Ethical Validity and Its Ontological Bearer in Heinrich Rickert's Metaethics

In this paper I present Heinrich Rickert’s account of the difference between theoretical and ethical values as an insightful strategy to accommodate constructivist and realistic intuitions in metaethics. After situating Rickert’s work in the Neo-Kantian philosophy of value stemming from Lotze I discuss the distinction of psychological act, realized good, and corresponding value in both the theoretical and the ethical domain. I then introduce Rickert's account of autonomy as the fundamental ethical value and the distinc-tion between encompassing and pervasive values. I conclude with the distinction between the ephemeral ontological bearers of ethical value (actions) and the robust ontological bearers of theoretical value (confgurations of meaning of Sinngebilde) and argue that this distinction grounds the distinction between pervasive and encompassing values previ-ously introduced.