In previous chapters we studied Husserl's account of fundamental structures of consciousness and their correlation, in intentionality, with fundamental structures of things in the world. For Husserl, we thereby “constitute” various types of object in various forms of experience. Our experience forms knowledge of objects and of facts when our judgments are based in evident or intuitive experience. However, we “constitute” objects not only as having factual properties (species, spatiotemporal location, and so on), but also as having values. And we “constitute” actions as having moral values. In this chapter we consider Husserl's views on the nature of values, including their place in our experience and in the world. We focus on Husserl's ideas about ethics, addressing the phenomenological and ontological foundations of values in general and moral values in particular, and considering the place of Husserl's views on ethics in his overall philosophical system. On some points Husserl's ethical views are less explicit than his views on other matters, so we shall be involved in a project of reconstruction. Ultimately, we shall consider the implications of Husserlian views for contemporary “construc-tivist” approaches to ethics – in which values are somehow constructed in activities of will or reason.
Husserl frequently writes in passing about values, about our experience of values amid things in the life-world. But what exactly are Husserl's views on ethics and the nature of values? What role do these views play in his philosophical system of logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and so on?
We have studied Husserl as one of the great systematic philosophers, along with Aristotle and Kant (and others). While Aristotle and Kant each developed a well-known ethical theory, with an associated political theory, Husserl is not widely known for contributions to ethical or political theory. Yet he lectured extensively, over a period of many years, on ethics and foundational issues about the nature of values. Texts of some of his lectures are gathered in a posthumous volume titled, in English translation, Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory 1908–1914 (Husserl 1908–14/1988, in German with no English translation yet). In his primary writings, Husserl addresses the character of normative disciplines, including ethics, already in the Prolegomena of the Logical Investigations (1900–1) (§§14–16), whence he argues that logic is not a normative discipline (concerning how we should reason). In later works, he addresses values and moral phenomena amidst phenomenological analyses of perception, action, personhood, intersubjectivity, and culture: in Ideas I (1913), Ideas II (1912), and the Crisis (1935–8). Accordingly, Husserl's philosophical system explicitly appraises the nature of values and their role in our experience and in the world overall. Thus, his conception of the life-world includes values, his account of the region Culture (Geist) addresses interpersonal interactions and morality, and his lectures on ethics assess the objectivity of values and their place in phenomenology and in formal ontology. Indeed, his phenomenological analysis of our “constitution” of things in the world around us – linking objectivity, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity (as emphasized in Chapter 9) – applies to values as well as “facts” (non-normative “objectivities”). Furthermore, his account of empathy – how we experience others – has important implications for both ethical and political theory. Husserl also wrote a great deal about aesthetics, drawing on his phenomenology of perception, empathy, and varieties of aesthetic experience. We'll focus here, in any event, on ethics and the nature of values. Our task is to reconstruct, in a systematic way, Husserl's views on values and ethics, bearing in mind his overall philosophical system and his penchant for system-building. (Melle 2002 presents an illuminating account of Husserl's views on ethics in different periods of Husserl's career. Further studies of phenomenology and ethics, looking to Husserlian phenomenology, are found in Mandelbaum 1955; Embree et al. 1997; Drummond and Embree 2002; and Mensch 2003. Husserl's views on aesthetics appear in Husserliana XXIII (Intersubjectivität I). On the phenomenology of aesthetic experience in film, applying Husserlian theory to cinematic representation, see Casebier 1991. On aesthetic theory of literature, assessing the role of intentionality in relation to author and reader, see Thomasson 1998, developing views with roots in Husserl and Ingarden.)
Ethics is the theory (or account) of how we should live, the theory of right and wrong action, moral obligation or duty, moral and human rights, good and bad character, and so on. Philosophers sometimes divide ethics into normative ethics and metaethics. Normative ethics addresses norms that specify which actions are right, wrong, obligatory, prohibited, and so on: such norms as the Bible's Ten Commandments (“Do not steal,” “Honor your father and your mother,”…), or the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), or the Buddha's Eightfold Path (“Practice compassion by following the eight ways of Right Views, Right Intent, Right Conduct,… ”). By contrast, metaethics studies the nature of ethics itself. “Meta” means “with” in Greek; hence metaethics is a discipline cognate to ethics, as metalogic is cognate to logic. (We can also say, with Aristotelian philosophy, that metaphysics is cognate to physics; unfortunately, a narrow and polemical use of the term has also developed, where “metaphysics” exceeds the bounds of natural science and empirical knowledge.) Metaethics may analyze moral discourse, considering what we mean by terms such as “good” or “right” or “obligatory”; or it may analyze our concepts of what is good or right or obligatory; or in a more Platonic vein it may study the ideal forms or essences of Good or Right or Obligation. The status of moral values may be considered one type of metaethical question: is there a fundamental divide between facts and values – where do values fit into the order of the world? Moreover, the foundations or origins of values would fall under some conceptions of metaethics – and there lie our concerns. Husserl himself speaks of foundations of normative disciplines, and so of normative propositions, contrasting foundational principles of ethics (say, Kant's categorical imperative, “Act only on a maxim you could will to become a universal law”) with principles of “normative ethics” (“A soldier should be brave”) (Logical Investigations, Prolegomena, §14). Thus, we ask where values come from: are values objective features of the world (as Plato held)? Or are moral precepts products of God's will (as are the Ten Commandments, literally handed down to Moses)? Or do ethical values come into being only through our acts of willing in appropriate ways (as Kant and Sartre held)? Or do values emerge only with our collective agreement (as social contract theories of political values hold, following Hobbes and Rousseau)?
Husserl's discussions of ethics center largely on foundational theories about values, rather than on specific norms (“Do not lie,” “Love your neighbor”). Our concern, accordingly, is to sketch Husserl's account of the foundations of ethics, including the essence of values, their place in the world, their relation to non-normative properties of things, and their relation to various forms of intentional experience, especially choosing or willing a course of action. Given Husserl's system of phenomenology, ontology, logic, and so on, his conception of the foundations of ethics, or of moral values, will be distinctive. Given Husserl's conception of “foundation” in the sense of Fundierung or ontological dependence, and given his conception of “constitution,” a Husserlian conception of the foundations of ethics or of ethical norms will not be on the same page as what we might draw from prior models of the foundations of morality. Looking toward relevant models, however, we shall consider the implications of Husserlian ideas for contemporary “constructivist” ethical and political theories, according to which values are constructed as we desire, deliberate, and will. Husserl's phenom-enological analysis of “constitution,” I believe, can serve to clarify and deepen this “constructivist” approach to the foundations of ethical imperatives. (For discussions of Husserl's views in relation to classical themes in ethics, see three essays in Drummond and Embree 2002: Melle 2002 on Husserl's views on ethics and values, Drummond on Aristotelian ethics vis-à-vis phenomenology, and Crowell on Kantian ethics vis-à-vis phenomenology. Kant's ethics, or metaethics, is stated succinctly in Kant 1785/1959, a text relevant to our present study. The literature on ethics per se is huge, but for our purposes the reader might well see the studies in Rawls 2000, where one of the great ethical-political theorists of our time reflects on key issues in the history of ethics. Korsgaard 1996 pursues the foundations of moral value, or what makes moral claims normative, in the character of the will, reflecting on Kantian principles and on the political theory in Rawls 1971/1999, restated in Rawls 2001.)
What, then, are Husserl's particular views on ethics? Where Plato held that values are objective forms defining The Good itself, Husserl addressed the objectivity of ethics by analogy with the objectivity of logic. The goodness of a person, the rightness of an action, or the justice of a decision – such values are objective, in that they are there to be agreed upon by everyone in the right circumstances. And yet values, like other properties of things, are “constituted” in our experience: notably, in our willing to do the good or right thing and to do so for good reasons and motives. In that way, values are inherently related to subjective experience. And still, values are intersubjectively accessible, and we are accountable for the values we “constitute.”
When philosophers seek foundations for ethics or for moral values, what exactly are they seeking? Indeed, what is meant by “foundations” in ethical matters? The answers are by no means clear, and would seem to vary across different ethical theories. For the Platonist, moral values are founded in objective ideals; for the utilitarian, in the balance of pleasure over pain; for the Kantian, in a basic principle, the categorical imperative; for a certain theological view, in the will of God, say, as passed down in the Ten Commandments. As we shall consider, Husserl would seem to approach the question of foundations with a distinctive conception of foundation: recall his conception of “founding” (Fundierung), or ontological dependence. How is this notion applied or modified to deal with values? Initially, as we shall see, Husserl holds that values in a given domain are founded in what he calls a “ground norm” (Grundnorm). Our task is to try to ferret out Husserl's distinctive conception of foundation in relation to moral values.
Husserl addresses the foundations of ethics early in the Logical Investigations (1900–1). In the Prolegomena to Pure Logic (§§14–16), he outlines a theory of “normative sciences,” including systems of ethics, and their relation to “theoretical sciences.” Recall that, for Husserl, pure logic is the theory of theories or sciences (Prolegomena, §§62–72), where pure logic as a theoretical discipline is contrasted with logic as a “practical” or normative study of how we ought to reason (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Husserl has his eye on ethics, then, already in his early study of logic, on the way to his conception of phenomenology.
