Ross and Scheler on the Givenness and Unity of Value

In this chapter, J. Edward Hackett clarifies the ambiguity of Ross’s list of prima facie duties using two components from Scheler’s phenomenology: affective intentionality and the order of preferencing. By showing how integral these two components are to moral experience, Hackett supports and defends intuitionism against the charge that it is unable to reveal basic and derived duties, and argues that Ross’s intuitionism is not arbitrary with respect to duties. Instead, there is a unity that can be experienced, even in cases of conflict, precisely because Ross does not have a full account of the phenomenological structure of moral experience. For Hackett, phenomenology’s future relevance depends on interpreting the non-reductive aspects of experience in terms of the same non-naturalism that is common in both thinkers.