Radical Choice and Moral Theory

In this work, the author approaches the crucial question of moral theory - the "ought-is" problem - via communicative argumentation. Moving to the end of Habermass's conception of the communicative action, he introduces the concept of "radical choice" as the key to the transition from the descriptive to the normative. Phenomenological subjectivity of the intersubjective life-world is being vindicated as the "arch-value" of all derivative values, or the first principle for all normative precepts. The author - a young native Chinese lately trained in a Western university - delineates a route along which the philosophical question of justification raised in the analytic tradition can be answered on the basis of phenomenology. A noteworthy contribution to the interplay between the Anglo-American and Continental schools of philosophy.