A normative discipline or science, Husserl says, propounds principles about what is “good” or “should be” in a given domain – evaluations such as “A soldier should be brave,” or alternatively “A good soldier is brave” (Prolegomena, §14). More specifically, a system of ethics deals with what is morally good, or what one morally should or ought to do. Again, a political system specifies what sort of political organization for a society is good or just, or how things should be in a body politic. And an aesthetics concerns what is good in art, literature, architecture, or what things should be like in art, and so on. Now, \Husserl holds that “each normative… discipline… presupposes one or more theoretical disciplines as its foundation or fundament [Fundament], in the sense, namely, that it must have a theoretical content free from all normativizing [Normierung]” (§16, my translation). In a prosaic example (not in Husserl's text), the normative proposition “This is a good knife” presupposes the theoretical proposition “This is a knife,” and the normative proposition “A good knife is sharp” presupposes propositions in the theory of knives, such as “A knife has a blade.”Again, the normative claim “A soldier should be brave” presupposes theoretical claims about soldiering, such as “A soldier follows orders,” “A soldier uses weapons,” and so forth. Husserl thus assumes that an object's having a value-property depends on its having non-evaluative properties: as other philosophers would later say, goodness “supervenes” on natural properties. But Husserl goes on to a more interesting doctrine about the foundation of values.
A normative science ascribes value-properties, or norms, to objects in a given domain (for soldiers, being a good or bad soldier) – typically including comparative evaluations of better or worse. The norms for a domain, Husserl says, form “a closed group.” For this group of norms, Husserl holds, there is a most basic norm, a “ground norm” (Grundnorm), that governs the relevant features carrying value. The ground norm for a domain, Husserl holds, is not strictly “normative,” but rather “defines” the value-range for that domain. In Husserl's opaque but intriguing formulation:
The constitutive contents of positive and relative value-predicates [for objects in a given sphere] are so to speak the measuring units [messenden Einheiten], according to which we measure objects of the relevant sphere.
The totality of these norms [for a given domain or sphere of objects] obviously forms a closed group determined through fundamental valuation. The normative proposition which places a general ordering on the objects in the sphere, that they shall suffice to the greatest possible extent for the constitutive features of the positive value-predicates, has marked out a position in every group of norms belonging together, and can be indicated as the ground norm [Grundnorm]. This role is played, e.g., by the categorical imperative in the group of normative propositions which make up Kant's ethics, as [it is] by the principle of the “greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number” in the ethics of the utilitarians.
The ground norm is the correlate of the definition of “good” and “better” in the sense in question. It tells us on what ground (ground value) all normativizing must be conducted, and does not therefore present a normative proposition in the authentic sense. The relationship of the ground norm to the authentically normative propositions is analogous to that between the so-called definitions of the number-series and the theorems – always referred back to these – about numerical relations in arithmetic. One could also here indicate the ground norm as a “definition” of the standard concept of good – e.g. of the morally good – wherewith the ordinary logical concept of definition would be left aside.
(Prolegomena, §14, my translation)
Evidently, Husserl conceives ground norms as a special type of formal measures that define membership in a group of substantive or material norms for a domain or sphere of objects – much as formal essences (Individual, Property, State of Affairs) define forms of objects in a material domain (Nature, Consciousness, Culture). (Recall Chapter 4 on formal and material essences.) Thus, the ground norm for a group of norms, for objects in a given domain, places those norms in that group, thereby defining relevant values carried by objects in the domain. The norms for a domain of objects are in this way founded on or by the ground norm. The ground norm is formal in the sense that it applies to all norms in that domain (though not to norms in other domains). Strictly speaking, ground norms are not themselves “normative,” as they do not ascribe substantive values, but instead form “a ‘definition’ of the standard concept of good” – a “definition” of “normativity” for values ascribed in “authentically normative propositions.” Accordingly, in the quotation just given, Husserl first speaks of the ground norm as the “normative proposition” that grounds the norms or “value-predicates” in a given sphere; but then, speaking more strictly, he says the ground norm, the grounding proposition, does not “present a normative proposition in the authentic sense.”
“Norms” are values (corresponding to “value-predicates”), and values are of many types. Looking to ethical theory, notice how Husserl separates Kantian ethics and utilitarian ethics. In Husserl's view, these ethical systems define different types of moral values. We are not looking at competing theories of the foundations of the same moral values: we are looking at distinct spheres of norms, distinct because they are grounded in different “ground norms.” What is “good” because it brings pleasure or well-being, and so is morally praiseworthy, is quite different from what is “good” because it is willed in the correct way, and so is morally obligatory. Indeed, contemporary ethical theories often worry about how to define the appropriate range of moral predications (“good,” “evil,” “obligatory,” “permissible,” “impermissible,” and so on). But how, in Husserl's approach, are we to conceive of the foundations of moral values, whichever sphere of values we address?
As the above passage suggests, Kantian ethics is a useful case study for Husserl's conception of what would count as the foundations of ethics or of moral values (even though Husserl is critical of Kantian ethics in the end). In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785/1959), Kant famously argued that moral principles have a “foundation” in a single basic principle he called the categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” We commonly ask, “What if everyone did this?,” but Kant elaborates that test in more articulate terms. For Kant, the foundation of moral evaluation for any particular action lies in the way that the agent's will — guided by practical reason about what to do – is constrained by this basic principle. Suppose I tell a lie in order to gain a sum of money. My action is effected through my will to lie in order to gain money, that is, I will to act in accord with the maxim “I should lie if I seek to gain money.”This “hypothetical” imperative or maxim guides my action, as I reason that I will now tell a lie since it will bring me remuneration. According to Kant, this action is morally wrong because it fails the test of the categorical imperative: I could not rationally will that the maxim guiding my will become a universal law, that is, a principle that anyone else could justifiably follow in similar pursuit of money. How, then, would the foundation of Kantian ethics be developed in terms of Husserl's theory of nor-mativity?
Kantian ethics is a normative science, in Husserl's sense. The domain of this normative science is the sphere of rational human actions performed by will. An action is morally good, according to Kantian ethics, just in case it is performed in accord with a good will. And, for Kant, a good will is a volition formed in accord with the categorical imperative “Act only on that maxim…. ” On Husserl's theory of the foundation of moral values, then, the categorical imperative propounds the ground norm of Kantian ethics. But this proposition, “Act only on that maxim…,” is not strictly normative. It is not itself a normative proposition, saying what one should or should not do – even though Kant formulates it, misleadingly, as an imperative. Rather, it constrains, or “defines,” and so serves to generate genuinely normative propositions such as “Do not lie” or “Treat your neighbor with kindness.” We might say the categorical imperative is a metanormative or metaethical proposition: a proposition that itself defines the norms asserted in properly normative ethical propositions such as “Do not lie” or “Treat your neighbor with kindness.” But what sort of “definition” is this?
What is the analogy Husserl draws with “definition” in arithmetic? Suppose the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4,…) are defined as follows:
1 is a number.
If n is a number, then n + 1 is a number.
This is not a logical construct or dictionary definition (“A bachelor is an unmarried adult male”), but rather a formula that generates the natural numbers by applying a criterion, indeed, a metric: being greater by 1. Similarly, Husserl holds, the categorical imperative in Kantian ethics serves as a founding “measure” that defines norma-tivity for moral propositions. Similarly, staying with the metric metaphor, we might say the standard meter stick in Paris (in the old days of international standards) is not itself measured as one meter long, but rather serves as a measure – a “measuring unit” (in Husserl's phrase) – that generates measurements of length in meters: being so many lengths of the standard stick.Accordingly, we may say the categorical imperative is a metanormative or metaethical proposition, playing off the post-Husserlian conception of metaethics in the sense of a theory of the foundations of ethics.
A further analogy, I suggest, lies with post-Husserlian metalogic. Following Tarski's semantic conception of truth (Tarski 1944/2001), logicians formulate a truth definition along the following lines (for, here, a language L including, inter alia, the conjunctive words “and,” “or,” “not”):
(T) A sentence S (in language L) is true if and only if –, where, for appropriate elementary forms of sentence S (in L):
“P and Q” is true if and only if “P” is true and “Q” is true.
“P or Q” is true if and only if either “P” is true or “Q” is true.
“It is not the case that P” is true if and only if “P” is not true. And so on.
A full Tarskian “definition” of truth for a language (L), following the schema T, depends on the specified syntax of the language in question.The point to observe here is that this “definition” serves to constrain, in a metalogical semantics for the language, the rules of inference in the language, for instance, the rule called Modus Ponens: “If P then Q. P. Therefore, Q.”The truth definition thus affords a semantic foundation for the validity of such logical rules of inference. In this way, if you will, the truth definition forms a complex ground proposition (compare: “ground norm”) for a given system of logic with a specified language. Where the rules of inference are logical, the truth definition is metalogical (compare: metanormative). Indeed, Tarski held that the truth of sentences in a given language must be formulated in a further language called the metalanguage of the first language. If we carry the analogy over to ethics, then we would say the categorical imperative is the metaethical foundation of Kantian ethics, formulated in a metalanguage for moral discourse. Thus, in a Husserlian metaethics, as I am conceiving it with an eye to Tarskian metalogic, we would give a normativity definition using a ground norm that defines moral values, and in the case of Kantian ethics the categorical imperative would play this role. What would such a “definition” of moral values look like?
Let us formulate the Kantian ground norm K – a variation on the Kantian categorical imperative – as follows:
(K) An action A by a person S in circumstance C is morally good or right
if and only if, in doing A in C:
S wills to do A in C and at the same time
S could reasonably (with practical consistency) will that anyone else wills to do a similar action in a similar circumstance.
