I have indicated elsewhere that this is not a vicious circle but rather the hermeneutic circle that characterizes all reasoning about morals and politics. We never begin our deliberations concerning these matters at a “moral ground zero.” Rather, in moral theory as in everyday morality, ill political theory as in everyday political discourse, we are always situated within a horizon of presuppositions, assumptions, and power relations, the totality of which can never become wholly transparent to us. This much we must have learned from all the criticisms of rationalism in the last three centuries. Discourse ethics in this sense presupposes the reciprocal moral recognition of one another’s claims to be participants in the moral-political dialogue. 1 am still enough of a Hegelian to maintain, however, that such reciprocal recognition of one another’s rights to moral personality is a result of a world-historical process that involves struggle, battle, and resistance, as well as defeat, carried out by social classes, genders, groups, and nations.