Phenomenological communitarianism

pp. 78-120

in: Steeves, Founding community, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

We saw in the last chapter that certain traditional ethical systems are fundamentally misdirected. The judgmental and relational theories (of which Kantianism and Utilitarianism were, respectively, the obvious examples) exhibit an inherent circularity: the former cannot account for the moral character of the categories it employs and the latter can only evaluate methods and actions while the goals of those actions are inexplicably either moral or amoral. In fact, the problem seems to be that such theories are not invalid, rather they are not theories of the type which can adequately classify acts and judge whether or not they belong to the realm of the moral.