Abstract
Nearly thirty years ago, Carl Wellman offered a theory of justification in ethics that anticipated in a number of important respects recent discussions of the nature, foundations, and limits of public justification in morality and politics. His “challenge and response” model addresses with admirable clarity and directness some of the most important issues in this area. In this essay I return to this text to look afresh at one of these issues in particular: whether reasons offered in moral justification are necessarily universal. Wellman never doubts that moral reasons must not only be universalizable, but also universal, that is to say, reasons for all rational beings. I shall argue, however, that the best argument for universality supports a more modest, “presumptive universality” thesis. My argument for this thesis takes Wellman’s account of the nature and point of moral justification for its point of departure.1
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Postema, G.J. (2000). On the Universality of Moral Justification. In: Friedman, M., May, L., Parsons, K., Stiff, J. (eds) Rights and Reason. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9403-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9403-5_6
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