SOURCE: A review of Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 78, No. 4, November, 1992, pp. 510-11.

In the review below, Antczak summarizes Habermas's theory of communication ethics and various potential objections from the communication scholars' perspective.

It is a truism now accepted even by some philosophers that modern medicine saved ethics, that moral theory had been mired in the same concerns with ever-diminishing returns until it confronted the new problems that emerged from the advances in medical practice, with consequences that significantly changed both ethics and medicine. It's hardly shocking when powerful new technologies applied in urgent practical questions reinvigorate standing issues and open further productive lines of thought; what's surprising is that nothing similar has happened to that other practice where momentous transformations have been changing the ways we approach issues of the highest public and personal importance—the practice of communication.

Many...