text: Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action is the primary anglophone source for Habermas's writings on "Discourse Ethics."  Written in the early eighties, this translation, which was published in 1990, provides  a developmental perspective.  The focus of the essays moves from Habermas's  statements about the role of philosophy today, in "Philosophy as  Stand-in and Interpeter, to his writing on reconstructive social science in  general, to his program for a discourse ethics in particular.  The final  papers address criticisms of this program.  The volume suffers a bit from  the fact that Thomas McCarthy's introduction is keen to locate Habermas's  position vis a vis various contemporary moral-philosophical standpoints,  but does not go very far toward locating the whole initiative in the  broader canvas of Habermas's overarching social-theoretic project
  