Discourse and the moral point of view: Deriving a dialogical principle of universalization∗

Central to the discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas is a principle of universalization (U) amounting to a dialogical equivalent of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Habermas has proposed that ‘U’ follows by material implication from two premises: (1) what it means to discuss whether a moral norm ought to be . adopted and (2) what those involved in argumentation must suppose of themselves if they are to consider a consensus they reach as rationally motivated. To date, no satisfactory derivation of ‘U’ from these two premises has been presented. Thus the present study attempts to show how one can, without begging the question, arrive at ‘U’ by assuming a suitable explication of these two premises, supplemented with a fairly innocuous assumption about the context of discourse. If the argument is sound, then ‘U’ brings both deontological and consequentialist intuitions together with a notion of solidarity that requires an intersubjective account of insight.