The Partially Examined Life (Citizens): (Protected Content)
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Mark and Wes read through and discuss Ch. 6 “Formalism and Person,” in Max Scheler’s most famous work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1916). Ethical Formalism is Kant: What makes something ethically correct is just something about the type of act and willing involved. Non-formalism pays attention to the content, e.g. our sentiments (a la Hume).
As we’ve been studying on PEL, phenomenologists starting with Brentano sought to merge the two: Things in our experience just present themselves as intuitively praiseworthy, and this is sufficient to establish ethical obligations. We have been reading about how Scheler relies in his ethical theorizing on our experiences of sympathy and love, but we wanted to learn more about what it is about particular people that we love and respect: What is it to be a “person” in the moral sense?
This book moves very slowly, so in this part he’s still just distinguishing himself from Kant when it comes to saying some basic things about your relation to your own selfhood.
Read along with us, starting on p. 370 (PDF p. 403).
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