Introductory remarks on the context of Tugendhat’s Lecture on Adam Smith

Ernst Tugendhat’s ‘Universalistically approved intersubjective attitudes: Adam Smith’ is the fifteenth lecture in his Vorlesungen über Ethik. This volume comprises eighteen lectures based on the last lecture course Ernst Tugendhat taught at the Freie Universität Berlin, during the Wintersemester 1991/1992. In Lectures 1-5 Tugendhat presents what he then considered the most plausible notion of the morally good1 and defends its claim to universal validity: morally good is what can or could be accepted as good by everybody. On this point, the contractarian (Hobbes 1985, Locke 1990, Rousseau 1988) and the Kantian philosophical traditions agree. But they disagree on the justification of the corresponding moral norms, not only with respect to the procedures of justification but also with respect to the kind of justification needed.