ABSTRACT
In this chapter I draw on Edmund Husserl’s accounts of doxical, axiological, and practical reason in order to ask if it is possible to have objective knowledge of values and rational actions. With this in mind, I discuss Husserl’s concept of “objectivity” [Objektivität] and argue that there is a sense in which we can claim that certain values have an authenticity or rationality that could, in principle, be acknowledged by anyone. However, since both the authenticity of values and the rationality of actions depend on context, I argue that their objectivity can only be provisional and can only be achieved through dialogue. The last part of the chapter is devoted to several challenges that context dependence poses to the possibility of achieving objective knowledge in the axiological and practical domains. Among them, the condition of belonging to a culture that is different from other cultures is particularly important. I close by discussing some interesting remarks of Luis Villoro, who contends that we often grasp values by way of experiencing a lacking. Villoro concludes that people who lack certain goods are more sensitive to the value of those goods than people that enjoy them. Since everyone lives under different particular circumstances and everyone lacks different particular goods, this has important implications for the claim that objective knowledge of values and rational actions cannot be obtained unilaterally and must be achieved through dialogue.
