Abstract

How to interpret and elucidate from a phenomenological perspective the requirement that philosophical theorizing ought to consider the legitimacy or universal validity of ethical principles as well as the diversity of life forms? What could phenomenology say about the distance between the theoretical foundations of ethics and the practical application of its principles? To elucidate these questions, first, we take the characteristics of Habermas’s discourse ethics as reference point to show what Scheler’s material ethics of values consists in and in what sense it rejects both universalism and relativism. Secondly, we present the concepts that articulate the phenomenological foundations of this ethics in order to indicate in what sense “the universal” and “the individual” are taken as complementary. Starting from some questions concerning the problem of the distance between theory and practice raised by this conception, we sketch finally some thematic lines to indicate to what extent it is possible to expect from the material ethics of values to shorten that distance