Moral Values

Nicolai Hartmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351504607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950), along with Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, was instrumental in restoring metaphysics to the study of philosophy. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Hartmann was clearly influenced by Plato. His tour-de-force, Ethik, published in English in 1932 as Ethics, may be the most outstanding work on moral philosophy produced in the twentieth century.In the first part of Ethics (Moral Phenomena), Hartmann was concerned with the structure of ethical phenomena, and criticized utilitarianism, Kantianism, and relativism as misleading approaches. In the second part, Moral Values, the author describes all values as forming a complex and as yet imperfectly known system. The actualization of the non-moral and elementary moral values is a necessary condition for the actualization of the higher values. It is on this account that rudimentary values have a prior claim.Hartmann outlines the main features of the chief virtues, and shows that the moral disposition required in any exigency is always a specific synthesis of various and often conflicting values. Specifically describing fundamental moral values-such as goodness, nobility, and vitality-and special moral values-such as justice, wisdom, courage, self-control, trustworthiness, and modesty-Hartmann takes theoretical philosophy and brings it very much into the realm of the practical.A compelling and insightful volume, Moral Values remains an essential contribution to the moral and ethical literature of the twentieth century. Hartmann offers a self-contained system of ethics that yet offers a conservative outlook on social life.

PART II

GENERAL ASPECTS OF THE TABLE OF VALUES

(AXIOLOGY OF MORALS)

Section I

GENERAL ASPECTS OF THE TABLE OF VALUES

CHAPTER I (XXVI)¹

THE PLACE OF MORAL VALUES AMONG VALUES IN GENERAL

(a) THE FIELD OF ETHICAL INQUIRY

IT is not only ethics that treats of values. The term is conspicuous in economics and has its origin there. Economics is the study of goods, in the first place of material, then of vital, social and mental goods of every kind. To the latter are closely related the values of moral, legal, political and artistic life. Research in this field is still young and our survey casual and unsystematic. There is a lack of comprehensive points of view; and previous attempts to attain them have too often been marked by a blind fumbling and uncertain groping.

So long as whole territories, like that of æsthetics, in spite of their dominant position, remain as good as unexplored, there is no remedy. Our knowledge of the structure and order of values is in a rudimentary stage. We can look out upon the whole realm only through special groups of values which happen to be accessible, but we cannot deductively determine particulars from a general view of the whole.

There is little prospect of our attaining any authoritative insight into moral values, as such, from the neighbouring fields or from a general theory. On the contrary, the domain of morality, as yet the most accessible among the more important fields, must itself furnish us with points of departure into general theory. In ethical research we cannot reckon upon guidance from outside.

How moral values differ from other kinds has in part been already explained (the two-sided relativity of persons)², but it cannot be more fully shown until we make a special analysis of single values. So much, however, is easily seen, that not all values which are ethically relevant, whether in the sense of obligation or of participation, are on that account moral values. The character of man is related to a multitude of values which are not moral in their nature. Moral conduct is always conduct towards persons, but never except in connection with other kinds of values and counter-values. From this point of view there was some reason for including, as the ancients did, the theory of goods under ethics.

In a certain sense one may say that everything, which exists, somehow falls practically under the category of values, that everything in the world, even the most remote and indifferent, is in the perspective of ethics either of positive or negative worth. The same universe, which in its totality underlies ontological phenomena, belongs also in precisely the same totality to ethical phenomena. It is no less a world of goods and evils than of things and their relations. At least it is as radically the former as it is the latter.

(b) THE DEPENDENCE OF MORAL UPON NON-MORAL Values

This wider sphere, however, is not that of distinctively moral values. These latter are affixed not to things and their relations, but only to persons. Only acts of persons can be morally good or bad. Nevertheless it is necessary to take the non-moral values into consideration, even if not to study them in detail. Their connection with the moral is not outward and not nullifiable or even negligible. It is essential, inward, material. Moral values presuppose other goods and the specific quality and worth belonging to them.

