Abstract
Transcendental arguments are arguments which aim to provide justification (possibly even ultimate justification) for some ethical and other judgments. In their most complex form they are indirect arguments: they claim to demonstrate that a proposition is true by showing that it cannot be false. This kind of reasoning is not trivial. But what are we doing when we argue transcendentally? We can ask this question from an epistemological perspective but also from the point of view of moral psychology. The thesis of this paper is that understanding and accepting of indirect transcendental arguments require some form of moral commitment on the part of the reasoner, over and above that reasoner’s purely rational capacities. Such a reasoner can be neither a non-human animal (as these lack any rational understanding of morality) nor a god (as gods, being morally perfect, need no moral commitment), but must have exactly those capacities which we, human beings, happen to have. This supports the observations of Aristotle, Confucius, and others: that only the good person can find the truth.
