Discourse Ethics (1983)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Morality from Communication
Out of the theory of communicative action, Habermas developed (together with Karl-Otto Apel) discourse ethics. The basic idea: moral norms are valid if all those affected could agree to them in a discourse free of domination.
The discourse principle (D) states: “Valid are exactly those norms of action to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses.”
The strength of discourse ethics: it avoids two extremes - dogmatism (norms are simply given) and relativism (norms are arbitrary). It offers a procedural criterion: not content but procedure decides validity.[1]
The limit: discourse ethics is purely formal - it does not say what is good, only how one might find out. Charles Taylor later criticized this: without “strong evaluations,” without substantive conceptions of the good life, no moral orientation is possible. The purely procedural criterion remains empty.
The Missing Fourth Level of Reflection
From the perspective of the logic of reflection, a systematic gap appears here: Habermas’s “communicative action” corresponds to the third level of reflection in Heinrichs’s schema - double reciprocity, in which both know that the other knows. But the fourth level - the metacommunicative level, on which the conditions of communication itself are thematized - remains underdeveloped in Habermas.
Discourse ethics presupposes that potential interlocutors are already recognized as such. But who decides who counts as a discourse participant at all? This question - the question of the constitution of the communication community - is metacommunicative. It lies on a higher level of reflection than communication itself.
Heinrichs’s fourth level of reflection - the level of institutions, norms, basic values that regulate all other levels - captures precisely this dimension. Habermas sees it, but he does not systematize it. His system/lifeworld distinction is an attempt to solve the problem, but the dichotomy remains too rigid.
Habermas develops discourse ethics in several essays, collected in: Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Frankfurt am Main 1983. The collaboration with Karl-Otto Apel is documented in: Karl-Otto Apel / Matthias Kettner (eds.), Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1992. ↩︎