ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses emotions in the disclosure of moral value, emotions and moral obligation, and a well-ordered and -balanced emotional life as a constituent of a flourishing life. Moral phenomenology is situated within the axiological discussions prevalent among the early phenomenologists—those working in the first third of the 20th century, such as Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. Values are often experienced as confronting us, as prescriptions, norms, imperatives, obligations, demands, and so forth. The mutuality in empathy introduces a communalization that is essential to objective knowledge, including moral knowledge. The respect-sympathy structure at the basis of morality has further implications for ethics. The rise of logical positivism and scientific naturalism pushed aside the study of emotions as supposedly irrational and of ethics as outside the scope of a positivistic philosophy.
