Ordo Amoris

Scheler follows Augustine and Pascal in placing love at the centre of his moral philosophy. Reason does not generate the moral vision; love does. To love a person, an idea, or a way of life is to be drawn toward what is valuable in it, to attend to it with a quality of perception that apprehends its specific value character. Reason's role is to articulate and clarify what love has already disclosed — not to constitute values but to reflect on them. A person without love is not merely cold; she is blind to the values that make moral action possible.

Each person has a unique ordo amoris — a specific arrangement of loves that constitutes their moral identity. This is not merely a psychological fact but an ethical core: to know a person's ordo amoris is to know who they most fundamentally are, what they most fundamentally care about. The moral biography of a person is the history of how their ordo amoris was formed, distorted, clarified, and corrected — the story of loves that were discovered, betrayed, deepened, or abandoned. Ethics, for Scheler, is ultimately the cultivation of a correct ordo amoris: an order of love that accurately tracks the objective hierarchy of values.

The ordo amoris is not only an ethical structure but an epistemological one: it determines what a person can see. A person whose love is disordered — who loves low values more than high ones, who confuses the agreeable with the good — is not merely immoral but perceptually impaired. She cannot see the values that are present in persons and situations because her love does not attend to them. The great moral educators — parents, teachers, friends, saints — work primarily by showing the pupil what is lovable, by modelling a correct ordo amoris so that the pupil can begin to perceive the values that were previously invisible.

Ordo amoris is the title of a posthumously published essay (1914) and is developed throughout Formalism in Ethics. Scheler traces the concept to Augustine's definition of virtue as ordo amoris in The City of God.