The Response of Discourse Ethics to the Moral Challenge of the Human Situation as Such and Especially Today: Mercier Lectures, Louvain-la-Neuve, March 1999

The need for a global ethics has its origin in the human situation that has separated us from the natural security of animal instincts and thrown us into the state of freedom. In the present situation characterised by ethical approaches to natural science, technology, politics and economy it appears to lack internal resources of ethical reason. This book tries to show that the transcentendal-pragmatic approach to discourse ethics can reconstruct the genesis of this siutation and provide a rational response to the extrenal challenges to and the internal deficities of global ethics.