ABSTRACT
Sellars’ celebrated claim about the task of philosophy, that it should provide a view of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest sense of the term,” surely includes the ordinary ethical distinctions and assertions that are the connective tissue of daily life. In this chapter, I explore some of what Sellars has to say about our ethical explanations—and indeed what he describes as our intersubjective ethical condition—by way of philosophers who have played a background role in Sellars’ thinking (in particular Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas). The surprise is that Sellars’ conclusion-that our ethical considerations must be guided by Kantian and proto-Christian claims—is misguided: what Sellars might have fruitfully appealed to is the framework of Buddhist metaphysics itself. The no-self view and the doctrine of dependent arising can clearly accommodate what Sellars is striving for in his gestures at Christian neighborly love and indeed his (slightly) more detailed account of what he calls “we-intentionality.”
