Abstract
Within Apelian transcendental pragmatics of communication, central importance is given to the project of grounding some morally normative requirements in the practice of argumentative discourse. According to Karl-Otto Apel, the dialogical practice of fully engaged argumentative discourse necessarily involves conceptually normative presuppositions some of which have a universally valid and recognizably moral content. The central contention of a “discourse ethics” is to identify conceptually normative presuppositions of argumentation, to select those that are morally charged, and then to develop whatever thin moral content they have into a coherent core conception of a morality with unassailable rational credentials. This chapter offers an elaborate defense of Apel’s original intuition that by reflexive recourse to practices of discoursive argumentation we can ground in a rationally definitive way certain normative requirements (moral and other) which rational persons as such must meet.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, “What is Philosophy? The Philosophical Point of View after the End of Dogmatic Metaphysics,” in What is Philosophy?, ed. C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 153–82. For Apel’s theory of paradigms of first philosophy, see: Karl-Otto Apel, “Transcendental Semiotics and the Paradigms of First Philosophy,” in From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), 43–63; Karl-Otto Apel, Paradigmen der Ersten Philosophie: Zur reflexiven—transzendentalpragmatischen—Rekonstruktion der Philosophiegeschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).
- 2.
Cf. the two most important collections to date of Apel’s essays: Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), and From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998). In addition to elaborations on the consensus theory of truth, post-metaphysical foundationalism, and ethical relativism, there is a momentous critique of Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy. Apel’s Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988) develops a non-Habermasian architectonic for the justification and application of discourse ethics; the long and as yet untranslated closing essay contains the gist of Apel’s appropriation of Lawrence Kohlberg’s cognitive-psychological account of moral development. Selected Essays, Volume One: Towards a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994) contains Apel’s objections to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics and Searle’s intentionalist semantics; unfortunately, the translation is uneven.
- 3.
Apel, “What is Philosophy?,” 156.
- 4.
Apel, “What is Philosophy?,” 167. Cf. “The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of Language,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 250–90.
- 5.
Apel, “What is Philosophy?,” 167.
- 6.
See “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics,” in Toward a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Fisby (London: Routledge, 1980), 225–300 (reprinted by Marquette University Press, 1998). Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. 1, Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik, and especially vol. 2, Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).
- 7.
Kenneth R. Westphal, “Epistemic Reflection and Transcendental Proof,” in Strawson and Kant, ed. Hans-Johann Glock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 130.
- 8.
Cf. Robert Stern, “Transcendental arguments: A Plea for Modesty,” Grazer philosophische Studien 74, no. 1 (2007): 143–61; reprinted in Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope, ed. Christian Beyer and Alex Burri (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Cf. also Marcel Niquet, Transzendentale Argumente: Kant, Strawson und die Aporetik der Detranszendentalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991).
- 9.
Chase and Reynolds, for instance, give the following characterization that allegedly captures what is distinctive of a transcendental argument: “(1) Subject-involving state of affairs p obtains. (2) A necessary condition for p obtaining is that q obtain. (C) So q obtains.” James Chase and Jack Reynolds, “The Fate of Transcendental Reasoning in Contemporary Philosophy,” in Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, ed. Jack Reynolds, James Chase, James Williams, and Ed Mares (London: Continuum, 2010), 29.
- 10.
As James Bohman and William Rehg put it in “Jürgen Habermas,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/habermas/.
- 11.
Nor does Habermas, after retracting his early inchoate “consensus theory of truth.”
- 12.
Argumentation is not an activity that any radically socially isolated individual could learn. Of course, once socially learned, argumentation can be carried out in foro interno, i.e., embedded in the first-personal thought of a single person.
- 13.
In terms of a distinction that Habermas has made popular, one could express this point by saying that rational agents, when involved in discourse, must be able and willing to act communicatively, not strategically or instrumentally. Cf Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 43–115; Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
- 14.
Whereas the distinction between nonconstitutive and constitutive rules concerns fixing the identity of practices (e.g., fixing the identity of the game of chess by fixing the rules of chess), I want the distinction between nonconstitutive and constitutive aims to concern fixing the normative essence of practices, that is, fixing how a practice must aspire to be in order to serve its aim well. Drop the aim and you can no longer know how the practice aspires to be.
- 15.
This is not to say that there are altogether no other ways for fixing our validity beliefs, for example by threats or cognitive conditioning. But these other ways can be faulted for irrationality when our question is to find out what is valid and what is not.
- 16.
How this relates to the way Kant distinguishes between “regulative” and “constitutive” ideas cannot be discussed within the confines of the present chapter.
- 17.
Brown and Cappelen survey various attempts to capture the normative nature of assertions in these terms, cf. “Assertion: An Introduction and Overview,” in Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, ed. C. Brown and H. Cappelen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–17.
- 18.
For an overview of the development of Habermas’s position, see Maeve Cookes’s Introduction (1–19) in Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
- 19.
For a range of issues that are at stake in the inflationist versus deflationist debate, cf. Corey D. Wright and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, eds, New Waves in Truth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Apel gives the most detailed statement of his truth-theoretical views in an essay in which he attempts to integrate correspondence, evidence, coherence, and consensus into a comprehensive truth property; see “Fallibilismus, Konsenstheorie der Wahrheit und Letztbegründung,” in Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung, 81–193. Cf. “Transcendental Semiotics and Truth: The Relevance of a Peircean Consensus Theory of Truth in the Present Debate about Truth Theories,” in From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View, 64–80.
- 20.
In specialized discourses, such as expert discourses, we might want to exclude some reasonable evaluators and rest with the set of those whom we treat as our discursive peers concerning the issue at hand. But the selective exclusion is rational if based on a reason that can be offered to them, and accepted by them, as a justification of their exclusion.
- 21.
See Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung.
- 22.
Enoch raises serious doubts as to the prospects of deriving normativity from constitutive elements of rational agency; see David Enoch, “Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of Action,” Philosophical Review 115, no. 2 (2006): 169–98. I think that Enoch’s criticism does not apply to the attempt of situating an important part of normativity in the constitutive aim of argumentative discourse.
- 23.
I have elaborated my revisionist account of discourse ethics in Matthias Kettner, “Gert’s Moral Theory and Discourse Ethics,” in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Audi (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 31–50; and Matthias Kettner, “Discourse Ethics: Apel, Habermas, and Beyond,” in Bioethics in Cultural Contexts: Reflections on Methods and Finitude, ed. Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Marcus Düwell, and Dietmar Mieth (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 299–318.
- 24.
Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 25.
If it is true to claim that everyone must cherish MID as their rational ethos cannot be denied salva rationalitate (that is, without getting involved in a performative self-contradiction), the same is not true for the claim that one’s rational ethos must dominate all one’s ethical convictions. Hence, identifying with the discourse ethos, if it is required at all, it cannot be required by communicative reason alone.
- 26.
For instance, to ethics committees. For a discourse ethics approach to clinical ethics committees see Matthias Kettner, “Ein diskursethisches Beratungsmodell für klinische Ethik-Komitees,” in Ethikkonsultation heute—Vom Modell zur Praxis, ed. Ralf Stutzki, Kathrin Ohnsorge, and Stella Reiter-Theil (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2011), 45–57.
- 27.
Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, The Response of Discourse Ethics to the Moral Challenge of the Human Situation as Such and Especially Today: Mercier Lectures (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2001).
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Kettner, M. (2016). Raising Validity Claims for Reasons. In: Kim, H., Hoeltzel, S. (eds) Transcendental Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9_10
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