Chon Ip Ng

This paper explores the possibility of hermeneutic ethics through critical engagement with Gadamer and Heidegger. While Gadamer emphasizes the ethical significance of interpretation, application, and tradition, his hermeneutics has often been criticized for its alleged conservatism and limited critical force. The paper argues that this limitation can be addressed by supplementing Gadamer’s account with Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity. By reconstructing moral action as a hermeneutic and expressive practice, the paper shows how Heidegger’s concepts of being-toward-death, conscience, guilt, and resoluteness disclose an existential structure of responsibility in which ethical norms may be appropriated and transformed through singular commitment. Authenticity is not treated as a moral norm, but as an enabling condition under which ethical bindingness becomes intelligible for an agent. The resulting hermeneutic ethics accounts for moral creativity as a bifurcation within tradition rather than a rejection of it.