Wojtyła’s view on Kant’s formalism and Scheler’s material ethics of value, or the ethics of material duty

Abstract

The article presents the concept of ethics developed by Karol Wojtyła in his polemic against the ethical systems of Immanuel Kant and Max Scheler. Wojtyła negatively evaluates Scheler’s system as a tool for scientific interpretation of the Christian ethics, and at the same time as a tool for interpreting the experience of morality as such. However, he does not negatively evaluate the phenomenological method itself, which, in his opinion, is an indispensable tool in the analysis of moral facts. Moreover, Wojtyła proposes that this method should be applied even more consistently than Scheler himself did. This is because in his – partly justified – polemic with Kant, Scheler went too far in excluding the normative moment from the experience of morality. Wojtyła argues that the very phenomenological analysis of experience – above all, the judgments of conscience – shows that normativity is given in the originary experience of morality.