Here in schema K is a normativity definition for actions performed within the relevant domain of values, that is, moral values pertaining to actions performed by human beings – volitional subjects who are embodied agents – whose will is autonomous and rational and subject to standards of practical consistency. My telling the truth in circumstance C is morally good precisely because my action meets the normativity conditions: I will to tell the truth in C and I could reasonably will that anyone else will to tell the truth in conditions similar to C. Strictly speaking, then, the ground norm K is stated in a language formally distinct from that of the normative ethical proposition “It is morally good or right that I tell the truth in circumstance C.” Whereas the normative language speaks of values of actions, the normativity definition K does not speak of these values themselves, but rather of what constrains the obtaining of these values, what “grounds” these values where carried by a particular action. And it is this grounding that morally justifies the particular action. To be strictly Kantian, the circumstance C involves the agent's aim as expressed in a hypothetical imperative, “I should do A if I want to achieve effect E.” But further consequences of A than E might be included in C if relevant to the moral evaluation. For instance, in assessing Kant's argument against lying, philosophers often insist on the relevance of further consequences – would telling the lie save someone's life? Of course, a utilitarian ethics would formulate a very different normativity definition, where the conditions of moral worth involve not the agent's will, but the actual overall consequences of the action. Notice also, following the comparison with a truth definition, that a definition of moral worth, along these lines, would need to map out the relevant features of moral evaluation – as it were, the “syntax” of moral human life.
To be clear, in the analogy between metaethics and metalogic, we were not yet addressing normativity in logic. As the Prolegomena to Pure Logic proceeds, Husserl distinguishes pure logic from practical logic. Practical logic is a normative discipline, saying, “One should reason in accord with Modus Ponens”; such norms concern how one should reason, where the domain of objects so normed is the set of acts of reasoning. By contrast, pure logic is a theoretical discipline, saying Modus Ponens characterizes an objectively valid form of entailment among ideal propositions. Pure logic thus provides a foundation for practical logic. But this is a step beyond the way in which a semantic truth definition provides a foundation for syntactic rules of inference in a logical language. The structure of syntax and semantics for a language together form a theoretical foundation for a normative practical system of logic concerning how one should reason. And, similarly, Husserl holds, the foundations of ethics form a theoretical discipline that grounds the normative discipline of a practical ethics that says, for example, “One should not lie.” That theoretical discipline is a metaethical theory that offers a definition of normativity for ethics. Unlike the case of logic, however, the norms “defined” in the metaethical theory are just that: norms, that is, values that guide the will in action, and so arise in practical or normative ethics.
Given Husserl's account of the foundations of ethics, we now see that Husserl offers an explicit theory of the “source of normativity” (to borrow the currently fashionable term used in Korsgaard 1996). In Husserl's own words: “The ground norm (or the ground value, the final end) determines, as we saw, the unity of a [normative] discipline; it is also that which introduces into all normative propositions the thought of normativity [Normierung, normativizing]” (Prolegomena, §16, my translation). Husserl's picture of the foundations of ethics is amplified in texts where he writes focally on ethics – in the Ethics lectures, to which we now turn. As we consider later on, Husserl's conception of the foundations of moral values also involves a further type of foundation in the “constitution” of values in consciousness – but that part of the Husserlian story must here wait in the wings.
Husserl gives his full attention to ethics in lecture courses. Some of these lectures are gathered in the volume Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory: 1908–1914 (Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908–14/1988, available only in German). The core of Husserl's theory of ethics, I submit, is the confluence of three themes: values are objective, yet values are “constituted” in acts of will, and moral values address others. Here we see, in Husserl's approach to ethics, his integration of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity.
In the Ethics lectures, Husserl distinguishes “pure” ethics from ethics as a “practical art” propounding specific ethical norms such as “Do not steal,” “Treat every person as an end, not a means,” and so on. For Husserl, pure ethics is a theoretical study of the foundations or “origins” of normative ethical judgments. Husserl's ethical theory would take its place in his overall philosophical system, tying into his views in logic, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology (recall Chapter 2). Indeed, Husserl's conception of pure logic shapes his conception of pure ethics. As he distinguishes pure logic from logic as a practical art where we develop specific rules of inference, so he distinguishes pure ethics from practical ethics where we craft specific ethical maxims (such as “Do not lie”). Husserl's phenomenology finds values all around us. For our experience regularly presents us with objects as bearing various types of value, for instance as we experience a gorgeous sunset, a beautiful poem, a sleek and responsive automobile, a wicked act of violence, a malicious look in another's eye. True to form, Husserl also addresses the ontology of values. For Husserl, values are objective features of things, but features of a unique type, features with their own categorial niche in the world: the category Value. (Recall Chapter 4 on categories.) Moral values, in particular, depend on the structure of will, emotion, practical reason, and interpersonal experience. So moral values are objective features of actions, but these values arguably depend on proper activities of will in connection with emotion and reason. Husserl's account of intersubjectivity in the life-world also has implications for ethics and politics, as many values reflect our empathic experience of others. We should keep in mind Husserl's formal/ material distinction, which he puts to work in logic, ontology, and phenomenology. Accordingly, we may see the distinction between pure and practical ethics as that between the “formal” and “material” aspects of moral value. If we judge “One should not lie,” that material practical norm is judged in accordance with the proper form of moral judgment. Thus, a Kantian pure ethics would hold that this judgment is valid just in case one could will that the substantive norm or maxim “Do not lie” be universalized: this is a formal constraint on the will in that it applies to any action in any material circumstance. Though Husserl was ultimately critical of Kant (for failing to give emotion, especially love, a proper role in ethics; see Melle 2002), the example of Kantian ethics illustrates Husserl's approach to grounding values somehow in ideal forms of experience.
In addressing the objectivity of values, Husserl's Ethics lectures echo his vision of logic in the Logical Investigations. Thus, the Ethics begins with an appraisal of the “parallelism between logic and ethics” (Part A, §§1–8). Here is Husserl's metatheory of ethics, following the lines of his metatheory of logic, immediately citing (Part A, §1) his Investigations and Ideas I. Logic was often treated incorrectly (for instance by Mill) as a practical art (Kunst), whereas “pure logic” is to be a theoretical discipline, studying ideal propositions along with correlated formal ontological structures (Part A, §1). Similarly, Husserl holds, ethics was often treated as a practical art, and accordingly as a purely normative discipline. This was the stance of “ethical empiricism,” expressed in the views of a succession of British moral theorists, including Hume and Mill. Here lies “psychologism,” in ethics as in logic. But ethics should be developed, Husserl holds, as a “pure” and a priori theoretical discipline guiding the normative discipline. (On the history of such empiricist ethical views in relation to Husserlian phenomenology, see Willard and Smith 1997.)
Thus, Husserl writes:
So therefore in analogy with pure logic and pure arithmetic the idea of a pure ethic next offers itself. On the opposite side stands ethical empiricism, as psychologism or biologism; everything which the a priorist takes an interest in as pure principle [ethical empiricism] moves into the peculiarities of human nature and human emotional and volitional life, and in further consequence [ethical empiricism] lets ethics be looked on and valued only as a technology leaning upon psychology and biology.
(Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Part A, §2, my translation)
Husserl proceeds to argue at some length against skepticisms about a priori values, promoting instead the “absolutism” (Part A, §2) of a “pure” ethics. As the lectures unfold, Husserl sketches the ideal of a “formal axiology” and then a “formal practique [Praktik],” that is, a formal theory of good (axiology) and a formal theory of practice.
A formal axiology will take the standpoint of “objectivism” or “idealism,” against that of the “relativist, sometimes psychologistic, sometimes anthropologistic and biologistic skepticism” (Part A, §11b). That is, formal axiology assumes the “objectivity of values” (Part A, §11b title) or ideals (thus “idealism” in one sense). In accord with Husserl's conception of formal ontology, these formal theories will carve out a place in formal ontology for the “pure” forms Good and Practice (Part A, §§5, 9–12, 18–21). That is, if we reconstruct a Husserlian category scheme as in Chapter 4, we will place the ideal formal essences Good and Practice, and also Right, in appropriate niches in the category scheme. Under the category Property we would add Value as a formal essence, subsuming Good and Right. Under Good would fall the concrete instances or “moments” of goodness in objects of appropriate type (say, the particular goodness in a good knife, a good idea, a good person); under Right would fall instances or “moments” of right actions (say, in a concrete action of helping a neighbor, telling the truth at a courtroom trial, and so on). And under Intentionality we would place Practice, subsuming particular types of activity such as Walking, Writing, Speaking, and so on: under Practice, then, fall instances of volitional action such as concrete acts of walking, writing, speaking, and so on. Since pure ethics is the a priori theory of right action and good character, we would then analyze connections between the essences Right and Good. We would specify what it is about an action that makes it right – its contribution to a good character (as Aristotle observed), its good consequences (as Mill held), its being performed with a good will properly formed (as Kant urged), and so on. In Husserlian ontology, the rightness of an action would depend ontologically on such features of the action (compare the role of dependence in the ontology of mind, as reconstructed in Chapter 4).
With these elements of a formal ontology of values under his belt, Husserl turns to the relevant phenomenology, the “phenomenology of the will” (Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Part A, §§13–17). He distinguishes several types of volitional act, indicating there are still others. Whereas an act of wishing concerns what might be, an act of will is “actualizing” (Part A, §14), willing to bring something about. Some acts of will are decisions about the future, while others, those on which Husserl focuses, are acts of willingly treating or “handling” things (Handlungswille) (Part A, §15). These latter acts of will occur in everyday volitional activities that involve using one's body, as in walking, hitting a ball with a stick or a racket, playing a piano, and so on. Here we see the link to the living body (Leib) and the life-world (Lebenswelt). On Husserl's phenomenology, we experience objects in our surrounding world as having values, we experience our own acts of will and, through empathy, others' acts of will, and we ascribe values to volitional actions. These are the phenomena to which ethics pertains. For Husserl, the point of opposing “psychologism” or “biologism” in “pure” ethical theory is that moral values depend not on the contingencies of human experience in acts of valuing, willing, and so on, but on the ideal structure of these intentional activities. Phenomenology studies the correlation between concrete acts of consciousness and their ideal content. Thus, the phenomenology of will studies the correlation between concrete acts of will and their ideal content. As pure logic studies ideal propositions (declarative propositions such as “2 + 3 = 5,” “Aristotle is synoptic”), pure ethics studies ideal values founded in ideal forms of will: we might say, ideal volitions or “normative propositions” (imperative propositions such as “Do such-and-such,” “Tell the truth”), as opposed to “factual” propositions (“Aristotle is synoptic,” “2 + 3 = 5”). Here the phenomenology of will draws on Husserl's theory of ideal contents, and the foundations of ethics are tied into this range of phenomenology.
