Content area
Full Text
Abstract: In this article the challenge of a pluralist ethics presented by Arnold Gehlen in his book Moral und Hypermoral [Morality and Hypermorality] is examined by attempting to find out what might still be worth preserving after Jürgen Habermas's critical objections to the text in his "Arnold Gehlen: Imitation Substantiality" (1970). To this end the basic assumptions of Gehlen's pluralist ethics are briefly presented (1), before going on to summarizing Habermas's central, and largely convincing, objections to this ethics (2), in order, finally, to reintroduce Gehlen's pluralism as a critique of Habermas's monist discourse ethics (3). The core idea is to defend the pluralistic intuition of Gehlen against his own theoretical consequences and against the monism of discourse ethics.
In his book Moral und Hypermoral [Morality and Hypermorality], Arnold Gehlen employed anthropological tools in order to develop a pluralist ethics. He took "pluralism" to mean the idea that there is a series of distinct and independent sources and imperatives of morality, all of which we must take account of in our actions if we are to prevent the human life-world from succumbing to a social pathology that could threaten its existence. The actual impulse of this pluralist ethics is therefore polemical, aimed at correcting a pathology Gehlen saw arising in the present. Standing on the threshold of our contemporary "global industrial culture," the pluralism of our ethical orientations and the integrity of our social life-world are threatened. Gehlen was convinced that this is due to the fact that a eudaemonistic humanitarianism has pushed all other moral imperatives, especially the preservation of the state, into the normative background. Similar to Michael Walzer or Alasdair MacIntyre today, Gehlen also maintains that an anthropological emphasis on an irreducible moral pluralism serves as a critique of a fatal kind of one-sidedness. He claims that an optimistic universalism oriented towards increasing the happiness of all human beings has thus crowded out our much more "difficult" ethical obligations to the preservation of our state institutions.
In what follows I will not be dealing with this polemical core of Gehlen's anthropological ethics. Although his critical remarks could certainly be considered relevant in the face of the current inflationary use of the rhetoric of human rights, the true challenge of his...