Summer 2016 183 Environmental ethicists typically consider Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to exclude moral consideration for nonhuman animals. Habermas's early work indeed limits relationships with nature to instrumental ones. Yet, interspersed throughout Habermas's writings are clear indications that nonhuman life deserves moral consideration, and that humans can enter into communicative relationships with nonhumans, however asymmetrical. Habermas’s anthropocentric theoretical foundations can achieve a revised, relective equilibrium congru- ent with his persistent intuitions that nonhumans also possess powers of communication (but not discourse) that would grant them moral consideration, perhaps allowing us to enter into non-linguistic interspecies communicative activity. Habermasians can incorporate non- instrumental relationships with nature into discourse ethics’ set of applications without ignor- ing the special role of language in communication. Rather than holding that the differencia speciica between humans and nonhumans exists in communication, it makes more sense instead to displace this distinction between communicative action as a general category and the special case of discourse. Doing so permits intuitions of nonhuman moral considerability and communicative possibility without altering the discursive core of Habermas’s theory. Habermas on Nature: A Postnormal Reading between Moral Intuitions and Theoretical Restrictiveness Yogi Hale Hendlin and Konrad Ott* * Yogi Hale Hendlin, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 530 Parnassus Ave., no. 366, San Francisco, CA 94143; email: yhh@yogihendlin.com, and Konrad Ott, Department of Philosophy, Christian-Albrechts-Universitat, Kiel, Leibnizstrasse 6, Kiel, 24118, Germany; email: ott@philsem.uni-kiel.de. This article grew out of a chapter of Hendlin’s dissertation “Interspecies Discourse Ethics,” completed under Ott’s supervision. Hendlin’s research interests span traditional philosophy to philosophy of biology. science and technology studies, and he has published on topics such as environmental justice, intergenerational justice, and phenomenological biosemiotics. Ott, a third- generation Frankfurt School scholar of critical theory and former student of Habermas, has published widely at the intersection of discourse ethics and environmental ethics, as well as a publically serving on various applied environmental ethics commissions and projects in Germany. The authors thank the students of the ethology and philosophy course Hendlin and Dirk Westerkamp co-taught at CAU Kiel, Veronika Surau-Ott, Jürgen Habermas, and two anonymous reviewers, Dale Wilkerson and Michael Zimmerman, for valuable feedback on the manuscript. I. INTRODUCTION Orthodox readings of Jürgen Habermas compartmentalize his theory of com- municative action and discourse ethics from environmental ethics and “ecological thinking.” Such readings suppose that any kind of Habermasian environmentalism entails little more than an anthropocentric prudent use and management of nature in the interests of humankind. Participants in the nature-versus-discourse ethics debate fall broadly into two camps: (1) critical and (2) afirmative. While the irst accuses Habermas of failing to theorize meaningful environmental ethics, the other camp defends discourse ethics at the expense of ecosophical worldviews and physiocentric 183