Open Standard, Open Judgment and Value Revision in Karl Popper’s Moral Philosophy

Abstract

In this chapter, I attempt to extract an ethics of the self from the philosophy of Karl Popper in the light of the ethics of subjectivity. For clarity, a subjectivist ethics may be viewed as implying that the standards for acting as well as judging actions are those of the individual. This may be taken to be informed by the understanding that while, on the one hand, ethics has to do with the moral evaluation of character and conduct,¹ on the other, by “subjectivity,” reference is made to the condition of the self’s possession of perspectives, experiences, feelings, desires — all of which influence and inform the self’s action as well as judgments about reality. As such, subjectivity presupposes a subject, one that experiences all the phenomena that makes up and produces the self.² Given the foregoing understanding, my attempt of a construction Popper’s moral philosophy is built on the foundation of his idea of critical rationalism, which finds expression in his ideas of open society, anti-historicism and falsificationism. To be sure, these ideas also form the basis of his discourse on knowledge.