Scheler’s Foundation of Ethics

Abstract

In this paper I would like to deal with Scheler’s emotional ethics and its relationship with a possible ontological foundation. I want to address the theme of values and acts, asking whether they are rooted in being or whether they possess their status autonomously, and where they obtain their legality and consistency from. I will face first of all Scheler’s original discovery of the special status of value as intentional object and the correlated human capacity of grasping it, realizing the corrected order of values and fulfilling the “moral good”. In the end, as I will underline how Scheler’s gain lies in the avoidance of reducing the foundation of ethics to a transcendental deduction or to an inductive-empirical method, I will stress the problem of his personalistic ethic, in the attempt to hand over to the person the whole discretion of letting values emerge and affirm in the history.