Hans Joas om historieberättandets etik

"We cannot make plausible and defend our value commitments without telling stories – stories about the experiences from which our commitments arose, stories about other people’s experiences or about the consequences a violation of our values had in the past. Biographical, historical, and mythological narration in this sense are not just a matter of illustration for didactic purposes, but a necessary part of our self-understanding and of our communication about values. The insight that in the case of the communication about values a strict separation of genesis and validity is impossible should not lead to an exaggerated understanding of their separability in the case of cognitive and normative validity claims, but instead inspire us to take seriously the connection between narration and argumentation in all attempts to justify values. What we need is a structure of argumentation that is ‘genealogical’ because of the contingency of the genesis of values, but not ‘destructive’ in the way Nietzsche and Foucault thought it to be."

Hans Joas - Value Generalization. Limitations and Possibilities of a Communication about Values. s.91