Discourse ethics, developed by Jürgen Habermas and Kart-Otto Apel, is arguably the most advanced attempt at grounding universal ethics in terms of value-commitments shared by all agents. According to Apel (1996, 211) “Humanity is in essence linguistic, and therefore depends always already for its thinking on consensual communication.” On this account, all meaning is generated through inter-subjective communication and presupposes recognition of our interlocutors as co-creators of meaning. Also, by verbalising any claim we are implicitly recognising another as a being capable of responding to our claim and we are inviting them to do so. “The logical justification for our thought” therefore commits us to “understand arguments critically” and to “mutually recognize each other as participants with equal rights in the discussion.” (Ibid. 29) I argue that all ‘ideology’ is self-defeating insofar as it implicitly negates the necessary conditions of meaning and rational agency. If all agents are committed to value their own agency above all else, then every expression of ideology or religion is contrary to our shared interest and therefore a universal-pragmatic wrong.

I define ideology as a system of beliefs that are not open to revision on the basis of ideology-independent evidence but are unconditionally regarded as the absolute truth or the ultimate value. On this account, religion is an ideology focussed on supernatural or divine sources of meaning or value.

The primary argument why ideology cannot possibly justify our actions, especially when those actions purport to be ethical, is that belief cannot even hypothetically ground a normative principle (Setiya 2003). Setiya shows that belief provides only explanation of our reasons, not their objective justification. Another way, beliefs do not entail normative facts. Douglas Lavin (2004) reaches the same general conclusion by demonstrating that a belief cannot be subject to a normative principle if the relevant principle is formulated on the basis of beliefs. In case of ideology, belief is invariably taken as a normative fact, irrespective of whether it motivates or justifies coercion of others or constitutes a hidden normative judgement about actions and beliefs. In either case it entails prejudice against potentially valid truth-claims and arguments of others. The believer thus assumes an arbitrarily privileged position in the public discourse, implicitly denying equal rights to other participants in the discourse and thus negates the discourse rationality: “the consensual-communicative rationality presupposed already in the use of language (and, therefore, in thought itself)…” (Apel 1996, 210-211)

Ideology, even when it does not result in a violent confrontation, even when it is ostensibly peace-promoting and altruistic, is a self-defeating process; a conflict of dogmas is essentially irreconcilable on the basis of rational deliberation and thus condemns us to violence as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Conversely, “in communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect of the offer contained in his speech act.” (Habermas 1990, 85) An argument is not just a unilateral declaration of facts, not just a claim of right or a demand to fulfil an obligation, but an invitation to understand the subject at hand and enrich its meaning via collective deliberation. A believer has neither the motivation nor the capacity to constructively assimilate the communicative action of another, no need to develop common meaning or to question one’s own convictions, because rational thought terminates in conviction.

If discourse ethics were only concerned with the question of logical consistency of belief, without any additional consequences, then an ideologically minded individual could simply reject the implied value of consistency. Why should I be consistent about the rights in a discourse if my alleged irrationality helps me to get what I want? But being inconsistent is precisely what limits our capacity to get what we want out of action; if our actions are motivated by inconsistent beliefs then they work against one another. According to discourse ethics, if our convictions interfere with or shut down the public discourse then our capacity to think rationally and therefore to act effectively is diminished, and if we all value our capacity to act effectively then what we value depends on respecting the same value-commitment in others. If this is true then discourse ethics universalises a pragmatic distinction between right and wrong.

According to the classical view (Raz 1999, 22; Gewirth 1978, 48-53; Nagel 1970, 35; Anscombe 1957, 76; Kant 2015, 5:58-5:60; Aristotle 1984, 431), intentional (purposive) action is paradigmatically directed towards preferences about acting in a particular way and therefore towards the contemporaneous good of the agent: the sense of preference is a positive value-commitment. It is irrelevant whether intentions and the associated preferences are realised exactly as intended (or not at all): having the first-person awareness that one is trying to do something is already acting intentionally, with a purpose, and an affirmation of preference for what is intended. Even if it made sense to intend an action that were believed to be bad or of no value for the agent, as the opponents of the classical view argue, in every case of intending (be it good or bad) there still is a second-order preference for having the first-order intention to act in a particular way satisfied rather than not satisfied. In intending to φ we affirm that it is preferable (or more valuable) to φ than not to φ, where φ stands for ‘exercise the capacity <to act in a particular way>’. No matter how we package our intentions we can derive a positive value-commitment in favour of our capacity to realise intentions. Furthermore, the universal commitment to the value of ‘now being an agent’ is a necessary condition of all contingent value-commitments.

It may be objected that just because we all value the capacity for rational agency above all else does not entail that we Ought to value this capacity. It nonetheless does not follow that it is necessary to establish a categorical Ought about what we already value in order to ground a normative principle; the fact of valuing something is in itself an incentive to pursue that something. The resulting Ought is then universal-pragmatic rather than a categorical-imperative, because going against what we value (knowingly or not) would amount to self-defeating behaviour. Conversely, a categorical Ought would only tell us what is right irrespective of what we personally value, and this would potentially fall short of motivating us to do what is categorically required. Pragmatic normativity has an immediate advantage over purely categorical conception of ethics or morality insofar as it motivates us to act according to some rule without delimiting what is categorically or in-itself right or wrong.

In summary, adherents of secular ideology or religious dogma assume a privileged epistemic position in the public discourse and thus implicitly negate the necessary condition of meaning and rational agency, both of which are conditional on equal rights in the discourse. This attitude has negative consequences not only for other participants in the public discourse but for the agential capacity of the offending agent.

Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Harvard University Press, 1957.

Apel, Karl-Otto. Selected Essays: Ethics and the Theory of Rationality. Humanities Press International, 1996.

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle (Volume I). Princeton University Press, 1984.

Gewirth, Alan. Reason and Morality. The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Habermas, Jürgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Polity Press, 1990.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Lavin, Douglas. Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error. Ethics, 2004.

Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism. Clarendon Press, 1970.

Raz, Joseph. Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Setiya, Kieran. Explaining Action. The Philosophical Review, 2003.

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