The validity of norms in Neo-Kantian ethics

This chapter presents the principal features of Neo-Kantian ethics, paying particular attention to those features common to the main representatives of both the Marburg and Baden schools. As the analysis will show, for the Neo-Kantians, a reflection on ethics implies a reflection on the nature and task of philosophy in general. Neo-Kantian philosophers worked extensively on this issue, given that, in their time, the tumultuous development of specialized sciences seemingly took away from philosophy every autonomous domain for inquiry. Thus, for the Neo-Kantians, ethics is not merely a part or a subfield of philosophy, but rather, to the extent that philosophy is a unitary science that cannot be divided into parts, ethics is a way of presenting philosophy as a whole. In this chapter, I examined the work on ethics of three leading figures of Neo-Kantianism. In spite of some differences in exposition and about some specific problems, Cohen, Rickert, and Natorp agree in rejecting an all too rigid distinction of theoretical and practical philosophy. On the contrary, they believe that the distinctive ethical problem of reconciling the individuality of concrete actions and the universality of the moral law sheds light on the deep-seated unity of philosophy as a whole. Both in the cognition of the natural world and in the evaluation of ethical agency, philosophy unearths the dimension of validity, or law, which is the origin and the teleological end of both activities. The unity of law and fact achieved in concrete ethical actions becomes the paradigm to interpret the norm-governed constitution of reality as a whole.