1. CHALLENGES AND CRISES OF A HERMENEUTIC ETHIC1The challenge of a hermeneutic ethic consists in making the analysis of interpretive dialogue fruitful for an approach that guides human action. Now the reconstruction of interpretation as a dialogue about the subject matter, against the backdrop of traditional background knowledge, oriented toward the subject matter and aiming at a productive advancement of one's understanding thereof, surely entails normative features. The hermeneutic recognition of the other is here entailed as a contextually sensitive, potentially self-transformative, and mutually respectful undertaking. The alterity of the other is indeed recognized as a strong voice, as the cognitive expression of someone about something of shared interest. The reconstruction of the unavoidable investment of one's prejudgments into the process, which nonetheless avails the other a space in-between in which alternative views and perspectives are able to be articulated, leads to a form of recognition that avoids abstract respect or individualized empathy; rather, the other appears as a partner, a mutual co-self, an other who is both different and close enough to be understood, to be taken seriously, to be taken into account-however long it may take to reconstruct the others background beliefs and assumptions.The emphasis on the processual and yet truth-oriented understanding overcomes the abstract opposition between relativism and objectivism-and yet, with regard to an ethic, a first serious problem may seem to emerge. If all understanding is subject to a contextual and transformative background understanding, and the recognition of views pertaining to the subject matter is itself subject to that very same process, no trans-interpretive criteria of rightness or truth may seem possible. The important Gadamerian 'value' of openness, which is declared to be the only or at least the major orientation that is required in interpretation (after the deconstruction of pseudo-objectivistic methods), could open doors to accepting any mode of understanding or practice.2 The emphasis on the interpreter's unavoidable embeddedness in a host of background assumptions and practices curtails any attempt to develop, or even aim for, interpretation-transcendent or even transcendental values or norms. Indeed, the idea of criteria, as the term nicely suggests, derives from crisis, from a lack of trust in the substantive forms of understanding that can themselves carry the interpreter into the dialogical event in which the other's voice will be heard and lead to understanding. Gadamer declares futile, even ridiculous, any posture of philosophers to tell others what to do, how to behave: what is at stake in hermeneutics is the ontological understanding of what 'is,' not an abstract and disconnected, presumptuous as much as futile'ought.'3The alleged problem of the lack of criteria does not seem alleviated by the emphasis on the receptivity and dependency of the interpreting agent on the event of tradition ( Uberlieferungsgeschehen). Indeed, tradition is seen as an all-encompassing event the true grasp of which corrects the enlightenment's over-stating of subjective autonomy. Interpretation is integration, the holistic moving into tradition, which while transformatively reproduced through dialogical truth-oriented encounters, nonetheless dispenses with subjectivity, whose truth is but 'a flickering' in the event of interpretive understanding.4 The insight into the unavoidable and productive dependency of interpretive acts on prior shared contexts of life becomes the Achilles' heel of an ethic that requires some space for moral agency. If we forego that'only a God may save us now' (Heidegger),5 we have to show how the embeddedness of interpreting agents within transsubjective contexts does not lead to the critical dismantling of any ethic as such.This situation presents us with an immanent critique, if we accept that dialogical understanding is essentially an expressive intersubjective articulation of the truth of the subject matter-and thus always essentially dependent on the background for its possibility of articulation. …