First, if the ethical has from the beginning a content necessarily attached to it, all other conceptions have to be rejected offhand as unethical. It is not difficult to realize the authoritarian and ethnocentric consequences … from such an approach … But, second, … as the Habermasians do, not a dogmatism of the contents but of the procedures. Have we advanced a single step with this new solution? No, we are in the same place as before, because only somebody who has already accepted some substantial values will accept also the validity of those procedures. It is only if a set of empty terms —’justice’, ‘truth’, ‘people’, etc. — become the names of the ethical, only if they are not necessarily attached to any content but are always given reversible contents through collectively elaborated radical investments, that something like a democratic society becomes possible. This means an endless movement between the ethical and normative dimensions.
… what kind of other link could exist between ethics and normativity? My answer is: radical investment, a notion that requires clarification.
I have said the primary ethical experience is experience of a lack: It is constituted by the distance between what is and what ought to be. … the object bridging the distance does not have a content of its own.
… any positive moral evaluation consists in attributing to a particular content the role of bearer of one of the names of fullness. If I say “socialism is just’ … I am identifying ‘justice’ as one of the names of fullness with a content which cannot be locally derived from that name (because there is no inherent conceptual content associated to that name). … Here we have investment in an almost literal financial sense: the relevance of the terms is greatly increased by making it the embodiment of a fullness totally transcending it. And this investment is radical because, justice being an empty term, nothing in it preannounced that socialism had to become the body incarnating it. (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 291)
Radical investment, conceived in this sense, describes the way I see the basic structure of ethical action.
Doesn’t that involve that anything goes, that there is no possibility of objective criteria to choose one rather than the other course of action? … a sovereign chooser who, precisely because he is sovereign, does not have the ground for any choice. But ethical life is entirely different from that picture. People are installed on both sides of the equation: they are, on the one hand, constructed as positions within a certain symbolic order; on the other hand, however, such an order is always a dislocated structure: it is destabilized by what … we could call the real of the structure. These dislocations show themselves as the distance between the achievable fullness and what actually exists, and this distance is the source of the ethical experience conceived as the attempt to name the unnameable (which requires, as we have seen, a radical investment). (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 287)