Happiness and Benevolence by Robert Spaemann

Author:Robert Spaemann [Spaemann, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-02T09:48:10+00:00

III

Our relationship with the scores of different individuals is structured by the ordo amoris not only under the viewpoint of near and far, but primarily under the hierarchical order of the realities which we meet. What grounds such a hierarchy? An answer justified in detail could only be carried out in the context of an ontology. Still, in the context of ethics a justification cannot be totally dispensed with. There is no ethics without metaphysics. We already saw this in connection with the necessity of having to view the other as real, as a "thing-in-itself," in order to experience anything like an obligation toward this other. In the end the experience of this obligation is nothing other than that experience of reality, since this experience is not something which is purely theoretical. In pure theory we only have qualitative experience, never the experience of existence, of being a self, never, then, the experience of that which per definitionem is not an object.

But not everything which the self encounters has the same priority or the same clearness. Other humans are unequivocally given to us as "things-in-themselves," as real in the strong sense of the word. That our duties are, first and foremost, duties to other humans finds its reason in this fact and not in the biological solidarity of the species, since this has its effect, as we said earlier, instinctively and without reflection, and also because it is unable to ground an obligation for a reflective being. That others belong to the same biological species as I do is not a reason for me to respect or help them; rather the reason lies in the fact that, beyond all biological kinship, these others stand in a relationship with themselves, that is, they are selves. They are in some sense real, which cannot be reduced to being an "object," a "value of a bound variable" (Quine). A being, which refers to itself, is not just relative in its relation to others and in the experience of another, but as finite it is also essentially related to others and real only in this relation. But insofar as it knows this, insofar as it realizes its own relativity and, leaving its own centrality, relativizes itself, it overcomes this relativity and becomes a representation of the absolute. This is what is meant by the dignity of humans. A being which has at its disposal such a virtually moral, that is, absolute, perspective prohibits, by its being, being treated in any instrumental fashion which is not justifiable to the person himself, that is, which cannot be seen as the sort of action in which the person puts himself or herself at the service of someone else. But what does "prohibit" mean here? The prohibition which we speak of is not grounded in some further impersonal "ought" or an abstract imperative, about which we would have to ask why we ought to subordinate ourselves to it. This prohibition is identical with the perception of being a self.

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