In fact, wherein would an honest man be superior to a thief, if the things purloined were not somehow of value? What one man can steal, what another can treasure as a possession, is not merely a thing but a good. Honesty, then, if it is a moral value, necessarily presupposes the positive worth of material goods. It is inherently dependent upon the latter. In the same way, chivalry which secures an advantage to the weak rests upon the worth of that advantage; love for one’s neighbour, which gives, or which takes upon itself another’s burden, assumes the worth of the things given and of the relief from the burden; not otherwise is veracity related to the worth (for the other person) of the truth asserted. In all these cases the value of the act is altogether different from that attributed to the external good, whether this be some simple material possession or some complex situation. And indeed the worth of an act is plainly of a higher kind, the character of which is seen in this, that its degree does not increase and decrease with the greatness of the non-moral good, but according to a standard of a totally different order. It nevertheless presupposes the value of goods not in themselves moral, and without them it could not itself exist.

A relation therefore of dependence holds between the wider and narrower spheres of values. It is an unequivocal, irreversible dependence of the higher upon the lower. But the dependence is purely material, not axiological. The lower is the stuff upon which the higher works; it is merely the conditio sine qua non of the latter. In every other sense the higher is independent of it; its specific quality, moral goodness, is something entirely new, something which was not represented in the lower value towards which it stands in complete indifference.

It is precisely the existence of the material stuff provided by the lower for the higher structural value, which makes this dependence necessary. Where moral values and their opposites appear in persons, there a world of positive goods must previously have been at hand, to which as objects of worth the persons react. But the converse is not true. The existence of the world of goods does not involve the emergence of a world of morality and immorality. The basis of the latter is provided only where a community of persons exists within one and the same world of goods. The content of the moral world lies on another plane; it is a structural novelty face to face with the whole mass of values from other quarters. Hence the novelty of its inherent quality. And indeed its pecularity—both material and axiological—subsists without prejudice to the fact that the moral conduct of the persons touched by it has, mediately and dependently, the character of a “good.”¹

(c) OTHER KINDS OF DEPENDENCE

This relation of higher and lower is not universal. It by no means holds good for the whole realm of values that the higher is conditioned by the lower. Such dependence prevails indeed over a wide area, but not everywhere, and it is itself not always structurally the same.

It is the tritest commonplace that, for instance, spiritual values can blossom only where the elementary biological values are attained, that the cultural form of a higher kind can grow only in a soil of prosperity and welfare of a certain grade. But the same cannot be affirmed concerning the value of pleasure and comfort, or even of happiness. Between these and culture there exists no inner and necessary dependence, although the former are lower in character than culture.

Between biological and spiritual values there is not the same kind of dependence as between material goods and moral values. The biological are only the ontological presupposition of the spiritual, that is to say, their actuality is a condition for the realization of the latter; their existence is only a means, only a building-stone. But their value-quality is not a material condition for spiritual qualities. Non-moral possessions, on the other hand, are in their specific value-quality a condition for those of personal conduct—without prejudice to the axiological independence of the latter. Between the two there is only a relation of a conditio sine qua non. But as regards the former the condition is merely external and ontological; for the latter it is a structural, an internally axiological, organic relation of valueentities as such, a fusion of the lower into the higher; in short, a purely constitutional relationship of values, or, more correctly, of the whole field of value as such, which is there before any actualization of value and which is independent thereof.

(d) SCHELER’S ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH THE OPPOSITE THEORY

In place of the law that the higher fields rest upon the lower, Scheler maintained that the lower are dependent upon the higher.¹ According to him the lower can exist by right only in so far as the higher, to which they are related and in which they find their significance, exist. As an illustration he takes the relation between the value of the useful and that of the agreeable. To be useful “for something” is of the essence of utility; a thing cannot be useful in and of itself. Therefore, another, evidently a higher value is the axiological condition of the useful.

Against this argument, which is in itself unobjectionable, there is one thing to be said. Why must the basic value always be the agreeable? Rather is utility the value of means as such, and this is relative to an end already given. The end therefore must have a value of its own; but this need not necessarily be that of the agreeable. A thing can very well be useful for life and prosperity, for social and mental values of every kind. When one in this sense widens Scheler’s theory it is undoubtedly, as regards utility, well founded.

But then the question arises: Does the same relation of dependence hold in the case of other orders of value? Is it true that biological values are based upon spiritual values, or that these rest upon some highest religious value? It is true that life gains a decidedly higher significance from spiritual values. But that fact is simply due to their place in the scale of values itself. May one, on the other hand, go so far as to say that the value of life would lapse, if it were not linked up with that of spiritual existence, in which the consciousness of biological value is enclosed?

