The aim of this article is to assess the coherence of the metaethical positions on which discourse ethics as developed by Habermas and Apel rests. After showing that one is faced here with a non-descriptivist, anti-realist but cognitivist moral theory, I examine whether a non-descriptivist cognitivism, on the one hand, and an anti-realist cognitivism, on the other hand, can consistently be held. I maintain that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and non-descriptivism is adequately solved by the two authors, but that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and anti-realism is still waiting for an appropriate answer, which I put forth in my article.

Thomas Hurka's brilliant study on the nature and value of virtue and vice opens with a puzzle. Hurka tells us that as consequentialism defines “all other moral properties in terms of goodness and evil” (p. 8), a fully consequentialist characterization of virtue and vice should define these things by appeal to goodness and evil as well. However, it has traditionally been thought that the most promising analysis of virtue, in terms of what is intrinsically good or evil, embarks from the fundamental claim that virtue is a disposition to promote good and prevent evil (p. 8). But then this been concluded, the bedrock truth that virtue is intrinsically good cannot be captured successfully by any consequentialist approach.

On n'a pas toujours assez insisté sur cet aspect, mais la préoccupation de l'herméneutique de Gadamer d'affranchir l'expérience humaine de la vérité de sa dépendance unilatérale envers la méthode et ses promesses de contrôle, plonge ses racines, bien avant la rédaction de Vérité et méthode, dans les premières années d'apprentissage du philosophe. C'est la puissance de révélation et d'évocation non maîtrisable de la poésie qui aura d'abord éveillé le jeune Gadamer à un univers de connaissance qui ne se résume ni à un savoir d'objet ni aux prétentions modernes d'une pensée qui veut s'assurer de ses precédés et de ses propres pensées, mais qui n'en recèle pas moins un authentique pouvoir véritatif.