ABSTRACT
The claim that ethics is more hospitable to transcendental reasoning than is epistemology or metaphysics might gain support from the consideration that epistemic constraints on truth are more plausible for moral discourse than for many non-moral domains of discourse. This chapter focuses on the theoretical setting that would have to be established in order for transcendental arguments that appeal to claims concerning the performative inconsistency of specific assertion attempts to have some prospects of success in ethics. This setting, would have to contain at least three elements: a notion of global, as opposed to local, performative inconsistency, an epistemic constraint on truth for moral statements, and a principle to the effect that moral propositions which are such that an attempt to assert them leads to a global performative inconsistency fail to meet the epistemic constraint, hence fail to be true. These three elements stand in need of independent justification.
