I’ve remarked on this for years (and more systematically), and although Habermas has a lot of groupies and loyalists, occasionally others do remark on this as well. This rather uneven piece by the philosopher Lorna Finlayson is the latest example. (You have to skip the first part of the essay to get to the interesting stuff; I’ll return to the strange beginning at the end.) She writes, for example:

A characteristic feature of contemporary critical theory is a fixation on the notion of “normativity,” and in particular on the question of how ultimately to justify, or “ground,” the value judgments inherent in political and social criticism. This is in sharp contrast to the earlier tradition of the Frankfurt School, which rejected the idea of “transcendent”—context-free, universal, or absolute—moral standards, seeking instead to expose the internal contradictions of the social world and strip away its protective illusions. Habermas, and many who follow him, insist this is not enough: some normative “foundation” is required on which to rest critical claims. The seemingly endless quest for this firmer footing, which sometimes descends into handwringing about how critique is possible at all, is itself rationalized in partly moral terms. At bottom, the worry seems to be that without something truly solid to hold onto in the realm of reason—some absolute and certain principles that, to use the Normative Orders statement’s language, cannot be “disputed”—there would be nothing to keep us on the moral and political straight and narrow….

The danger, clearly, is real. Far from preventing a slide into the moral abyss, however, abstract normative concepts and “guiding principles” often prove to be infinitely flexible in their application, stretching to the justification of pretty much anything, up to and including ethnic cleansing and mass murder. As an illustration, take the signature idea of Rainer Forst, a coauthor of the Normative Orders statement: the “right to justification.” The ability to demand and offer justifications, Forst claims, is what sets us apart from the animals. Forst proposes the right to justification as a candidate for the kind of “context-transcending” norm that Habermas saw as emerging from a process of rational discourse, and without which—Forst warns—we risk falling into a dangerous relativism.

One might note how quickly context-transcendence is abandoned when it leads to uncomfortable truths….[H]ow might the right to justification play out in the context of Gaza? Following Forst’s formula, we could say that the people of Gaza have a right to—and Israel a duty to provide—a justification for the structures that affect them, and that the justification must strive to be one which no party could reasonably reject. Does Forst think that Israel has satisfied this condition? He has said nothing to suggest otherwise (or perhaps he shares the view of former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that the people of Gaza are “human animals,” in which case the right to justification need not apply).

As usual, moral philosophy is flotsam on the surface of reality, affecting nothing, and that is as true in the Anglophone as the Habermas-infused recent German tradition.

(The unevenness of this essay is due to where the piece starts, with a factually illiterate critique of Habermas’s statement about a month after the October 7 atrocities by Hamas [which Finlayson is unable to even identify as atrocities–the mass murder of a thousand-plus unarmed civilians is a classic “war crime”]–Finlayson’s remarks are no less dumb than these earlier ones and I’m astonished the Boston Review let them pass editorial review. [Remarkably, she does not seem to know that a founding principle of Hamas is the annihilation of Israel.] By contrast, it is fair to note that Forst has not, at least in public, revised the view expressed a month after October 7.)