Abstract

This thesis explores the dialogical grounds of our moral being. What is presented is a description of the structures of our being-in-the-world through which value occurs in relation. I propose that the self is a relational being, that reality is relational, and that the dialogue between self, world, and others names the experiential ground or dynamic texture through which value is achieved. The way we are in the world and related to others is such that there is nothing in-itself, and certainly nothing value-laden in-itself. Therefore, if we wish to comprehend the ways in which we exist as moral beings attending to moral value, we must begin by understanding the relations of our existence through which value is achieved and attended to. ;The final goal of this argument is to provide a description of moral value and moral discernment. To achieve that goal, I construct a philosophical anthropology which accounts for the possibility of moral relations. This description of human being in the world finds its essential organizing structures in H. Richard Niebuhr's image of the responsible self. Generally speaking, Niebuhr's vision of an ethics of the fitting provides the occasion for this reflection upon the experiential foundations of our moral being. I attempt to clarify Niebuhr's insights and, through use of the phenomenological method, to use them constructively. To understand the foundations of the moral self, I place the responsible self within the life-world; and by drawing on the work of Niebuhr, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz, I describe the structural relations through which value is achieved and through which moral discernment and moral action are made possible. ;Niebuhr provides an image of the moral self as a time-full and social being responding to the world and others in light of an interpretation of what is going on around it. The four structures of existence which define responsibility are response, interpretation, accountability, and social solidarity. After introducing the problem in Chapter I, Chapter II takes up the categories of response and interpretation through an analysis of the intentional relation between consciousness and world. I examine response and interpretation as statements of our 'worldliness' and the 'fitting' as a description of the way phenomena gain meaning in relation. On this first level of inquiry, value remains an amoral category, descriptive simply of reality as meaning-event. Chapter III addresses accountability through a description of the self's time-fullness, or the temporal relations by which the past and future bear on our interpretations in the present. In this chapter I describe the elements necessary for discernment by focusing on pragmatic engagements within the everyday world. Here the fitting response is an act which masters the situation, and value is a relation which is particularly self-centered. ;Chapter IV addresses the intersubjective nature of the self, our relations with others in the life-world, and the historical nature of interpretation. The recognition of sociality gives rise to a definition of the fitting as a moral relation in which beings are complemented rather than thwarted. Drawing upon all previous reflections, Chapter V explores moral value as a relation which is particularly other-oriented and the modes of self-transcendence necessary to moral discernment. Chapter VI begins to describe responsibility as a distinctively moral mode of intending. It moves toward a phenomenology of the moral. In short, this phenomenological analysis of Niebuhr's ethics of the fitting provides a preliminary understanding of the foundations of value, moral value, discernment, moral discernment, and the responsible self as a moral being