ABSTRACT

The rationalism of Edmund Husserl’s ethics is tied to the views that our ethical judgments are grounded in an evidential insight into axiological and practical truths and that the laws governing our axiological and ethical reasoning are a priori laws. Ethical norms are grounded in a theoretical science whose claims about the rules governing the contents of moral thinking are necessary and universal. Simone de Beauvoir follows Sartre both in placing freedom and transcendence at the center of her ethical reflections and in recognizing the obstacles freedom faces in its exercise and in transcending the limitations of the human situation. Moral emotions are already at work in moral perception’s presenting things as good or bad and in our judgments of value and obligation. Values are often experienced as confronting us, that is, as prescriptions, norms, imperatives, obligations, demands, requirements, and so forth. Martin Heidegger was a critic of the then-prevalent theories of value.