Abstract
In addressing the question at issue, I consider (1) Scheler’s distinction between Kant’s “ethics of duty” and his own “ethics of insight”; (2) Kant’s weakened conceptions of moral virtue and vice, which are roughly equivalent to Aristotle’s encratês and akratês, disqualify his ethic as a classical ethic of virtue; (3) Scheler’s phenomenological articulation of moral virtue as a moral disposition (Gesinnung); and (4) whether Scheler develops his theory so as to provide anything like a view of “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos,” which Alasdair Maclntyre finds in classical virtue-ethics. I conclude that Scheler’s ethic has some of the basic features of classical ethics of virtue, but also some of the basic difficulties of “post-aretaic” ethics.
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References
A helpful collection of essays on this development with a good bibliography can be found in Robert Kruschwitz and Robert Roberts, eds., The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character ( Belmont: Wadsworth, 1986 ).
William Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. ( Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973 ), 63–67.
G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” (1958) in Collected Philosophical Papers, II: Ethics, Religion and Politics ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981 ), 26–42.
This does not mean that an ethics of virtue must necessarily assume a “foundationalist” form. There is no reason why an ethics of virtue could not assume, say, a “coherentist” form of argument.
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981 ). Needless to say, other works of less celebrity dealing with the same sorts of issues could be mentioned that predate Maclntyre’s, such as James Wallace’s Virtues and Vices ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978 ).
Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, II: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1954), trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), hereafter cited as “F” followed by pagination, respectively, of the German and English editions (e.g., “F, 49/26”).
I realize that an ethics of “insight” or “intuition” is one thing, and that an ethics of “virtue” could turn out to be another. But my expectation is that by attending closely to how Scheler contrasts Kant’s ethics to his own, we may find ourselves hearing something very much like a contrast between an ethics of duty and an ethics of virtue. Furthermore, I think this will be borne out by Scheler’s more thematic remarks that I shall examine in the latter portion of this paper.
Scheler’s principal account of “duty” is found in Chapter 4 of Formalismus, which is devoted to a comparison of “Value-Ethics and Ethics of Imperatives.” His criticisms of an ethics of duty, as he finds exemplified in Kantian ethics, is located in the first part of the chapter, in which he discusses at least four “Unsatisfactory Theories of the Origin of the Concept of Value and the Essence of Moral Facts.”
Scheler’s discussion of “The Autonomy of the Person” is found in the second part of Chapter 6 of Formalismus, beginning at F, 499/494 (but see esp. 503ff./498ff.).
Here Scheler is citing an expression used by Kant in Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, ed. Paul Menzer, Kants Gesammelte Schriften Vol. II (Berlin: Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1912 ), p. 81. Cf. Gordon Treash’s translation, The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God ( New York: Abaris Books, 1979 ), 194.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 1–10.
Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985), 217 (in “Appendix D: Kant”).
For Kant’s discussion of the moral “disposition” (Gesinnung), which he distinguishes from “executive will” or “choice” (Willkür) and “legislative will” (wille), see the opening chapters of his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
The issues underlying the famous controversy between Kant and Schiller and their well-intentioned (but often misconceived) efforts at reconciling their views, have been made the subject of a fine, thoughtful study by Hans Reiner, Duty and Inclination: The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller, trans. Mark Santos ( The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983 ).
Schiller, On Grace and Dignity, first published in Neue Thalia (1793); reprinted in Schillers Philosophische Schriften und Gedichte, ed. Eugen Kühnemann, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1922), 130 (quoted in Reiner, 31).
Maclntyre, 54.
Maclntyre argues that after the teleological assumptions of Aristotelian physics were rejected, “reason” was no longer regarded—by Kant or Hume any more than by Calvin or Pascal—as capable of supplying a genuine comprehension of man’s true end. He writes: “reason for [Kant], as much as for Hume, discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics” (Ibid., 54).
F, 220/205. The “ought” here, it should be noted, needn’t be understood as bearing the imperative form of “duty,” but may be regarded as an “ideal” involving the possibility of supererogation. For Scheler’s distinction between the “ought of duty” and the “ideal ought,” see F, 218/203 and 224/210.
Eugene Kelly, Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall & Co., 1977 ), 112.
In Scheler’s terms, the “values of striving and willing” are founded on the “values of the central feeling-state,” which, in turn, are founded on the “values of the person.” For Scheler’s account, see esp. F, 370/358f.
For Scheler’s account of how persons are given, see F, 392ff./382ff., and Quentin Smith, “Scheler’s Stratification of Emotional Life and Strawson’s `Person,”’ Philosophical Studies (Ireland) 22 (1977), 103–127.
Against Scheler’s claim that moral values appear only through the realization of other non-moral values, I argue that moral values themselves represent a species of material values that may be realized. See Philip Blosser, “Moral and Nonmoral Values: A Problem in Scheler’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48.1 (September, 1987 ): 139–143.
In response to N. Hartmann, who denied that it is the task of ethics to offer prescriptions, Scheler writes: “Ultimately ethics is a `damned bloody affair,’ and if it can give me no directives concerning how `l’ `should’ live… then what is it?” (F, 23, n./xxxi, n. 14).
See Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Manfred S. Frings, ed. Kenneth W. Stikkers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 36; and Ronald F. Perrin, “A Commentary on Max Scheler’s Critique of the Kantian Ethic,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (August, 1974 ), 359.
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Blosser, P. (1993). Is Scheler’s Ethic An Ethic of Virtue?. In: Blosser, P., Shimomissé, E., Embree, L., Kojima, H. (eds) Japanese and Western Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8218-6_10
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