Here I am interested in explaining some reasoning derived from the dialogue between Apel and Dussel, which allow us to understand the criterion or material principle from which Dussel contra argued the challenges and scope of discursive ethics. For the Latin American thinker, it is the criterion of life, a criterion that, in reality, had always been presupposed in the entire development of the ethics of Latin American liberation since its first version in 1973. I am going to base myself mainly on the work Ethics of Discourse and Ethics of Liberation, specifically in his works entitled: "The introduction of the Transformation of the philosophy of K.O. Apel and the philosophy of liberation", as well as "The reason of the Other. The act of interpellation as speaks”, where the criticism was made from the Other, from which it has been excluded from the communication community and from a community of economic life on which it had to be complementary with discursive ethics. These leads, on the one hand, to the Dusselian differentiation between validity and truth as aspects that are complementary and necessary, both as differentiated moments of the same process that implies ensuring human life. On the other hand, the dialogue between both ethics allows us to rethink the current and global situation of the coronavirus pandemic because the human fight for survival did not begin with the arrival of COVID-19, but with the exclusion of countless communities of life ago several decades
