NTU Philosophical Review

Issue 15, January 1992

A New Orientation Towards Ethical Value - An Approach to the Phenomenological Method

T'his article deals with modern ethical values. The author tries to use the phenomenological method to analyse the differences and the possible coincidence between normative ethics and meta-ethics. The normative ethics which concentrates its heavy point in the practical part of philosophy, and the meta-ethics, which maintains the cognitive function would be more fundamental in moral philosophy, inspires the same moral subject, namely the human being, according to the descriptive phenomenologicol point of vievv. In the transcendental phenomenology this moral subject practises its cognition, volition and all other inner activities as a pure subject in its transcendental milieu. The volition as one of the human inner activities brings not only the intentional act, creates also all bonum sibi and consequently any bonum alteri. Bonum sibi and bonum alteri constructe the perfect goal of moral philosophy. Thus in the constititive phenomenology the moral subject contents all the subjective intention and volition, and at the same time all the objective goods both for himself and for others. The moral subject, the ethical person, stands in the middle point of the ethical values. It would be the possible coincidence and conformity between normative ethis and meta-ethics.