Karol Wojtyła’s dispute with Max Scheler over the concept and role of conscience in morality

Abstract

The article, following Karol Wojtyła’s study of Max Scheler’s ethics in his habilitation dissertation, reveals the above-mentioned phenomenologist’s overly narrow view of ethical experience and, for this reason, a narrow and erroneous account of conscience and its role in morality. Scheler’s narrowing of his analyses of ethical experience down to the emotional experience of values and insight into their essence led, as a consequence, to the exclusion of the causality of the real subject of action, i.e. to the exclusion of the objective desire for good, which is an act of self-determination guided by the fact of moral duty and the categorical normativity of conscience. Scheler equated “wanting good” with “the emotional feeling that I am good”. However, the emotional, passive experiencing of values alone is not the causation and performance of an act. The performance of an act is about good as such, permeated by value and moral duty along with the categorical imperative of conscience. The moral goodness of an act internally permeates the entire dynamism of its performance. The explanation for this kind of personal fulfilment in the act is the potentiality and realization of the nature of the human person. Thus, in the ethical experience, we are dealing not only with the emotional experience of value, but with the experience of moral duty, with the experience of the norm, including the one closest to us, that is, the imperative of conscience, with the involvement of our will towards the performance of a valuable and morally commanded act, as the apex of personal fulfilment.