Abstract

A cognitivist and discursive ethics must distinguish itself from two other metaethical positions: on one side, a cognitivist but non-discursive ethics; on the other side, a noncognitivist but communicative, argumentative and procedural ethics. The aim of the present work is to use Habermas’ reflections on the topic of truth to develop an ideal-typical scheme which could be helpful in explaining those distinctions. This scheme will contain three typical conceptions about the truth of theoretical statements: realist-intuitionist conception, objectivist-semantic conception and discursive-consensual conception. The distinctiveness of the cognitive-discursive ethics will then be explained by relating the cognitivist but non-discursive ethics and the noncognitivist but procedural ethics to their respective conceptions of truth: the realist-intuitionist conception and the objectivist-semantic conception