Acknowledgments
Theauthor is grateful to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive
comments.
Notes
1 This is the picture of pragmatism given by Richard Rorty. As Rorty puts it in the
introduction to Philosophy and Social Hope, “[W]e pragmatists … define ourselves in
negative terms.We call ourselves ‘anti-Platonists’ or ‘antimetaphysicians’ or
‘antifoundationalists’” (Rorty, 1999, p. xvi). From Rorty’s writings, one gets the impression
that nothing remains after the critique of Platonism, metaphysics, and foundationalism.
2 This sets discourse ethics apart from emotivist and expressivist theories of moral
language, according to which moral claims are not candidates for formal validity, but
rather expressions of personal will, desire, like, and dislike.
3 What Habermas retains from Baier is merely the regulative ideal of the moral point of
view, not a systematic philosophical theory of how such a context-transcending vantage
point can be secured. Habermas does attempt the latter task, but through the thought of
George Herbert Mead, as discussed below.
4 This reading of MacIntyre is indebted to Taylor (1995).
5 For their references to each other, see Nielson and Habermas (1990) and MacIntyre
(1990).
6 Such revision is by no means incompatible with universal validity, which hinges upon
discursive consensus, not the substantive content of a given moral judgment.
7 See Krebs (1997) for an example of a critique of the consensus-focused nature of
discourse ethics from an environmentalist point of view.