ABSTRACT
What can moral theory do in a situation where the comprehensive consensus among all human beings that would alone justify universally valid principles of rational discourse is necessarily a counterfactual assumption? Doesn’t this lead to scepticism? I don’t think so. There are possibilities of rational discourse under these circumstances of insecurity. The fact that we cannot attain an ultimate foundation does not mean that everything is equally plausible. Some possibilities are arguably more plausible than others. The reference point for such considerations is Habermas’ paradigm of the ‘impartial standpoint’, which points to the imaginary ‘assent of a universal audience’.
