Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

Introduction

Scheler published the work in two parts in 1913 and 1916 in Husserl’s Jahrbuch; its subtitle calls it a new attempt to found an ethical personalism. Kant had held that any ethics based on content must rest on inclinations and therefore be merely empirical. Scheler replies that values are objective qualities, given a priori in feeling, and form a ranking from the agreeable through vital and spiritual values to the holy; preferring the higher value is morally good. The person, he argues, is neither a thing nor a substance but the unity of its acts. Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, wrote his habilitation thesis on whether Christian ethics could be built on Scheler’s system.

Connections

Builds on

• Logical Investigations1900 · Edmund Husserl

Criticizes

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals1785 · Immanuel Kant