Ethics

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

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Max Scheler

1913

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values is Scheler's most systematic philosophical work and his central contribution to ethics — a sustained critique of Kant's formal ethics and a positive phenomenological account of value as the true foundation of moral life. Scheler argues that Kant was right to seek a non-empirical foundation for ethics but wrong to locate it in formal rational principles. The true a priori in ethics is material, not formal: a realm of values — positive and negative, arranged in a hierarchy from sensory to vital to spiritual to holy — that are not constructed by reason but felt and intuited through acts of love and hatred, preference and rejection. Each person is endowed with an "ordo amoris," an order of love that constitutes their ethical identity and their ability to perceive the values present in persons and situations. Scheler's positive ethics is a phenomenology of the emotional life that takes seriously the moral significance of feeling without reducing it to mere subjectivity.