Abstract

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of the assumption that practical reason prescribes merely for the formal validity of singular, prudential imperatives. While for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, his medieval interpreter, the internal fruition of phronesis was the universal good of the "perfect community," the abstract formalism of Kantian "Moralitat" rendered prudential prescriptions logically distinct from considerations of moral universality. As the critique of Kantian categorical imperatives preserves this distinction, moral theory is conceived by philosophers such as R. M. Hare and John Rawls as a problematical delimitation of prudential choice by formal, metaethical constraints. ;Although such hypothetical choice theories fail to generate coherent accounts of morality, a critical reconstruction of Kantian hypothetical imperatives reveals that the validity of singular, prudential prescriptions is contingent upon the adoption of certain formally generalized attitudes respecting rational prescription. Drawing upon the interpretative theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer, these attitudes will be explicated in terms of the concept of respect for persons, recalling the earlier ethical notion of prudence. A hermeneutical synthesis of "Moralitat" and "Sittlichkeit" thus gives rise to a theory of morality which avoids the Scylla of ethical relativism and the Charybdis of abstract formalism.