The controversy between Apel and Habermas about the fundamentattattation and the relatation between morality and law

Abstract

This paper investigates Apel’s reconstruction of the controversy between Habermas and Apel himself, about the fundamentation and the relation between morality and law as procedural discursive conception of practical philosophy. Thus, the objective is to show the – methodologically important – relation of philosophical discourse in the specific treatment of the architecture of discourse ethics. It is argued that the debate and controversy between the two programs of discourse ethics derive from the fundamentally different ways in which are developed the theme of the methodological relation between philosophical statements and those from the socio-reconstructive, empirical, sciences and that this difference in approach is relevant in each author’s different way of addressing morality and conceiving practical reason, which culminates in of the understanding of the latter as moral or non-prescriptive practical reason, as well as the problem of its unity and/or specification. For Apel, the determination of this methodological relation is important, since it is from this reflection that derives, in discursive theory, a scission between two fundamental modes of thinking the fundamentation and the relation between moral, law and politics.