Andreas Dorschel

Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded and thus lost validity; a moral norm that nobody keeps, however, may still be valid. Yet the latter point does not render the question obsolete whether demanding obedience to a specific moral norm, under certain circumstances, could mean asking too much. The costs incurred might be, on the one hand, individual costs. But there may, on the other hand, also be moral costs of obeying a certain moral norm. For an individual might also have responsibilities towards others near her, e.g., her family or peers; acting in accordance with the strict moral standard, then, could do harm not just to her but also to those who rely, and must rely upon her. Yet to define moral limits to following moral rules appears to be self-defeating.

In Die idealistische Kritik des Willens [German Idealism’s Critique of the Will] Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Immanuel Kant’s and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ethical animadversions. He objects both to Kant’s claim that „a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same thing“ („ein freier Wille und ein Wille unter sittlichen Gesetzen einerlei“) (Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten AB 98) and to Hegel’s doctrine that „freedom of the will is rendered real as law“ („die Freiheit des Willens als Gesetz verwirklicht“) (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson. Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1923ff., p. 368). What renders freedom of the will real, Dorschel argues, is rather to exercise choice sensibly.

Ancient mythology related music to pain in a twofold way. Pain is the punishment inflicted for producing inferior music: the fate of Marsyas; music is sublimation of pain: the achievement of Orpheus and of Philomela. Both aspects have played defining roles in Western musical culture. Pain’s natural expression is the scream. To be present in music at all, pain needs to be transformed. So even where music expresses pain, at the same time it appeases that very pain. Unlike the scream, musical dissonance is articulate. While pain’s presence in music has to be mediated and in a way remote, it can be more differentiated than any immediate natural expression of it. Pain itself offers no structure to those who are overcome by it; rather it tends to disintegrate their lives. Music, on the other hand, is audible order in time. Such order may thus appear to be merely imposed on pain; yet it can also reveal something about pain by way of contextualizing it.

Arnold Gehlen's attempt to give anthropological grounds for morality stems from Kant's idea that being freed from the compulsion of instinct left human beings in need of compensation for the loss of the practical guidance which instinct had hitherto provided. Whereas Kant thought this compensation was to found only in reasoned morality, Gehlen would argue that morality provides recompense by becoming a quasi-instinct that functions without reflection and that needs to be bred into human beings. The author maintains that in comparing animals and human beings. Gehlen posits will as a deficient instinct as deficient will; because each side is characterized as the negative of the other, Gehlen's starting point fails to meet the conditions for a valid comparison.

Order has been ascribed both to nature and to society. There is a long tradition of claiming that the social order and the natural order are closely linked. Radical enlightenment challenged that tradition. According to Spinoza (Ethica, pars 1, appendix) to call something orderly simply means that we can easily imagine and remember it; ascribing order thus betrays merely something about us, not about things. This challenging idea never became Enlightenment mainstream. In fact, ties between an objective natural order and our own human order were widely popularized in the 18th century. Yet one strand of thinking, set out to undermine traditional views of order, turned up trumps. The British Enlightenment succeeded in undoing the time-honoured equation of order and hierarchy.

Does having some feeling or other ever count as an argument – and, should it? As a matter of fact, not just do persons sometimes refer to their feelings to make a point in debate. Often, they even treat them as irrefutable arguments; for they are, of course, certain of their own feelings. To make a point in debate by reference to one’s feelings, one has got to articulate them. As language is the core medium of debate (though it can be supported by images etc.), feelings, then, have to be articulated in words. These words, to function in communication, must participate in what is general (though not necessarily universal). On that level of generality, other speakers of the same language can contest the feelings – not that they have occured within the first speaker’s subjectivity, but that they are reasonable reactions to circumstances. Hence if feeling is sometimes to be taken seriously as an argument, it is not irrefutable, but rather refutable; and to the extent that somebody insists that it is irrefutable, it cannot count as an argument.

It is known that sociobiology, the theory of the biological origins of the social behavior of living beings, is related to ethics. However, sociobiology does not include moral doctrines but simply describes facts. The present essay discusses two basic theses, “altruism” and “reciprocal altruism”, in order to prove that a natural science free of judgments and evaluations is contrary to a theory of ethics, such as the theory of Kant and Apel, as well as to intuitive theories of ethics. Ethics is the explanatory theory of morality, and morality should be established at the theoretical level, so that doubt can be expressed and not restrained.

In book 3 of ‘De anima’, Aristotle distinguishes between sensations and feelings. On the level of sensation, we merely register that something is so and so; feeling, by way of contrast, takes that so and so to be agreeable or disagreeable. Emotion has to be distinguished from both sensation and feeling. One cannot have a sensation or feeling without noticing it. But others may be the first to realize that somebody is jealous or envious. Hence emotions like jealousy or envy are not, and are not like, sensations or feelings. Feelings and emotions share an evaluative stance towards the world. But they differ in the way they relate to reason.

The expulsion of prejudice is the centrepiece of intellectual progress, as it has been understood since the Enlightenment. that this fight has not been successful since is obvious, but this does not invalidate it. There is no reason to believe that people in the 20th century had fewer (rather than merely different) prejudices than people had in the 18th century; yet we might simply conclude that the fight has not been conducted resolutely enough. The question whether or not this might be the right conclusion, however, depends on an answer to a more fundamental question; whether prejudices, as such, are a proper object to fight against in the first place. The argument of this book, is an attempt to show that they are not. The author begins by reconstructing the Enlightenment's main objection to prejudice, challenging the conclusion that all prejudices must be destroyed and focusing on the context of decision and action. The book goes on to consider the relationship between prejudice and experience, and explores a particular defence of prejudice developed in hermeneutics. A final chapter drives home the general conclusion of the book. To make the case for a reinterpretation of the concept of prejudice, it addresses particularly contentious issues, exploring dogmatism, fundamentalism and racist prejudices.