Habermas has always implied that discourse ethics contains or leads to a theory of democratic legitimation. Only recently, however, has he begun a systematic investigation of the political potential of discourse. He and much of the wider critical debate have focused in the past on discourse ethics as a moral philosophy - a cognitive ethics in the neo-Kantian tradition that sets out to articulate the modern moral point of view of impartiality. As a contribution to moral philosophy, Habermas often stresses that discourse ethics is more descriptive than normative, for it represents “a reconstruction of everyday intuitions underlying the impartial judgment of moral conflicts of action”

Drawing on language philosophy and an analysis of what we mean when we say such and such is morally right, Habermas concludes that what we mean is that we could redeem this claim in an ideal conversation. To put this another way, to believe something is right is to believe that we have good reasons to hold this position. To believe that we have good reasons entails the idea that given enough time, given interlocutors of goodwill, and given a constraint-free environment, everyone would come to the same conclusion as we have. Thus, impartial judgments are judgments that would gain universal agreement in an ideal communication community.