Konkrete Vernünftigkeit

Charles S. Peirce is known mainly for his studies of semiotics, logic and epistemology. Up to now however there had been no coherent analysis of the conception of his pragmatistic ethics. Nicola Erny analyzes the systematic relevance and the theoretical approaches to justification in Peirce's conception of ethics. In an analogy to the epistemological construction of a final consensual statement, Peirce does not by any means portray the long-term moral objective ( summum bonum) as the final goal of moral progress. This is a dynamic principle which, without a definition of its content, represents the ideal of concrete reasonableness. In this respect the summum bonum marks an ideal limit for moral action in a historical process of the increasing concretization of reasonableness.