What is Reflective Judgment

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss important ethical aspects of online communication of global scope. We focus particularly on procedural fundamentalism as the most significant threat to free and open communication today. By contrast, it is argued that deliberation models a desirable form of communication, based in both Habermasian discourse ethics, but also rhetoric along with a plurality of communicative styles, as long as they satisfy procedural constraints of deliberation. The importance of judgments that transcend purely private conditions is discussed by reference to reflective judgments aiming at enlarged thinking - to think from the standpoint of everyone else. It is concluded that it is preferable to develop Internet technologies that stimulate imaginative powers in order to make people better informed of knowledge of counterfactual circumstances. Such knowledge may work as an impediment against fundamentalist knowledge.