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We first distinguish, following Hartmann, between personality and personhood. The person executes itself morally by carrying out its intentions. It can discern a good-in-itself for itself that trumps all other moral considerations. From the peculiar moral position of the person, material value-ethics derives a variety of normative implications (1) concerning the individual and his social milieu; (2) concerning the nature of solidarity and the highest form of human society; (3) concerning the importance of value-persons in pedagogy; (4) concerning the solidarian love between persons as morally edifying. Hartmann's personalism, while in fundamental agreement with Scheler's, sees the moral person as a unique individual achievement of virtue as a balance-in-tension of vices and virtue on the model of the Aristotelian mean. As ethics seeks a synthetic unity of values, so must each individual seek a synthesis of the moral values to which he is drawn by his fundamental ethos or Ordo amoris, but which make competing demands upon him. Given the difficulty of discovering any unity in the realm of moral values, this idea of achieving a personal balance among those virtues and vices to which a person is drawn by his most fundamental orientation towards value is useful for its normative content. It describes the highest moral achievement possible for an individual. The chapter concludes with a listing of normative principles common to Hartmann and Scheler's material value-ethics. No final synthesis of values is possible at this time; the moral life is a process to be undertaken, not a problem to be solved.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_10

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