This article aims to demonstrate that a special category of desire – a state which is sought unconditionally, as an end (sought in and of itself) – is the only ultimate value that logical observers can conceive upon consideration of sufficient conceptual depth. This demonstration appeals to logical reasoning, and ultimately, the reader’s inability to conceive alternate conclusions which are logically consistent. Key words: A Priori, Beings, Desire, Objectivity, Ultimate value, Logicality, Morality, Moral-rationalism, Purism, Moral-realism, Realism.

Alan Gewirth’s work on moral and political philosophy attracted a great deal of attention between 1978 and 2000, but has received very little attention since then. This essay aims to revive interest in Gewirth’s work by providing a more direct and straightforward version of his core argument for objective moral rights and duties and clarifying how a Gewirthian moral and political theory can proceed beyond the conclusion of the core argument.

In this paper, I present different ways in which transcendental argumentation has been used in contemporary debates in moral philosophy to justify the normative authority of morality. My aim is to defend strong “retorsive” transcendental argumentation as a way to ground a sort of critical realism in metaethics, comparing transcendental arguments proposed by Karl-Otto Apel, Christine Korsgaard and Alan Gewirth – which are sometimes referred to as “constitutivist” arguments. In particular, I endorse an argumentative strategy that considers the merits of (...) the respective positions while overcoming the limits of each. Such a strategy aims at grounding transcendentally the metaphysical fact of human value, making explicit the ontological implications of transcendental argumentation, and showing that a justification of fundamental values alone can ultimately make it possible to ground basic moral principles. (shrink)

One of the main reasons for philosophers to have embraced Humean constructivism rather than Kantian constructivism is a negative one: they believe that in the end Kantian constructivism is an unsta...

Christine Korsgaard’s argument for the claim that one should not only value one’s own humanity but also the humanity of all other persons, ‘the publicity of reasons argument’, has been heavily criticized and I believe rightly so. However, both in an early paper and in her most recent work, Korsgaard does not rely on controversial, Wittgensteinian ideas regarding the publicity of reasons, but instead she uses a different argument to justify interpersonal morality, which I will refer to as ‘the argument (...) from the sufficiency of agency’. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the argument from the sufficiency of agency can succeed where the publicity of reasons argument fails. I will argue that although the argument from the sufficiency of agency is potentially more promising, it fails to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality. I argue, however, that this failure has less to do with the argument from the sufficiency of agency itself and more with Korsgaard’s specific version of it. This leaves open the possibility that other Kantian constructivist arguments from the sufficiency of agency might be more successful. (shrink)

Most Kantian constructivists try to ground universal duties of interpersonal morality in certain interactions between individuals, such as communication, argumentation, shared action or the second-person standpoint. The goal of this paper is to present these, which I refer to as arguments from the second-person perspective, with a dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case the argument does not justify a universal principle of interpersonal morality. (...) Or interaction does have a principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but such forms of interactions are merely optional. I argue that proponents of arguments from the second-person perspective have failed to provide a convincing response to this dilemma and that this failure is systematic. This suggests that the success of Kantian constructivism depends on the success of arguments from the first person. (shrink)