Value Preferment

One will note that up until now there has been no mention of ‘Good & Evil’ or moral choice in Scheler's ethical theory. We have discussed ‘goods’ i.e. valuable objects, but not the distinctly moral Good & Evil. Confusingly, these are two non-identical uses of ‘Good’ in Scheler’s ethics. There is ‘The Good’ that we can experience, which is broadly all possible or actual goods i.e. valuable objects, instantiating all positive values, and there is also ‘Good’ that is the specifically personal, moral value revealed, as I’m about to describe, in people preferring higher values over lower ones.

This is because Scheler argues that ‘Good & Evil’ as concepts only make sense in reference to the ethical realm of existing individual values.142 Moral theories that leap directly to the issue of personal moral choices without taking stock of the manner in which cognition of value occurs will always give only a foreshortened theoretical description of ethics. It is most likely they will be giving an incorrect view of ethics precisely because they fail to take into account the great detail of value cognition that precedes moral choice and hence misrepresent this basic material. Theories of morality such as Kantianism that state that normative oughts, the commanding or prohibiting of acts, are the entirety of ethics make the further mistake of not ignoring but actively denying the existence of the majority of ethical cognition that involves no sense of an immediate normative command.

In the cases of values we have discussed so far there has been consideration of only one particular value and so there has been no possibility for ethical choice. Ethical choice occurs when multiple different values are given in a single situation as providing alternatives for acts. To give an example: I was once walking home with my girlfriend at the time; on this particular day that involved pushing her in her wheelchair a mile uphill in the pouring rain. The rain had just come on suddenly and pushing someone in a wheelchair you have little ability to hurry, so we were resigned to getting increasingly cold and wet for the next 20 minutes. I was about to cross the road when we were overtaken by a young Asian lady I did not know walking under an umbrella. The young lady gave us one glance, thrust the umbrella into my hand and marched off across the road and through the rain before I could respond at all.

Anyone at all could recognise that experience, despite its relative triviality, as an act of profound goodness. Scheler argues that this immediate awareness cannot be reduced to any calculus of expected outcomes of happiness or other metric, nor any internal view of the mental

141

Ibid, pp38-44.

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process of the lady who helped us, but is immediately apparent on the apprehension of the choice made between values in that instant. She sacrificed her own comfort to prioritise the comfort of struggling strangers, even though she had no bond of friendship or other link to us, and even though we could be thought responsible for our own fate by failing to prepare for autumn English weather. Her act instantiated the values of kindness and generosity and Scheler would argue that it is in the immediate apprehension of these personal values, the sacrifice and service to others, as qualitatively higher than the purely agreeable value of her own comfort that the recognition of the goodness of her action appears.143

Scheler argues that moral 'Good' appears specifically and only in the preferment of higher positive values over lower positive (or just negative) values and ‘Evil’ in the preferment of lower values over higher ones. They do not appear independently at any point as a direct feature of objects, whether things, acts or persons. Objects are intuited as more or less positively or negatively valuable i.e. as goods, but that does not constitute ‘Good or Evil’ in the specifically moral sense. 'Good' and 'Evil' are specifically values of persons and no other objects because only persons are capable of preferment among values. Scheler flatly rejects Kant’s view that only the ‘will’ can be good. What we will is rather dependent on our ethical cognition and especially our value preference. This means it is a good person who has a good will, rather than the other way round. This does not mean that 'Good' or 'Evil' can be defined in terms of persons. Like all values they are "clearly feelable" essences that can only be known through experience and any attempts to essentially define them in terms of non-evaluative physical characteristics are doomed to failure. It merely means that persons and their acts alone are essentially the bearers of these uniquely moral values. They are the unique moral values revealed through value preferment, whereas all other values are non-moral ethical values revealed through a wide range of bearers.144

Preferment among values does not just happen in terms of active moments of choice among acts, as in the example I described, but is a constant and largely implicit process of cognition that occurs in all recognition of values. Whenever a value is intentionally recognised through conation or feeling it is immediately either preferred to or placed after other known values in terms of 'height' i.e. qualitative intensity of value. This mental act does not occur directly through feeling or conation, it is a distinct form of value cognition whereby "the height of the value is 'given', by virtue of its essence, only in the act of preferring"145. But this does not constitute the absolute height of the value because that exists objectively in the essence of the values themselves.146 As such value preferment can go wrong, and indeed systematic incorrect

143 _{Ibid, p27.} 144 _{Ibid, p28.} 145 _{Ibid, p87.} 146

I am aware that the concept of value height itself may be considered contentious by some. There is insufficient space to consider this problem here but I dedicate my 5th chapter to considering some of the

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preferment, or value-deception as Scheler calls it, would be the core failing of moral cognition and the most fundamental driver of moral failure (to which phenomena like ‘weakness of will’ would be secondary).147 The near automatic and invisible act of cognition should be considered the default way in which value preferment occurs, separately to any external actions or choices. It can also occur spontaneously when faced with a choice or conation that brings to consciousness at that moment values that had never before been perceived or ranked. Usually, though, preferment does not occur in an act of choice, but rather previous acts of preferment themselves dictate the moral choices that we can or will make when certain situations arise. Preferment is importantly different to choice, in a similar way to the previous distinction between 'will' and the more fundamental and broad conation. Choice between things, persons or acts is always based on underlying preferment among values, but choice implies an act in conation or conscious thought based on perceptually represented objects. I choose to see one movie over another, even if I cannot give distinct reasons for my decision. But that choice itself is only possible because I have already made preferment among certain values, and in complicated goods among certain complexes of values, that immediately guides my choice.148 It is possible to talk of preferring among goods, such as "I prefer roses to carnations" that refers to no act of choice, even an imagined one, though it does then act as the basis for any particular choice. Preferment is a near automatic act of value-cognition that is only revealed through implicit conative acts and consciously through choice.

