Values and Moral Values

Abstract

The vertical table of values and disvalues according to their relative worth that was presented in Chap. 2 as part of Scheler’s phenomenology of cognitive acts of feeling and preference is now developed by Hartmann in several dimensions. He (1) distinguishes moral values and non-moral values; (2) studies how some of the latter’s contents causally condition the content of the former; (3) discovers kinds of modal, relational, and linear antinomies among values; (4) analyzes qualitative and quantitative oppositions among values; (5) extends Scheler’s scale of values in a horizontal direction, i.e., locates additional moral and non-moral values on each of Scheler’s five levels of values. A key to Hartmann’s strategy to fill out the “valuational spaces” in the table of values is his allowing the phenomenology of the moral sense to be guided at first by the ontological categories postulated by his metaphysics. On the side of the value-agent, dimensions of acting persons as bearers of moral obligation are revealed. The question of the individual and the collective agent is considered, specifically whether collective entities such as nations can carry moral predicates; this is a question that divided Scheler and Hartmann. The distinction between values and goods, and the non-moral values that condition the latter, is crucial for the transition to the phenomenology of moral action and moral obligation. Finally, the a priori relations that condition the material content of values are considered. Values are “intertwined” in a lawful way and the substance of these laws will eventually assist us in the examination of the question of the possible unity of the table of values.