Zhenming Zhai

My dissertation is an inquiry into the possibility of providing an ethical axiology through communicative argumentation. It attempts to undertake a normative justification from a standpoint that transcends the opposition between the Anglo-American and Continental traditions. The concept that provides this bridge is that of communicative rationality, and the so-called "is-ought" problem is to be dealt with in this project by practicing this kind of rationality. Here rationality is understood in terms of communicative action as proposed by such philosophers as Habermas and Apel. But the engagement in a choice of life-and-death, which makes possible the choice of being a participant in any process of argumentation, will enable us to go beyond Habermas' discourse ethics so that the "committed members of a communication community can assign a normative value to human life qua its human-ness. This choice we call "Radical Choice." ;The human-ness of human life, as suggested by phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, is what we call "Subjectivity" that gives meaning to all aspects of experience. As we continue to engage in communicative argumentation, we will move from personal Radical Choice back to the intersubjective dimension of human life which we set out as a precondition for rational communication. Thus we may derive all intersubjective moral principles from the single pre-moral value we have established through Radical Choice.

As the core paradigm of modern economics, the rational economic man hypothesis has constructed a behavior model oriented towards utility maximization by pushing instrumental rationality to the extreme. However, this hypothesis has triggered a profound self-referential paradox at the philosophical level: when most economists include themselves in the subject category of theoretical presuppositions, their theoretical construction behavior itself becomes an object of utility calculation, which shakes the legitimacy of economics as a "discipline in pursuit of truth". Starting from the split between instrumental rationality and value rationality, this paper reveals the deep mechanism of this paradox by analyzing the logical isomorphism between theoretical subjects and research objects, and explores possible ways to resolve the paradox in the perspectives of phenomenology, hermeneutics and critical theory. The study shows that the essence of the self-referential paradox is the one-dimensional colonization of the human spiritual world by modern instrumental rationality. Only by reconstructing the relationship between theoretical rationality and practical rationality can a more inclusive philosophical foundation be laid for economics.