| Martin Heidegger is often accused of neglecting ethics in Being and Time. The accusation stands only if we consider ethics as a theory or system that prescribes imperatives, norms, or rules of action, on the basis of which moral responsibility, obligation, praise, and blame can be attributed to a subject. Since Heidegger overturns the very "metaphysics of the subject" on which such theory is based, there can be no Heideggerian "ethics" in this sense. Not surprisingly, Heidegger himself insists that his interpretation of daily life has "a purely ontological aim, far from any moralizing criticism." At the same time, pivotal sections of Being and Time are replete with analyses of concepts (e.g., authenticity, guilt, responsibility, resoluteness, freedom) that are ethical in another sense. The dissertation argues that these concepts have distinctive ethical content, despite Heidegger's insistence that they are merely formal and provide only the condition for the possibility of ethics. With a view to unpacking this distinctive ethical content, the dissertation analyzes Heidegger's accounts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and demonstrates how these accounts significantly alter traditional conceptions of responsibility and recognition. It concludes by suggesting how a Heideggerian approach to ethics instructively converges with the approaches of Aristotle, Bernard Williams, and a moderate form of moral particularism, all of which reject transcendent foundations of ethics and a solely rational grounding of morality, while emphasizing the importance of the individual. Heidegger's writing thus invites us to reconsider the scope and nature of ethics in light of his project of fundamental ontology. The interpretation advanced is not only important for how we understand Heidegger's philosophy itself, but it also provides a unique, ontological point of entry into current debates in ethics and metaethics by offering a phenomenologico-ethical description of our lived experience. |
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