Husserl's systematic approach to philosophy is apparent, then, in his approach to the foundations of ethics. His vision of pure logic outlines what we today call a philosophical metalogic, and this vision of pure logic guides Husserl's vision of pure ethics. As we might say today, Husserl's vision of the foundations of ethics is a philosophical metaethics, wherein pure or formal principles (ground norms) constrain applied or material ethical principles in any normative ethical theory. Since normative ethical propositions (“Do such-and-such”) apply to willed actions, the foundations of ethics are tied into the phenomenology of will and of volitional action. Further, for Husserl, phenomenology is shaped by a categorial ontology, itself reflected in Husserl's account of pure logic. Knowledge in ethics, we may infer, also follows the path to objective knowledge in a phenomenological moral epistemology, where evident or intuitive experience guides our well-formed judgment about what it is morally right or obligatory to do (recall Chapter 7 on intuitive evidence).
What makes an action morally good or right or obligatory? – what is at issue in this question? We have so far focused on Husserl's account of the metaethical foundation of moral values in “ground norms” like the Kantian categorical imperative. Now, within such formal constraints delimiting or “defining” moral values, we look into the phenomenological foundation of values, in substantive or “material” conditions in the “constitution” of values in our experience. In what ways, for Husserl, are moral values intended and thereby “constituted” in appropriate forms of consciousness? Alternatively, what is the “origin” of moral values in our experience, in the structure of their “constitution”? What role does the “constitution” of an action and of its value play in ethical theory, for Husserl? In light of the phenomenology of action and values, how does Husserl respond to the more familiar lines of normative ethics? I do not expect explicit or finished answers to these questions within Husserl's framework (given the texts I know), but I hope to explore these issues in a Husserlian framework, drawing on a variety of relevant themes discussed by Husserl.
So, we ask, in what forms of experience, with what forms of meaning, are actions and their moral values “constituted”? I may judge that I should tell the truth about such-and-such in a given circumstance. Or I may reason to the conclusion that it would be right or obligatory for me to tell the truth. Or I may will that I now (rightfully) tell the truth. I may want to rightfully tell the truth, or I may feel morally compelled to tell the truth. In these varied acts of consciousness, I intend my action of truth-telling as having moral worth. The value of my action is “constituted” in a manifold of such possible forms of experience in which my action is intended as having said moral worth (recall our account in Chapter 6 of Husserl's theory of constitution). Central to that manifold is my intending or willing to so act, specifically where I now act out of so willing.
At one level, to will is already to value. When I act in such-and-such a way, I enact or execute my will to so act. And in willing to so act, I posit value in that action. Thus, the content of my willing is already an imperative, a norm, “Do such-and-such.” Indeed, this primordial structure of value in willing is reflected in the etymology of the words “will” and “value”: the root “wal” derives from “wield” in Old English and Germanic forms meaning to rule. Now, moral theory holds that there are standards or grounds – norms – that constrain the values propounded in willing. But that is already to say that value arises through volition that meets some standard. Here, at any rate, is the beginning of a theory of the phenomenological foundation of moral value. (On the etymology of “value” in the root “wal”, see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992, Indo-European Roots Appendix.)
On one reading of Husserl's transcendental idealism, consciousness brings the world into being. On our reading of Husserl's ontology, however, the “constitution” of a tree in my act of visual experience does not bring into being either the tree itself or its spatiotemporal-causal properties in nature (recall Chapter 4 on transcendental idealism). Yet if “factual” objects like trees and their properties are not intentional artifacts, values may yet be. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it is said. But if aesthetic values are a subjective matter of taste, moral values are not simply “aesthetic” values. Most ethical theories, that is, seek some kind of objectivity for moral values. And yet, on some “constructivist” approaches to ethics, moral values are objective but are nonetheless brought into being precisely through acts of consciousness, specifically through willing or through practical reasoning – two constructivist models inspired by Kantian ethical theory. Husserl's phenomenology may serve to underwrite such a position, as we shall come to see. (As we proceed, I shall leave scare quotes around the term “constitution,” or the cognate verb “constitute,” reminding us that this is a technical idiom, one whose exact force we are in the process of explicating in regard to the “constitution” of values. Shorn of the reminder, the term too easily slips into meaning the way something is built, not the way it is intended.)
Think of how the “constitution” of values would arise for Husserl, in light of his overall philosophical system. Husserl's objectivism of values is resonant with a Platonic ethics focused on the form of The Good, though Husserl does not place ideal forms in a Platonic heaven (as we saw in Chapter 4). But there is more to Husserl's position on moral values. Virtue ethics, often associated with Aristotle, focuses on the way a particular act reflects and contributes to the agent's character, comprising his moral virtues (or vices). As we move into the period of modern philosophy, however, the locus of moral worth moves into the realm of consciousness. Humean “sentimentalist” ethics focuses on the role of feeling in grounding moral values, especially the feeling of sympathy for others. Utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, championed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, focuses on the consequences of an action for pleasure and pain, where a right action promotes the greatest good, specifically in the balance of total pleasure over total pain produced. By contrast, Kantian ethics focuses on the way the will operates in an action, where a right action issues from a will that exercises “practical reason” properly, that is, willing an action so that one could will that others will in the same way (to paraphrase Kant's categorical imperative). Now, with phenomenology at hand, Husserl specifically addresses these issues: in the Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory (Parts B, C, and Supplementary Texts). Particularly relevant to Husserl's approach to ethics is his critique of Kantian ethics (Supplementary Texts, Number 3).
Consider, then, the value or norm propounded in the moral principle “One should not lie” or “Do not lie” – a ubiquitous principle of human conduct. How is this value “constituted” in appropriate ranges of our experience, and how would that issue play in Husserl's critique of traditional moral theories? For a Platonic ethics, this principle is simply an ideal objective value, written into the order of the world. But Husserl would want to say how that value is tied into our conscious intentional experience; veracious speech does not simply instantiate that value, but intentionally enacts it, perhaps motivated by an appreciation of the value of truth-telling. For an Aristotelian virtue ethics, this principle is manifest in its practice as a part of a virtuous person's moral character – a good person does not lie (at least, other things being equal). But Husserl would want to know how this value is at work in and motivating one's occurrent actions of truth-telling. For a Humean sentimentalist ethics, this principle is an expression of sympathy for others – I should not lie because my lying would hurt others, with whom I naturally sympathize. Today (as already in Husserl's day, but not yet in Hume's), we speak of empathy as distinct from sympathy. Accordingly, we might say it is wrong for me to lie to another because I would not like the action were I in the other's shoes. Empathy plays a prominent role in the structure of the life-world, on Husserl's analysis, and so we might expect Husserl to press an empathy-based ethics. Yet Husserl resists a Humean “feeling”-based ethics (Gefühlsethik) (Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Part A, §2). My judgment that I should not lie is not properly formed, Husserl seems to hold, by reasoning from merely “psychologistic” considerations of my feelings of empathy or sympathy for others. Again, Husserl rejects a utilitarian ethics, whereby lying is wrong because its consequences produce more pain than pleasure. For Husserl, ethical norms such as “Do not lie” are not properly “constituted” as flowing from such merely “psychologistic” or “biologistic” contingencies – even where I judge that I ought to seek to produce more pleasure than pain in the world.
A Kantian ethics holds that lying is wrong because the maxim “Lie [to gain money]” does not rationally accord with the categorical imperative. Yet Husserl also resists a reason-based or “understanding”-based ethics (Verstandesethik) (Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Part A, §2). When I reason and so judge that I should not lie, what makes my proposed action wrong, Husserl seems to think, involves more than my rational capacity to apply the categorical imperative. From a Husserlian perspective, however, what is interesting in the Kantian approach is that it is precisely the form of the will that grounds the morality of an action. For the Kantian, an action is right just in case it is performed through – in Husserlian terms – an act of will that is formed in a certain way, namely, in accord with a line of potential reasoning that the given maxim could be universalized without practical contradiction. Thus, for Kant, the morality of an action is grounded solely in the agent's potential exercise of reason – practical reason – in choosing and so willing what to do. And there's the rub for Kant's critics. Human feeling, one's concern or compassion for others, plays no role in making an action moral. In his later years Husserl echoes such critics, explicitly arguing that love plays a central role in the foundation of ethics, in the conditions of will that render an action moral (see Melle 2002: 241ff.).
But in what ways does the will bring moral authority with it? A moral value is not an inert “fact.” Rather, it is a norm governing our actions. Indeed, it is experienced precisely as a value that affects us, that moves us to action, that lays a claim on us to act in a certain way. The phenomenology of will and of experiencing moral value must explicate this sense of moral force. Normative ethics will be founded somehow in this aspect of moral phenomenology.
