Value Ethics and Experience

Abstract

When we want to speak of the foundations of an ethics, it seems to me that one of the first problems that we have to face up to is to decide what we mean by founding. In the philosophical sense, surely, founding one or more judgments means to justify them, that is to say, it means to explain them by tracing them back to or deriving them from more evident judgments, deriving them from judgments that express more originary evidence. The ideal case, indeed, would be to derive such judgments from absolute evidence that can be expressed in a perfectly rigorous manner even in its selfsame formulation. But I do not think that this is quite as easy to achieve; or, rather, I have the distinct impression that in present conditions it is humanly impossible. What seems absolutely evident to us today may no longer appear quite as obvious tomorrow. We are not participating in a quiz program where the emcee will eventually tell us whether “our answer is correct” or otherwise. We are embarked on a boat that we are obliged to repair and perfect little by little while we ply the seven seas, without ever getting the chance of pulling it up on dry land and entrusting it to a shipyard. In such circumstances one simply does the best one can.