The Material A Priori in Ethics

Kant argued that ethics must be formal — must concern the pure structure of rational will — because any material ethics that bases morality on feelings or desires is necessarily empirical and contingent. Scheler accepts that ethics cannot be reduced to empirical generalisation, but denies that the only alternative is pure formalism. Between empirical facts and formal rational structure lies a third region: the a priori material content of values — positive and negative, noble and base — that is knowable independently of experience but not merely by analysis of the concept of rational will.

Values are not properties of things or consequences of actions that we discover empirically and then evaluate. They are ideal objects — similar to mathematical objects — that are present to intentional emotional experience as its proper content. When I feel genuine admiration, I am not merely having a pleasant sensation: I am intentionally directed toward a value that is really there in the person or act I admire. The error of subjectivism is to mistake the experience of value for its object; the error of naturalism is to reduce values to natural properties.

Scheler inverts Kant's priority: for Kant, what is morally obligatory is primary, and value is derivative. For Scheler, value-intuition is primary: we first intuit the positive value of a person, act, or state of affairs, and from this intuition the ought follows. A being that genuinely saw the full value of what it meant to keep a promise would not need to hear a command to keep promises. The moral law is not the foundation of value but an imperfect substitute for value-intuition in beings whose perception of value is clouded.

The critique of Kant's formalism and the positive account of the material a priori occupy Parts I and II of Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913–1916).