Husserl's approach to normative ethics might be gleaned from an account of his evolving moral philosophy. The editor of Husserl's Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Ulrich Melle, has constructed an overview of Husserl's views on ethics in different periods (Melle 2002). Husserl's earliest views (as we have already noted) concerned formal axiology and formal “practique,” formal principles about the good and about practice or action. Subsequently, Husserl criticized “empiricist” ethics, including Hume's ethics of feeling or sentiment, utilitarian ethics, and Kantian rationalist ethics. Husserl's criticisms of these traditional options, I take it, move along these lines: sentimentalist ethics loses the objectivity of moral values; utilitarian ethics offers a technique for calculating pleasure and pain but loses the locus of subjectivity in the will and its formation and motivation; and Kantian ethics excludes compassion for others, hence proper intersubjectivity, in the name of practical reason. More particularly, Husserl criticized Kant's categorical imperative, seeking a more fundamental, still formal principle of value theory. Accordingly, Husserl pressed an alternative “categorical imperative” adapted from Brentano (Melle 2002: 236): evidently, Husserl's “ground norm” (per our earlier discussion). This principle Husserl glossed as “The better is the enemy of the good”: that is, “Do the better” or, in Brentano's formulation, “Do the best that is attainable.” This formal principle of value theory and practice theory (compare today's game theory) is to provide a very basic foundation for ethics. This principle may sound like the utilitarian principle “Do what has the better consequences.” But, no, Husserl sees his ground norm as purely formal, so that what counts as the better action is to be determined by further material considerations. Those considerations are: for the Kantian, how the will operates (rationally, following Kant's own categorical imperative); for the utilitarian, how the action results (in causing pleasure and pain); for the sentimentalist, how the agent feels about others. Where, by Husserl's lights, are the proper material foundations for moral values? An abiding traditional answer is: in love, in compassion for others. As Husserl continued to lecture on ethics in later years, he emphasized the role of love in moral evaluation.
On Melle's reconstruction, Husserl distinguished “objective values” from “values of love” (Melle 2002: 244). Objective values are, for example, values perceived in objects, as when I see a beautiful sunset over Catalina or the handsome cathedral at Chartres. Such values are passively “constituted” in a receptive way in perception. By contrast, “values of love” are actively “constituted” or given through “love of subject.” A subject or “I” is a special type of object (in the wide sense of formal ontology), that is, a being that plays the role of subject in an act of consciousness. I “constitute” other subjects through empathy, and love of others presupposes empathy. (Recall that empathy is a recurring theme for Husserl in Ideas II and in the Crisis.) Moral values, then, are values of love. These values are “constituted” – and practiced – in acts of will concerning others, as I act through volition in relation to others. So, for Husserl, moral values are founded at one level in the formal principle he calls a “categorical imperative” (“Do the better”). But at a different level, Husserl holds, moral values are founded in a material principle of love. That is, a basic substantive moral principle is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (as phrased in Christian moral doctrine) or equivalently “Practice compassion for others” (so phrased in Buddhist moral doctrine). This principle presupposes the “constitution” of others as other subjects, fellow persons in our intersubjective world. For Husserl, recall, the region of Culture or Geist, the intersubjective or social world, is the domain of community and therewith of morality. For Kant, practical reason alone determines how the will is to operate in a morally correct way – compassion does not play a direct role in Kantian ethics, to the dismay of Kant's critics, including Husserl. For Husserl, we infer, practical reason is motivated by considerations of love for others, when the will operates in a morally correct way. Thus, the early Husserl emphasized the formal structure of values in practice, and the later Husserl stressed the material structure of values in actions that express love or compassion for others. The task remains for a well-developed normative ethics to detail how practical reason is to work and how compassion is to motivate.
We have been developing a composite picture of Husserl's ethical theory, a theory of the foundations of moral values. For Husserl, moral values are “defined” in one way in the formal principle “Do the better.” This principle is Husserl's “ground norm” for the sphere of moral values in human actions, a principle “defining” the formal bounds of practical norms (such as “Do not lie” or “Tell the truth”). Instructively, the Kantian principle “Act on a maxim you could will be to universal” might be seen as further “defining” the better action as one performed in accord with that principle of will (such an action is better than any other). But Husserl is not a Kantian. The better action, for Husserl, is further “defined” by principles specifying the way the agent's will operates in relation to both practical reason and love or compassion for others. So, as I understand Husserl's ethical theory, the moral worth of an action – its being morally good or right or obligatory – is founded in two different levels of structure in the action:
1 its formal structure of “doing the better” – a form that applies to all valuable actions; and
2 its material structure of willing in relation to both practical reasoning and feeling compassion for others – a form that is realized in a concrete action insofar as the will is appropriately guided by reason and compassion in the case at hand.
These structures are, respectively, the formal and material foundations of the action's moral worth. Notice that we have descended from the principles or propositions that characterize these structures to the structures themselves: there lie the foundations of moral value, that is, those structures in the world which make an action morally good or right or obligatory. And how does the “constitution” of value unfold in that intentional structure of action? In a given case, my action's worth is “constituted” in the way I will to act in light of my reasoning about what to do and my feeling compassion for others. On Husserl's theory, then, the moral worth of an action is founded in the way the action and its value are “constituted” in the agent's willing so to act.
When we think of the foundations of moral judgments or of the moral value of an action, we think of that on the basis of which an action is morally justified. Thus, in the considerations above, we considered what principles “define” or determine the moral value of an action: these principles justify the action, morally. Similarly, when we look to the foundations of belief, we look to those experiences that provide evidence for the belief, thus to the evident propositions that justify the believed proposition, epistemologically. When Husserl speaks of “foundation,” however, he usually has in mind ontological foundation, or Fundierung.
Can we find the “foundations” of moral value in ontological structures? The very idea sounds wrongheaded, unless we are working in a properly Platonic ethics (where ethical norms are Forms realized in actions). Isn't morality about how we behave – rather than how the world is at some basic level? But wait. In Husserl's wake, Heidegger aligned phenomenology with “fundamental ontology,” where phenomenology seeks not merely forms of consciousness, but more fundamentally our “modes of being,” where intentionality is grounded in the form of “transcendence,” which is more fundamental ontologically than the subject-object or act-object structure that Husserl analyzed (see Heidegger 1927/1982 on modes of being and transcendence). And writing in the wake of both Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre took consciousness to have its own mode of being called “being-for-itself,” within which, Sartre held, consciousness produces value when one wills or chooses. (See Sartre 1943/1956 on the being of values.) We shall explore this notion later. The point at present is to see how such an idea might work within a Husserlian framework: would it make sense to think of the foundations of moral values as ontological?
Well, for Husserl, values occur in the world, and they have their own categorial niche. As we learned in Chapter 4, very different things – “objects” in the widest formal sense – are fundamentally different in their essence and in the mode of their being. Some objects are temporal, some are spatial or spatiotemporal, some are ideal (numbers, meanings), some are conscious (experiences), some are social (greetings), and some – values – are normative. Accordingly, we might say the being of the moral value of an action – the action's being of value, the “moment” of value occurring in the action (as a dependent part of the action) – is what is founded: given Husserl's conception of foundation. Thus, where Kant sought the “foundations of the metaphysics of morals,” Husserl sought, we gather, the foundations of the being of morals. On the Husserlian model we have constructed, an action's being moral is founded or dependent on the structure of the agent's volition, that is, the way the will is formed in relation to reason and compassion.
Husserl's use of ontology in pure ethics would parallel his use of ontology in pure logic. What makes logic objective, for Husserl, is its study of ideal forms of meaning. Thus, pure logic studies ideal propositions, their forms, their logical (“consequence”) relations to other propositions, and their semantic correlations to the objects and states of affairs they represent. Similarly, for Husserl, what makes ethics objective is its study of ideal forms of action, notably forms of volition – according to our earlier account. Accordingly, pure ethics studies those ideal forms of meaning that are the noematic contents of volition in action. An action is a form of embodied movement effected through a volition, that is, an act of conscious willing to do such-and-such. This volition has a “real” content, or noesis, and a corresponding ideal content, or noema: an ideal meaning of the form “I hereby will to do such-and-such.” An act's noema is instantiated “in” the act's noesis. The action is (partly) “constituted” in this volition, a volitional noesis carrying a volitional noema. What is distinctive of an act of volition, however, is that the real-time occurrence of my willing causes my movement, executing my action (to whatever degree of success). Also distinctive of volition is the form of the noema: <I hereby will to do A>, where the thetic component is <will> and the sense component is the imperative or normative proposition <Do A> or, in an alternative version, <I hereby do A>. Here is an application of Husserl's theory of noesis and noema to the case of volition and action; here is a Husserlian ontology of volition and action. (See D. W. Smith 2004: ch. 4 for a relevant model of volition and causation in action.)
Now, in pure ethics, an ethical appraisal of the action will assess the noematic content of the volition. Where the volition is a conclusion of a process of practical reasoning, the volition presupposes that reasoning. And where the volition and its background reasoning are motivated by the agent's compassion for others, the volition presupposes that compassion. Then the corresponding ideal meanings come into play: the volition's noematic sense <Do A> presupposes the reasoning content and is “motivated” by the emotional content. These relations among noematic contents of volition, reasoning, and compassion are analogous to the logical relations that may hold among factual propositions. For Husserl, then, pure ethics studies such ideal contents of volition. Given that part of a Husserlian ontology of action and volition, we add our reconstruction of a Husserlian ethics. What makes an action morally good or right or obligatory, we gathered, is the complex structure of the agent's volition in relation to practical reason and compassion. That structure, we now observe, is itself formed from ideal forms or meanings of volition. In that way, for Husserl, what makes an action moral is defined in terms of the ontology of action and volition and the way the moral value is “defined” and founded by the two levels of structure mapped earlier.
