one of its representatives show:<strong>The</strong> free acceptance undertaken by human beings only constitutesa necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the moralvalidity of norms, Immoral norms can also be accepted by menas obligatory, out of error or on the assumption that only41 I refer the reader to my paper “Más allá del contrato social (Venturas ydesventuras de la ética comunicativa),” chap. 7 of Desde la perplejidad (Madrid,in press).