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17 J. Value Inquiry 3 (1983)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi17 and id is 1 raw text is: J. Value Inquiry 17:3-16 (1983). © 1983 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague. Printed in The Netherlands. AXIOLOGY: A METAPHYSICAL THEME IN ETHICS PETER MILLER University of Winnipeg I A builder lays the foundations of the building first and only when these are firmly set does he build a superstructure on top. An inquiry into the metaphysical foun- dations of ethics suggests by analogy that ethics is some sort of superstructure to be constructed only once the philosophical foundations of a metaphysical system have been laid. That image begs the question of whether ethics does in fact have meta- physical foundations or ought to. A number of philosophers, beginning with Socrates, who expressed his disappointment at his predecessors' metaphysical principles when it came to questions of ethics,' have in a variety of ways insisted that ethics is or ought to be an autonomous enterprise largely independent of the descriptive and explanatory accounts of the sciences or metaphysics. As branches of philosophy, ethics and metaphysics are parts of a common critical and constructive enterprise that aims ultimately to be at once existentially adequate, analytically clear and rigorous, categorially general, and speculatively comprehensive. But ethics and metaphysics diverge in the central themes and leading questions that they pursue. Ethics is the philosophical attempt to articulate and justify the most general normative principles for guiding and evaluating human conduct, whereas metaphysics is a systematic philosophical enquiry into the question of what there is and how the different categories of things that there are are related to one another. Suppose, now, that we were to adopt the principle that the superstructure of ethics must await the completion of the foundation of metaphysics. Two dangers ensue. One is the moral danger to which Socrates and Kierkegaard have alerted us of bracketing moral reflection until our metaphysical reflection is complete, which may be never, leaving us in the meantime without benefit of a philosophical moral compass to the detriment of our soul. The other danger is the theoretical one that if and when our metaphysical foundation is complete, it stands a good chance of not supporting the ethical superstructure we wish to build upon it because it was constructed in the face of a studied ignorance of the requirements of ethics in accordance with the priority principle that we have adopted. This might system- atically distort any subsequent ethical enquiry which is made to conform to the

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