Marcus Düwell

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see himself as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments.

This chapter discusses some philosophical assumptions in the use of transcendental arguments in Alan Gewirth’s method of dialectical necessity. With this method Gewirth aims to show that agents must hold some beliefs in order to understand themselves consistently. Firstly, it is argued that this method is not in the first place used to convince the sceptic, but rather that the aim is gain a reflective understanding of ourselves. Since the methodology investigates ‘judgments’ and their role for the subject, we should see it as part of a hermeneutical enterprise to gain a form of reflected practical self-understanding. Secondly, the paper questions the distinction between ‘dialogical’ and ‘monological’ forms of transcendental justification in ethics. It is argued that the investigation of dialectically necessary judgments of the subject has the aim of showing in which ways the subject must respect the other in order to understand himself consistently. Those normatively committed subjects must be presupposed by discourse ethicists as well, otherwise the dialogue will not reach its goal of generating normatively acceptable outcomes. Finally, the chapter sketches some consequences of seeing the role of transcendental arguments in gaining a reflected form of practical self-understanding. If moral commitments are based in ‘judgment’, the power of judgment is of crucial importance and we must consider how the institutional and individual conditions needed to protect and develop this basic capacity can be protected and increased.