A further point of ontology arises in Husserl's account of the life-world. An action occurs in the social sphere of the life-world, which for Husserl belongs to the material region of Culture (Geist). How are moral values “constituted” for actions, in the life-world?
The foundations of ethics in Husserl's philosophy appear in some detail, but with little explicit discussion of ethics, in Book Two of Ideas, Ideas II, initially drafted in 1912 along with Book One, though Husserl never released Book Two for publication. As we saw in Chapter 4 of this volume, Ideas I outlined a categorial ontology in which formal essences such as Individual, Property, Number, and so on apply to objects falling under the three regions, or highest material essences, Nature, Consciousness, and Culture or Spirit (Geist). As we saw in Chapter 6, the “constitution” of an object consists in the correlation of a manifold of meanings with a manifold of properties of that same object. Ideas II, subtitled Phenomenological Investigations Concerning Constitution, includes much of Husserl's most detailed analyses of the “constitution” of objects in the three regions (see §§50–61).
Husserl's story in Ideas II includes the following highlights regarding the three material regions:
1 Objects in Nature are intended as occurring in space and time and in causal relations. “Animalia” in Nature are intended as “psychic” beings whose minds “animate” their “living bodies.” We humans are such animals in nature. Moreover, we intend a human being as an animated living body (Leib), alternatively an embodied subject. Thus, I move my body intentionally, by my acts of will. But the relation between my willing movement and my movement is a relation of “motivation,” Husserl holds, not causation. Moreover, the sense of a human being, the sense “I as man,” rests on empathy. I intend others as human beings by virtue of empathy, but I also intend myself as a human being by virtue of empathy, since I understand the movement of my own body in the same way as I understand the movement of another's body. Since Husserl is analyzing a structure of constitution, this is a claim about noematic sense, not about the “real” psychological processes carrying such sense.
2 We know that objects in the region Consciousness, acts of consciousness, are intentional, carry meaning, and so intend others in various regions. Thus, the essence Animal, or specifically Human Being (“Man,” Mensch), depends on the essence of intentionality, and even on the specific essence of empathic experience of an “other I.”
3 The cultural or “spiritual” world, the world of objects in the region Culture, is “constituted” with several crucial features.
(a) A person (Person) is the “center of a surrounding world (Umwelt)” (§50). A person is by essence not merely an embodied subject, a “human I,” but also a social and so intersubjective being. This Umwelt is a world that is my and our world.
(b) We experience many objects in our common Umwelt through “acts of valuing” (§50), and thus objects with value properties (“pleasant,” “beautiful”) surround us.
(c) Furthermore, we experience persons as members of a moral community. So the cultural world is a moral realm.
Of the moral aspect of action, Husserl writes:
Morally-practically, I treat a human being [Mensch] as a mere thing [Sache] if I do not take him as a moral [= morally relevant] person [Person], as a member of a moral association of persons, in which a moral world is constituted. Likewise, I do not treat a human being as a subject of rights if I do not take him as a member of the community of rights, to which we both belong, but take him as mere thing [Sache], as lacking in rights as a mere [material] thing [Ding].
(Ideas II, §51, my translation)
Thus, the moral world, our communal world of moral values and rights, is “constituted” as I treat human beings in appropriate ways. Clearly, Husserl here means human rights in the deepest sense of the Enlightenment tradition.
Here is the core of a Husserlian approach to ethical and political theory. Values are objective properties of persons and personal actions, which occur in our Umwelt, our Lebenswelt, and they are so “constituted” in our “moral-practical” experiences, in our perceptions and judgments of human beings as persons, and in our actions wherein we treat human beings as members of our moral and political world. Central to our experience in the moral-political Umwelt is the role of empathy in taking and treating relevant objects as not merely natural objects, not merely pure subjects (“I” and “other I”), not merely embodied subjects or animated bodies, but persons, members of a moral and political community. On Husserl's analysis, our moral and political experience carries meaning that characterizes objects as persons (phenomenology). And, for Husserl, if our experience of persons is veridical, then the relevant objects in the world around us have objective value properties such as being good, useful, moral, right, just, and so on (ontology).
On Husserl's analysis, the life-world plays a key role in the structure of intentionality – in the horizon of everyday experience – and a basic role in grounding knowledge. (See Chapter 6 on horizon and Chapter 7 on the life-world's role in the formation of knowledge.) The term “Lebenswelt” is prominent in Husserl's last work in the Crisis (1935–8). However, this notion is sharply presented already at the beginning of Husserl's presentation of phenomenology in Ideas I (1913) and amplified in Ideas II (1912). In Ideas I (§28) Husserl speaks simply of the Umwelt, my and our “surrounding world” of everyday life. Husserl writes pointedly of my experience of things in this world: “this world is for me not there as a mere fact-world [Sachenwelt], but in the same immediacy as value-world, goods-world, practical world [Wertewelt, Güterweld, praktische Welt]” (§27, my translation, quoted in Chapter 7 of this volume).
Here we see the traditional distinction between fact and value, but the distinction is applied here to things as we experience them in our surrounding world. Objects, such as bicycles or stoves, are intended as having values, as being good things, as being practical things we use in our activities. Further, actions are intended as right or wrong, and people are intended as being of good or bad character. Given Husserl's theory of intentionality, the contents or meanings in our everyday experiences thus prescribe values in objects, persons, or actions in the world around us. In this way, the value-structure of objects, persons, and actions in the life-world is “constituted” in our experience of things in our surrounding life-world (recall our account of the “constitution” of objects in Chapter 6).
In the Crisis (1935–8), Husserl develops a lengthy account of the ways in which all intentionality is rooted in the life-world. Our “constitution” of nature in mathematical physics, in particular, is founded on our background sense of spatiotemporal objects as we experience them in everyday life. This argument in the Crisis has implications for the constitution of values, as well as the constitution of “factual” properties such as spatiotemporal location, movement, and causality. If we “constitute” moral values in intentional activities of will, reason, and love (as considered earlier), then, following out the line of argument in the Crisis, our constitution of values – in such activities – is founded on our familiar activities in the life-world, including our engagement with others in our moral community. Thus, values play two roles in our constitution of values in the life-world. First, values are features of the objects of our experience: we experience objects around us (including persons and actions) as having values – just as we encounter them in our surrounding life-world. Second, values are features in our surrounding life-world, that is, values are already part of the context in which we experience, encounter, and deal with objects: more precisely put, the life-world, carrying values, is the ground or background of our experience of all things, including our experience of things as having values. If you will, our evaluation of things around us is itself founded, partly, on our background sense of values that surround us (recall our account of “horizon” in Chapter 6).
Why be moral? Why be rational? Why be compassionate? These are perhaps the most trying questions in moral philosophy. Husserl approaches these questions, obliquely, during his last phase of work, posthumously published in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1935–8).
Husserl does not pose these questions explicitly in the Crisis, nor does he attempt to answer them directly, yet the implications of the Crisis bear on exactly these questions. In 1930s Germany there was a sense of “crisis” about meaning or values. Nietzsche had trenchantly traced the origins of 19th-century “nihilism” – the loss of meaning, the collapse of values in “master” and “slave” moralities – while outlining the long history or “genealogy” of the very concept of morality, from biblical times unto the close of the 19th century. This was the aim of Nietzsche's “polemic” against “morality” in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887/1998), interrogating “the value of values,” even “the value of compassion and of the morality of compassion.” Nietzschean historical “genealogy” took on a new form in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927/1962). In that work, moreover, Heidegger pressed his revisionist conception of phenomenology, an “existential” form of phenomenology (as it would come to be known) as against Husserl's “transcendental” phenomenology. In particular, Heidegger emphasized the historical-cultural background of our sense (Sinn) of being in the world. In that historical context, Husserl came to address the “crisis” of values and of meaning that was articulated by existential thinkers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger. Husserl clearly felt the “crisis” was a threat to his form of phenomenology as the ideal form of philosophy, a threat indeed to the very form of rationality that Husserl took as constitutive of “European humanity” – a threat to reason itself, scientific and philosophical, the highest value of the European Enlightenment. Reason was also, with Kant, the foundation of ethics, that is, practical reason following the categorical imperative. Suppose we are right in our prior sketch of the outlines of a Husserlian ethics, where the foundation of moral values lies in their “constitution” through a proper integration of will, practical reason, and love or compassion. Now bear in mind the moral-political climate in which Husserl wrote the manuscript of the Crisis. Hitler had come to power in 1933, Nazi gangs were burning books, Jews were the scapegoat of choice, Heidegger in 1934 had enforced Nazi regulations that locked Husserl out of the university on account of his Jewish origin. The moral and political implications of the Crisis were left implicit, an existential choice by its author. What, Husserl asked, was the source of the “crisis” of meaning, of “European humanity,” of the “European sciences,” and of the phenomenological movement itself? On Husserl's diagnosis: the “crisis” is at bottom the loss of the true meaning of rationality, and so the true value of rationality.
As we have observed along the course of our narrative in previous chapters, the salient theme of the Crisis is a reformulation of the context and methods of transcendental phenomenology. Husserl's new take on transcendental phenomenology is cast in a historical form, developing what Nietzsche would call a “genealogy” of the form of rationality in “theoretical,” especially mathematical, science. (Husserl nowhere mentions Nietzsche, but the emphasis on “historicity” is central to Heidegger's conception of phenomenology.) In the Crisis, Husserl argues that in “mathematizing” nature, mathematical physics, from Galileo to Einstein, has lost touch with our background experience of nature in our everyday experience. Thus, the mathematical conception of space—time, gravity, and so on is an abstraction from our experience of spatiotemporal objects and events as they appear in our “life-world.” Our scientific judgments are thus founded on our everyday perceptions and judgments about things in the world around us. As we abstract away from our everyday experience, however, we lose the full sense of spatiotemporal-causal phenomena in nature. Ultimately, Husserl implies, we lose our sense of ourselves – in the full and proper phenomenological theory of sense and its role in intentionality and so in the “constitution” of nature. It is not a long step, then, to a loss of compassion for others and for ourselves. We have lost touch with our life-world experience of values, values based in compassion for others and in our basic sense of human rights. What else could explain what was happening in Husserl's Umwelt?
