The Hermeneutical Age of Morality: Translation of the Sacred in Habermas, Taylor and Ricoeur

Abstract

How to give testimony of the sacred with philosophical credibility? Why sacralise the
secular? What hopes hermeneutics offer to a contemporary moral philosophy open to religions? How
to express in the public domain of modern societies the dialogue between ethics and religion? We
present three answers in a new philosophical context that we call the «hermeneutical age of morality».
We divide our work into four parts, the first explains the title, and the next three present three possible
models of rapprochement between the sacred and the secular. All three acknowledge that we are facing
new times that require translating from the sacred to the secular; from religious beliefs to the constitutional
norms. We start introducing Habermas’ normative approach, which retrieves the legitimacy of religion;
we continue with Taylor’s social philosophy which elaborates the eclipse of religion and end up with
Ricoeur´s ethics, expressed in the valuable analogy of the activity of translating.