Abstract
The concept of proto-ethics is missing in ethical theory. It refers to a domain that is evaluative in an ethically-relevant sense, but falls short of moral prescriptivity. In this paper I explore the characteristics of the proto-ethical with an emphasis on the role of mood and affect, especially with reference to Heidegger’s concept of attunement (Befiendlichkeit). I explain the sense in which the moody aspect of human existence forms necessary (but insufficient) conditions for the possibility and intelligibility of ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example Warnock (1969). The criticism of ethical formalism as empty goes back to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and continues into virtually any contemporary metaethical criticism of Kantian constructivism.
- 2.
My claim will be that the idea of humanity is already evaluative and serves as a meaning-conferring background for ethical theory. Any ethical consideration of or reliance on the notions of human dignity, respect for persons, love for humankind, etc. (including the ethics that follows from Kant’s formulation of “Humanity as End in Itself”), must include an—at least implicit—reference to a philosophical anthropology of humanity, that is, to the basic determinants of human existence. Hence, damage to the image or notion of what it is to be human inevitably entails ethical consequences.
- 3.
Moreover, these interpretations are not arbitrary: moods express how things have become for one, they embody the history of Dasein and its social milieu.
- 4.
For this point see Golomb (1995: 202).
- 5.
Guignon (2003: 189).
- 6.
The question of whether the idea of authenticity in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s ontologies is not an unlawful transgression into ethics has been a source of controversy. A well-developed idea of proto-ethics may offer an answer by explaining away the dichotomy between ethics and ontology.
- 7.
In discussing normativity below we will see an important qualification to this.
- 8.
This, according to Nietzsche, is what one’s conscience commands (Nietzsche 1974: 270).
- 9.
Sartre 1958: esp. part 3, ch. 1, sec. IV.
- 10.
Such valence, determined pre-reflectively by affect, can be termed “existential value.”
- 11.
For a thorough discussion of this point see Cohen (2008). A different rendition of an ethical idea of the infinite distance of “the other” (versus the “proximity” of things) is found in Emmanuel Levinas’ fundamental distinction between the ontological and the transcendent (Levinas 1969). Kant too recognizes distance as the mark of respect (Kant 1996: 198).
- 12.
This understanding of respect is of course not from Being and Time or Being and Nothingness.
- 13.
The view that the “fact” of humanity is constituted via an evaluative stance is not a peculiarly “continental” idea. A similar insight is expressed by Daniel Dennett, who writes that “it is not the case that once we have established the objective fact that something is a person, we treat him or her or it in a certain way, but that our treating him or her or it in this certain way is somehow and to some extent constitutive of its being a person.” See Dennett (1978: 270).
- 14.
Nor does the restriction on the scope of the authority of ethics entail a diminishment in the commanding nature of ethical imperatives—what commands necessarily for any human creature has sufficient, satisfactory authority as a binding imperative. The different senses of categoricity that these distinctions entail deserve separate discussion.
- 15.
A parallel difficulty in accepting the notion of proto-ethics concerns its maladjustment to the map of contemporary metaethical approaches. At issue is the idea of the autonomy of ethics. The various strands of reductive naturalism, on the one hand, deny such autonomy, saying there are no peculiarly moral facts, properties, or states of affairs that cannot be reduced to non-moral ones. On the other side of the divide are theories that affirm the autonomy of the moral domain, such as moral intuitionism, Kantian constructivism, non-cognitivism, and arguably non-reductive naturalist realism. The idea of the proto-ethical falls in between those two general approaches: whether the empirical and the ethical completely overlap or whether there is an infinite gap between them—in both cases no unique place is left for preliminaries to ethics. Each of these metaethical theories faces profound theoretical challenges, however; the exploration of the notion of proto-ethics may show a way out of that metaethical impasse.
- 16.
To state the obvious: the existential-ontological picture does not adopt the Humean philosophical anthropology, as do most metaethical theories (it rests on a conception of persons as “ek-sistents”).
- 17.
The primordial disclosive character of moods stands in stark opposition to the objectivity-thwarting role assigned to them throughout most of the history of philosophy.
- 18.
While I find Gibbard’s terminology helpful, this should not imply any further adoption of his metaethical position.
- 19.
Otherwise we find ourselves facing the famous problem of Plato’s Meno.
- 20.
This fits with the very sensible intuition that we cannot be wholesale wrong about all our moral intuitions (this prevalent conviction underlies, for example, the important idea of “reflective equilibrium” in ethics).
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Cohen, S. (2011). The Proto-Ethical Dimension of Moods. In: Kenaan, H., Ferber, I. (eds) Philosophy's Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 63. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1503-5_12
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