The "Cape Horn" of Scheler's Ethics (original) (raw)

This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral and the Simply Normative” at the Max Scheler Society of North America at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Pasadena, California, on March 25, 2004, and subsequently published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 121-143. Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved. This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question. Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good. Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.