In 1935 Husserl delivered a lecture to the Vienna Cultural Society titled “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.” This text served as prolegomena to the work that became the Crisis, and it is reprinted as “The Vienna Lecture” in an Appendix to the main text of the Crisis. Existential philosophy, we noted, was much in the air, notably through Heidegger's existential variety of phenomenology. Existentialism downplayed the importance of reason and elevated the role of emotion and will. At the same time, Nazi politics in Germany were openly dismissive of rationality. Against this background, Husserl took a lofty attitude in championing rationality. Husserl emphasized the origins of the “theoretical” attitude in the ancient Greek thinkers who, Husserl argued, invented the ideals of “philosophy” and “science” in the proper development of “theory.” The Renaissance reinvigorated the Greek ideals of reason in the 14th century, and the Enlightenment elaborated modern rationality in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here were the roots of modern philosophy, embodying the pure ideal of reason. But the great success of modern mathematical science, Husserl argued, has pulled us away from our foundational experience in the life-world. Addressing the existential Zeitgeist, Husserl poses a challenge:
Is it not the case that what we have presented here [as a defense of rationality] is something rather inappropriate to our time, an attempt to rescue the honor of rationalism, of “enlightenment,” of an intellectualism which loses itself in theories alienated from the world, with its necessary evil consequences of a superficial lust for erudition and an intellectualistic snobbism?
(Crisis, 1935–8, “The Vienna Lecture”: 289)
And do not these words resonate once again in the 21st century?
If Husserl found worry in the “mathematization” of nature, in the Crisis his point was not that mathematical physics is a bad thing, but rather that we have lost track of its place in our overall “constitution” of the world. Thus, the Crisis spells out a new, stage-by-stage methodology for transcendental phenomenology. First, we are to bracket the world as presented in mathematical terms, leaving us with the life-world, which is the ground of our mathematical theorizing. Then, appreciating these two levels of meaning in our “constitution” of the surrounding world, we are to bracket the world as experienced in our everyday life, that is, the life-world. Only then are we in a position to reflect on the “pure” structure of consciousness, practicing transcendental phenomenology. Where does rationality fit in this program?
Here is how Husserl appraised the status of rationality in “The Vienna Lecture”:
Mathematical natural science is a wonderful technique for making inductions with an efficiency, a degree of probability, a precision, and a computability that were simply unimaginable in earlier times. As an accomplishment it is a triumph of the human spirit. As for the rationality of its methods and theories, however, it is a thoroughly relative one [that is, relative to the subjective activities of pure consciousness]. It even presupposes a fundamental approach that is itself totally lacking in rationality. Since the intuitively given surrounding world [Umwelt], this merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific investigation, the working subject is himself forgotten; the scientist does not become a subject of investigation. (Accordingly, from this standpoint, the rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids.)
(Crisis, 1935–8: 295)
This attitude informs Husserl's extended program in the Crisis. If we put the subject back into the world “constituted” through proper rationality, if we tie rationality back into the subject, what do we find? In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Husserl had argued that “formal logic” must be founded on “transcendental logic,” which is founded on intentionality theory: meaning, expressed in formal symbols, is sense carried in acts of “pure” or “transcendental” consciousness. How, then, are values carried in acts of consciousness? A detailed account of the “constitution” of moral values in acts of consciousness that are themselves enacted in the life-world where values surround us – this phenomenology of values would restore rationality to its proper foundations. Such a view, at any rate, seems to be at work in Husserl's concerns in the Crisis.
How might we develop more fully a Husserlian approach to ethical theory grounded in phenomenology? One important line of development is along the lines of a “constructivist” approach to ethical and political theory – an approach that has been unfolding recently in the writings of John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, and Christine Korsgaard. On this view, moral as well as political values are “constructed” by appropriate activities of will or reason, individual or collective (as the case may require). More precisely, in Husserlian terms, values are “constituted,” as we have considered above.Within the classical phenomenological movement, this approach to values, partly framed by Husserl's program of phenomenology, is seen in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.
In Being and Nothingness (1943/1956) Sartre elaborated a “phenomenological ontology,” amidst which he framed an explicit “ontology” of values. On Sartre's account, we create our values as we choose or will what we are to do: values are, if you will, artifacts of intentionality, of volition. Sartre's philosophy was focused on our human being, or “existence” (adapting Heidegger's use of that term) – whence Sartre's well-known “existentialism.” According to Sartre, we are radically free, wholly responsible for our actions, which are born entirely of our free choice or will: we are “condemned” to freedom, with no further excuse. But we are not simply choosing freely to follow one or another extant value, a value that is already out there in the world, an “a priori” value, as Sartre put it. Rather, it is wholly within the activity of conscious choice that values are born into the world.
In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, everything we deal with is a “phenomenon” appearing in consciousness, that is, an object of intentionality, an object imbued with meaning – so a phenomenon, for Sartre, is an intentional object, for which Sartre occasionally uses the Husserlian term “noema.” Behind the phenomenon, however, is “being in itself,” which on rare occasions appears, as it were, through cracks in the phenomenal world. Now, for Sartre, values appear in the phenomenal world: this action is “to be done,” “desirable,” “good” or “right” – its value appears insofar as it is chosen or willed in the exercise of freedom. Interestingly, Sartre finds, a value – an object or situation with value – appears as a “lack,” an absence in being, what is not yet existent but is desired and chosen to be realized. Such is “the being of value.”What is important for our purposes, in Sartre's scheme, is the ontology of values: values enter the world in “phenomena” of consciousness – their being is, we might say, that of intentional artifacts. (See Sartre 1943/1956: 133–46, a section titled “The For-Itself and the Being of Values.” Consciousness is “for-itself,” or self-conscious, “consciousness (of) itself” in Sartre's idiom, whereas a mere object like a stone is “in-itself,” with no consciousness and so no self-consciousness.)
In his popular essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1945/ 1956), Sartre encapsulated – more directly and more succinctly – his theory of ethical values:
I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values …. [W]hen I recognize, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence [i.e. his moral essence], and that he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I realize that I cannot [in good faith] not will the freedom of others.
(Sartre 1945/1956: 365–6)
Sartre summarizes his existential doctrine in the slogan “Existence precedes essence,” holding that we have no “human nature” or moral essence prior to our existing, that is, prior to our acting. Hence, we each “make” our self. But, more than that, we each create our own values in acting, in freely willing to do such-and-such. When Sartre speaks of the “foundation” of values, he means an ontological, a phenomenological-ontological, foundation. This notion of foundation derives from Husserl's notion of “founding” (Fundierung), or ontological dependence, and from Heidegger's kindred notion of “fundamental ontology” emphasizing our “being” (Sein) as opposed to the “beings” (Seienden) we deal with. Thus, our acts of choice or will bring values into being: values depend for their being on our willing. For example, the value of being truthful depends or is founded, in my own case, on my willing to be truthful – my act of willing to act in accord with the maxim “Be truthful.” Here, I submit, is the foundational principle – the “ground norm” (in Husserl's idiom) – of Sartre's ethics:
I create a value when I will in good faith with respect to freedom, my own and others.
Alternatively, the “categorical imperative” of Sartre's ethics is:
Act so as to will freedom, your own and every other's.
There is resonance with the biblical “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” as well as the Kantian “Act on a maxim you could will that everyone follow” (to simplify Kant's formula). However, the will plays a special, “constitutive” role in Sartrean phenomenological ontology.
In these formulations, from Kant to Sartre, the words “will” and “could will” center ethics on the activity of will. Sartre declares freedom “the foundation of all values,” echoing the ideals of the Enlightenment. These ideals Kant had crafted into an ethical ideal in his categorical imperative, and these ideals inform modern European social-political theory as well. What is striking in Sartre's vision, however, is the place of freedom of will and hence values in a phenomenological ontology. Values are founded in “acts” of will, which are enacted in embodied actions. For Sartre, acts of will both are free (in point of ontology) and are experienced as free (in point of phenomenology). And in the free exercise of will, for Sartre, values are “constituted” and enacted and thereby brought into being – and hence founded, in a Husserlian sense. To create a value, an authentic value, however, Sartre holds, we must will in good faith, and that means, at bottom, recognizing our own freedom and also others’ in the very act of willing. The condition of willing freedom in good faith is crucial, because – as Sartre emphasizes in Being and Nothingness (Part One: ch. 2) – we often will in “bad faith,” partially deceiving ourselves by treating ourselves or others as less than free.
Sartre's ethics is sometimes called “voluntarist,” meaning that values are determined by the will, ultimately by willing freedom as one wills to act thus-and-so (see Olafson 1967; on the history of voluntarism in early modern moral philosophy, see Schneewind 1998). For a Sartrean, however, the point is not that an action is good or moral simply because the subject or agent wills it – where, instead of God's will determining moral value, the agent's will does so. Rather, it is the way in which the will is formed, in the subject's own process of willing, that grounds moral value. This feature also informs more recent “constructivist” approaches to ethics.
