Is Scheler's ethic an ethic of virtue?

Philip Blosser

pp. 147-159

in: Philip Blosser, Eiichi Shimomissé, Lester Embree, Hiroshi Kojima (eds), Japanese and Western phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

In addressing the question at issue, I consider (1) Scheler's distinction between Kant's "ethics of duty" and his own "ethics of insight"; (2) Kant's weakened conceptions of moral virtue and vice, which are roughly equivalent to Aristotle's encratês and akratês, disqualify his ethic as a classical ethic of virtue; (3) Scheler's phenomenological articulation of moral virtue as a moral disposition (Gesinnung); and (4) whether Scheler develops his theory so as to provide anything like a view of "man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos," which Alasdair Maclntyre finds in classical virtue-ethics. I conclude that Scheler's ethic has some of the basic features of classical ethics of virtue, but also some of the basic difficulties of "post-aretaic" ethics.