Innocens sed nocens. The Multiple Layers of Ethical Experience

Religious Ethics and Metaphysical Ethics begin with God as the creator of the Universe and of Man. From man’s status as a created being, they derive the duty to obey God’s Law. In contrast, the modern approach to Ethics is different: it starts not with God but with Man, who constitutes his own interior ethical world. Ethics, in this view, does not depend on Metaphysics nor derive its first principles from it. Karol Wojtyła bridges these two approaches. Through a profound phenomenological analysis of human ethical experience, he highlights the objectively given, non-arbitrary structures of individual subjectivity and the transcendent movement through which the person transcends individual subjectivity to form a collective experience: love and community. The person creates an interior order of values and moral world but does so based on an objective structure of human experience that is pre-given. Where does this objective structure come from? Ethics cannot avoid this question, but at the same time, it cannot answer it. The answer requires meta-phenomenological or metaphysical inquiry. Rather than deriving its first principles from metaphysics, Ethics, in the view we have outlined, provides the presuppositions for metaphysical inquiry. One consequence of this model is the distinction between Ethics and Morals. Ethics, as a science, investigates the a priori structures of ethical experience, while Morals concerns itself with how a human community establishes its moral order. This moral order is always partial and limited; it often happens that some values within a historically given moral order are neither recognized nor integrated. An individual who acts according to an erroneous conscience, especially when that error is socially ingrained, bears no personal responsibility for it. He is innocent (innocens) because he acts in accord with his own conscience, yet he is mistaken. The task of Ethics is to transcend the historical limitations of a given self-consciousness in pursuit of truth. The traditional approach that begins with God and the phenomenological approach complement each other, offering two distinct perspectives: the ecclesiastical and the secular approaches to truth about man.