Relational Ethics: The Primacy of Experience

Abstract

The understanding of moral reasoning that I advocate here extends and benefits from postphenomenology’s hybrid character, for it adopts insights informed by Dewey’s pragmatism and Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy, although it is based in Husserl’s account of passive synthesis. The focus is on developing possibilities for responding to the moral dimension of things, rather than on reaching decisions guided or governed by the paths associated with Aristotle, Kant, or Mill.