In The Sources of Normativity (1996), Christine Korsgaard poses the question “What is the ‘source’ of normativity in ethics?” – where “ethical standards are normative” in that they “make claims on us; they command, oblige, recommend, or guide” (p. 8). “When we seek a philosophical foundation for morality,” Korsgaard writes, “[w]e are asking what justifies the claims that morality makes on us” (pp. 9–10, emphasis added). Appraising “what makes morality normative,” Korsgaard distinguishes “voluntarism” from “the appeal to autonomy.” Of the latter approach she writes:
This kind of argument [from autonomy] is found in Kant and contemporary Kantian constructivists, especially John Rawls. Kantians believe that the source of the normativity of moral claims must be found in the agent's own will, in particular in the fact that the laws of morality are the laws of the agent's own will and that its claims are ones she is prepared to make on herself. The capacity for self-conscious reflection about our own actions confers on us a kind of authority over ourselves, and it is this authority which gives normativity to moral claims.
(Korsgaard 1996: 19–20)
Korsgaard subsequently (pp. 90–130) argues for a “constructivist” account of the source or foundation of morality. Constructivism, in this broadly Kantian sense, holds that we construct moral values. What legitimizes the values we so construct – the “source” or “foundation” of these values – is the way we construct them: strictly, the procedure we follow is coming to endorse a specific value (say, “Be truthful” or “Do not lie”). Much as a society must follow appropriate procedures in setting out its laws or its political constitution, as Rawls argued at length (Rawls 1993), so an individual must follow appropriate procedures in setting out a “law” for herself, a maxim guiding her action. Accordingly, Korsgaard urges a “procedural” rather than “substantive” (Platonic) realism of moral values: “values are constructed by a procedure, the procedure of making laws for ourselves” (Korsgaard 1996: 112). Korsgaard summarizes her analysis as follows:
I have offered an account of the source of normativity. I have argued that human consciousness has a reflective structure that sets us normative problems. It is because of this that we require reasons for action, a conception of the right and the good. To act from such a conception is in turn to have a practical conception of your identity, a conception under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. That conception is normative for you…. And that [conception of your identity] is not merely a contingent conception of your identity, which you have constructed or chosen for yourself, or could conceivably reject.
(Korsgaard 1996: 122–3)
This account of the source of normativity is broadly Kantian, as Korsgaard avers. But it is also, more precisely, Sartrean – though Korsgaard mentions neither Sartre nor phenomenology. On Korsgaard's neo-Rawlsian—Kantian analysis, what makes a moral claim normative is the way in which consciousness constructs a reason for acting (so far Kantian) that corroborates the subject's conception of her identity (enter Sartrean) and affirms the worth of the action in contributing to her life (here the Sartrean theme takes center-stage). In the first person: the action I choose or will gains value only in light of my reflection on the significance of the intended action in relation to my sense of my own personal identity or “self” (as Sartre put it). So, on this conception, my will is autonomous in that (1) I will freely, on the basis of appropriate reason and (2) thereby I construct a law or norm for myself (and anyone else in similar circumstances, per Kant and Sartre). In Kantian terms, my will is self-legislating, self-norming. In Sartrean terms, my will is self-constituting and indeed “self”-constituting.
What exactly is the sense in which the “source” of normativity lies in my will? A sharp answer flows from Husserl's theory of the foundation of moral values (as reconstructed earlier): the normativity of an ethical norm – whence its moral claim on the subject (agent) – is founded in the way the will is formed in relation to love and reason. Specifically, normativity is founded on both a formal and a material structure in the conscious intentional activity of willing in relation to reason and compassion: the norm itself is “constituted” in that pattern of intentional activity. The autonomy theory entails that moral value is actively created in such a pattern of willing. In neo-Husserlian terms, values are thus intentional artifacts of willing in an appropriate way. Roman Ingarden, writing in Husserl's wake, carefully analyzed ways in which artworks are ontologically dependent, or founded, on intentional acts of consciousness (see Ingarden 1961/1989; Thomasson 1998).The present Sartrean—Kantian autonomy model can be explicated in such phenomenological-ontological terms: moral values are “constituted” and thereby ontologically founded in appropriate activities of will – in relation to reason and compassion, for Husserl. Here is where Husserl's system of ontology and phenomenology takes hold, in giving an analysis of foundation in the relevant sense. There is really nothing like this in the moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, and others.
Is this Husserlian theory of the foundation of moral values, then, “constructivist” in the currently evolving sense? We might point to two relevant paradigms of the “construction” of values. One is the theory of social contracts, which Rawls developed in detail on the heels of Enlightenment political theory (Rousseau, Hobbes). The other is the theory of “constitution,” developed by Husserl and elaborated, in his own terms, by Carnap. In the lineage of Rawls’ political theory, a political system is held to be just or fair just in case it is constructed as if through a quite specific form of agreement. If all of us in the system were in the “original position” where we did not know who would be rich or poor, influential or not, and so on (we are working behind this “veil of ignorance,” in Rawls’ terms), would we agree to the principles that define our system – say, principles like those of the Constitution of the United States of America? The fundamental principle or “ground norm” of a theory of political justice along these lines would be (in terms of our present discussion): “Construct the principles of a political constitution as if we were all agreeing on the principles while in the original position of ignorance.” In an analogous ethical system, our moral principles would be constructed by following a method more Kantian. The fundamental principle or “ground norm” of a “constructivist” Kantian theory of moral correctness would be: “Construct the maxim of your current will as if you did not know who would be affected” – whence Kant's categorical imperative, “Act on a maxim you could will that anyone would follow.”T. M. Scanlon has considered a parallel structure between the “construction” of a proof in mathematics and the “construction” of the justification (compare proof) of the moral worth of an action (Scanlon 2005; see also Scanlon 1998; James forthcoming). Interestingly, Scanlon nods to Carnap's notion of the “construction” of knowledge in a given domain, here thinking of mathematics. But Carnap's notion of “construction” is an adaptation of the Husserlian notion of “constitution” – as noted, Carnap's German term of art is “Konstitution,” not “Konstruction” (the term “Aufbau,” literally “build-up,” occurs only in the title of the Aufbau). So we are back to Husserl's conception of “constitution”: values are “constituted” in appropriately formed acts of will in relation to compassion and reason.
For Husserl, “constitution” is not literally construction. Rather, there is a tracing back to foundations, to the relevant forms of meaning and the acts of consciousness carrying such meaning.The “constitution” of a particular ethical value, then, consists in the way that value, or norm, is intended in an act of will that involves a proper regard for compassion in a proper form of practical reasoning about what to do in the given circumstance. Given Husserl's articulate account of “constitution,” we can see that, for Husserl, moral values are objective, “there for everyone,” thus intersubjective, even as values are intended in subjective acts of will. In this way, Husserl's theory of constitution entails a distinctive approach to ethics – and similarly, though we have not turned in that direction, to political theory.
Husserl's views on ethics and the nature of values are arguably less well developed than his more familiar views on logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology. Still, his ideas on ethics frame a novel account of the foundations of moral values. His conception of pure ethics, a specific conception of metaethics, outlined a novel notion of ground norms that frame a definition of normativity for a domain of values. His critique of traditional ethical theories – from Humean sentimentalist to Kantian rationalist to Millian utilitarian ethics – joins familiar critical themes, but gives these a unique force when framed by his conception of pure ethics. Framed by the formal principle “Do the better,” moral values are constituted in acts of will formed in relation to practical reason respecting love for others. This account of the “constitution” of moral values extends Husserl's phenomenology and coordinate ontology, looking to values as they appear in our surrounding life-world.
Perhaps most significant, however, is the way in which Husserl approached ethical theory. Husserl held that moral values are objective, yet they are “constituted” in certain forms of subjective consciousness, and they take their place in our intersubjective world of everyday life.
Ultimately, Husserl's ethical doctrines take their place in his overall system. There is an ethical motivation for the rationalism of his conception of logic and its role in the foundations of knowledge. Phenomenology itself, Husserl's brainchild, carries ethical implications for human knowledge and its implications for social and political life, as Husserl argues in the Crisis.The role of ontology and phenomenology is apparent in our reconstruction of Husserl's metaethics. Husserl's distinction between the formal and the material guides his conception of pure ethics, while the “constitution” of values depends on his account of the existence and “constitution” of objects in general, now applied to value objects in particular.
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Drummond, John J., and Lester Embree, eds. 2002. Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook. Dordrecht and Boston, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic Publishers (now New York: Springer). Studies of phenomenology's implications for ethics.
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Mensch, James Richard. 2003. Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. A phenomenological study of obligation, drawing on the concepts of self and other as studied by Husserl and others.
Mulligan, Kevin. 2004. “Husserl on the ‘logics’ of valuing, values and norms.” In B. Centi and G. Gigliotti, editors. Fenomenologia della Ragion Pratica. L'Etica di Edmund Husserl, 177–225. Naples: Bibliopolis.
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Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. A contemporary contractualist theory of the construction of those moral values that define obligation in the sense of what we morally owe to each other – reflecting a specific conception of “construction.”
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Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. An analysis of how through collective intentionality we construct social institutions, which involve values (at least political values, and perhaps moral values too).
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Zahavi, Dan. 2001. “Phenomenology and the Problem(s) of Intersubjectivity.” In Steven Crowell, Lester Embree, and Samuel J. Julian, eds. The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology's Second Century. Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. Electronically published at www.electronpress.com. An overview of intersubjectivity, including issues of empathy, with relevance for ethical theory. Drawing partly on Husserl's three volumes of writings on intersubjectivity (Intersubjectivität I, Intersubjectivität II, IntersubjectivitätIII), published posthumously in 1973 (not yet in English translation).