Abstract

In this article the challenge of a pluralist ethics presented by Arnold Gehlen in his book Moral und Hypermoral [Morality and Hypermorality] is examined by attempting to find out what might still be worth preserving after Jürgen Habermas’s critical objections to the text in his “Arnold Gehlen: Imitation Substantiality” (1970). To this end the basic assumptions of Gehlen’s pluralist ethics are briefly presented (1), before going on to summarizing Habermas’s central, and largely convincing, objections to this ethics (2), in order, finally, to reintroduce Gehlen’s pluralism as a critique of Habermas’s monist discourse ethics (3). The core idea is to defend the pluralistic intuition of Gehlen against his own theoretical consequences and against the monism of discourse ethics