Feeling the Good – and Doing It. Husserl’s Axiological Ethics

Overview & Synopsis

Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, far from the intellectualist he was long taken to be, significantly renews traditional moral questions. His ethics is first and foremost characterized by its meta-ethical framework, namely that of phenomenological value theory. On the one hand, Husserl interprets values as genuine objects, inherent in worldly thingssuch as a beautiful landscape or an abject deed. On the other hand, he examines the experiences in which these worldly values appear to us, claiming that they are essentially affective -we feel, for example, that torturing is cruel. From this perspective, he seeks to demonstrate the rationality of values, that is, the possibility of achieving ultimately justified axiological judgments through evident value manifestation, thus dismissing axiological relativism. Crucially, however, Husserl insists that ethics is not reducible to axiology. While axiology concerns the knowledge of the good, ethics is a practical discipline, which requires doing the good, that is, choosing among attainable values and acting concretely to realize them in the world. The aim of this chapter is accordingly to examine how Husserl integrates ethics into his general theory of values and value experiences. To this end, the paper is divided into two parts. I first consider Husserl's prewar ethics, emphasizing how it radicalizes Franz Brentano's approach. The second part studies Husserl's ethics after the First World War, focusing especially on the personalist turn it undergoes.