Preferment among values does not necessarily require the presence of more than one value either. In the cognition of a certain value it may be given as 'high' without the values that it is higher than being clearly given in intuition. A value may also be given as though there could be certain values that were higher than it, even if those values are not clear. Also, the act of preferment is not purely dependent on the giving of values in feeling or conation; rather the preferring itself shapes and is shaped by those values that are accessible to the person in feeling through the mechanism just described. In the process of preferring or placing after the person intuits the 'space' occupied by other values in the ranking of values and from that opens the possibilities of these values being directly identified and clarified in feeling.149

Values are originally revealed and clarified through conation and intentional feeling. They are 'ranked' through the emotional act of preferment that also provides space for the identification of new values within the areas already disclosed by feeling. Beyond any of these elements are the acts of Love and Hate. Scheler does not consider love and hate just to be emotions, or modes of valuation, or the perception of values. Rather loving and hating are the "highest level of our

complexities raised by Scheler’s relatively simple outline of his connected ideas of Value Height and Value Preference.

147 _{E.g. Ibid, p37.} 148

Ibid, p26, p41.

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intentional emotive life"150. Love is the most intentional, object directed of emotional states, the most distant from the self-referential and contained nature of feeling-states. Love of any person is a movement towards the highest possible value in that person, a revealing of their value- potential that is indifferent to whether these are values they already instantiate. Love as such has the unique role of revealing radically new areas of value previously un-encountered. Love primarily applies to human persons but can also apply to all bearers of higher values such as nature, art, knowledge or God151.

Acts of preferment allow discovery of neighbouring values by containing references to the spaces in the value structure they may occupy. But love acts "as a pioneer and guide",152 going ahead of feeling and preferment in flashes of creative insight that reveal whole new territories of values as yet unimagined. Whereas, for example, the phenomenological method relies on analysing experience that is already given, and so can clarify, but is not radically creative. Love opens up these new realms to be thoroughly 'mapped' in acts of feeling, conation and preferment and so widens the ethical possibilities and potential for that person to heights of value previously un-thought. Conation and intentional feeling, preferment, and love all then have vital roles in "circumscribing" our wider ethical awareness, and hence both our specific moral choices and the whole universe of such choices that are a practical possibility for us.153

Hate, on the other hand, has an analogous but opposite role and effect. In hate positive values are actively closed off and withdrawn from all possibility of perception or cognition. The world of positive values the person can experience is thus more deeply and widely impoverished the deeper the hate is and the farther it stretches. In doing so it also hides its own action so the person does not realise how impoverished they are. They can lose all sight of those values to the point of becoming totally unaware of what they no longer have access to. It can only possibly be right to hate disvalues themselves, to hate evil as such, never to hate positive goods or values, though it is doubtlessly seductive to do so because goods are easier to identify than specific negative values.

Scheler sharply distinguishes the wider layers of moral intuition and moral cognition from the more specific areas of moral comportment and ethics as a field of study. All persons have moral intuition and cognition for moral knowledge, but only ethicists require ethics "by which, obviously, no human being becomes 'good'"154. Actually being ‘good’ is a matter of one’s love, one’s value insight in feeling and conation and the strength of one’s will. Philosophical ethics may help one in a small way, but in the same limited way that a knowledge of the science of sport may help make one a better rugby player. Scheler richly distinguishes differing areas of

150

Ibid, p260.

151 _{Ibid, p155.} 152 _{Ibid, p261.}

153 _{I consider the role of Love in greater detail in Chapter 5, in the discussion of the details of Scheler’s}

theory of Value preference and hierarchy.

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ethical experience without which he argues we can have only a confused view of ethical knowledge and practice. On the side of values he further distinguishes various levels at which we must both distinguish and consider the inter-relation between our awareness of values and our actual moral actions: in terms of 'Ethos', 'Ethics', 'Morals', 'Practical Morality' and 'Mores and Customs'.155 I believe this richness of description to be a great strength of Scheler's ethics because it gives the breadth and flexibility to both include the insights of other theories within it and to surpass them in terms of the range of ethical experience it clarifies.

Value preferment is the core concept of moral ordering in Scheler's ethics. I have presented it in simple terms here for brevity but the questions it raises are central to a proper assessment of Scheler's ethics. Value preferment can occur between values of different modalities (Agreeable Vital, Spiritual, Holy) but also occurs between all values within modalities. In concrete situations choice will often not be based on simple preferments between two values but between complexes of values instantiated in goods. There is also a second axis of importance of value in addition to the modalities among pure values. Among bearers Scheler argues for a clear hierarchy of values of Persons (which can be individual or collective) as the highest values, over the values of Acts, over values of Things.156This then raises questions as to how this interacts with the modalities previously identified. A further issue appears when dealing with 'quantities'. Value preferment is a profoundly qualitative theory of ethical decision making, but how does this cope with quantitative ethical questions, such as whether one should save one life or five? Moral dilemmas could involve all of these issues in one single piece of decision making. These questions are so important that I dedicate chapter five of this thesis to beginning to provide answers to some of them.