That would in truth deny the value peculiar to life itself; and the gravity of the moral crime involved in the destruction of mere life—even where there are scarcely any spiritual values worth mentioning—would be absolutely incomprehensible. It is likewise in contradiction to our sense of value and especially to our moral sense, when one makes the spiritual values (including the moral worth of action) dependent upon some absolute other-worldly value of a religious nature. The characteristic feature of spiritual values—for example, the æsthetic—is their self-evident autonomy, their perfect self-sufficiency and their independence of all wider perspectives.

The same holds good of moral values. To found them upon a higher value is evidently mere metaphysical speculation, conceived as a support for religio-philosophical theses which as such do not throw any light upon æsthetic or ethical reality. This entire notion that the lower depends upon the higher is at bottom a teleological prejudice; as a universal formula, it would read: lower structures are always dependent upon higher ones as ends, for the sake of which they exist and in which alone they find significance.

Such a teleological law would presuppose a thorough-going teleological gradation of values and a teleological structure of the realm of values, and would affirm something not only altogether unverifiable, but something which goes counter to those categorial laws of dependence which are violated in metaphysical personalism.¹

Against this it must be maintained that all grades of values, genuine in their own right, possess their peculiar autonomy, which can be diminished by no kind of dependence upon anything above. The whole meaning of the realm of values, so far as it is a world of ideal self-maintaining entities, stands or falls with this foundation-principle. But especially is it the spiritual values, even down to their ultimate details, which by their constitution reveal this autonomy. What is beautiful is beautiful for its own sake; what is comical is comical in itself; what is noble or lovable is noble or lovable intrinsically. All reference back to something else for the sake of which it is what it is, is fantastic speculation.

The citation of utility is therefore the worst imaginable. For in itself utility is not a value on its own account. By its very nature it can only be the value of a means to something valuable in itself.

Of an entirely different kind is the basing of the higher value upon the lower, as it is here set forth. It implies for the higher values no surrender of their autonomy; for it does not touch the valuational character of the latter, but throughout attaches only to some specific structural elements of their contents, so far as these already must have such a character of their own. The higher value is never conditioned completely by the lower. Its dependence is not axiological, not to mention teleological, but only material or, as in most cases, only modal. It gives us indeed a certain insight into the realm of value, but it by no means applies to the whole range.

Dependencies naturally can very well exist in a kingdom of autonomous entities; only they must not be total and constitutional dependencies, for such would destroy the autonomy of the members. On the other hand, the basing, axiologically and teleologically, of the lower upon the higher constitutes a total and essential dependence of the quality of worth as such. The basing of the higher upon the lower materially is, on the contrary, only a partial dependence of particular structural elements.

1 In this volume, Chapters I–XXXIX represent Chapters XXVI– LXIV in the German edition, and the numbers in brackets (xxvi) are those of the chapters in that original.

2 Cf. Chapter XV (d), (e), Vol. I.

1 Cf. Chapter XV (c), Vol. I

1 Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik, second edition, p. 92 ff.

1 Cf. Chapter XXV, Vol. I

CHAPTER II (XXVII)

MORAL VALUE AND THE END OF ACTION

(a) THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF MORAL VALUES IN THE ETHICS OF ENDS

BESIDES all its methodological consequences, our theory of dependence leads us to a still more important point of view, one which is decisive even for the understanding of moral acts.

The Kantian ethics shows the meaning of moral principles solely in their character of Ought. The commandment, the imperative, the claim upon man, was the moral law. If this idea were applied to values, the meaning of morality would needs begin and end in this, that man’s will would have to be directed to moral values as the highest ends. He alone would be the morally good man who in all his actions sought to be morally good, who spoke the truth in order to be truthful, who loved in order to be loving, who practised magnanimity so as to be magnanimous. The Kantian rigorism speaks out pointedly and universally: only that action has moral worth which is done “for the sake of the law” it is not enough that it be in accordance with the law, the law must further be the single motive and its fulfilment the final end.

That this rigid rigorism leads to preposterous results is evident and has often been shown. But here we are concerned not directly with it, for it is only an outgrowth of the ethics of ends. What shall we say of the ethics of ends? Is it true that moral values constitute the supreme ends of moral action, of that action whose valuational quality they produce? Is it true that the morally good man ultimately has himself in view, himself distinguished by the value of his action, that in his aim by anticipation he sees his own picture in a mirror—the picture of himself as he ought to be? Is the picturing of oneself in the looking-glass the meaning of goodness, love, magnanimity, straightforwardnes...