Roman Ingarden’s Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Two publications of Roman Ingarden deal directly and exclusively with ethical problems: ‘An Inquiry into Moral Values’¹ (this is almost an exact record of one of his lectures on ethics held at the Jagiellonian University in 1961/62) and Ueber die Verantwortung ² (an extended version of his lecture delivered at the International Philosophical Congress in Vienna in 1968). There are two more essays closely connected with those problems: ‘Remarks on the Relativity of Values’ (Uwagi o względ-ności wartości)³ and ‘What We Do Not Know about Values’ (Czego nie wiemy o wartoiściach); though they are devoted to the general theory of value, many considerations in them refer to the moral values. The way in which Ingarden approached ethics, its subject and aims, allows us to include his considerations on ontology and epistemology to the reconstruction on his ethics. To those materials there may be added several chapters from the book The Controversy about the Existence of the World ⁴ and two articles: ‘Man and His Reality’ (Człowiek i jego rzeczywistość)⁵ as well as ‘Man and Time’⁶. As to the above-mentioned lectures, only one of them was authorized and published by the author.