20th Century Ethics (Sess 3) - Max Scheler, Love is the Answer

This Meetup is the third in our series on 20th Century Ethics.

“What mediates the intuition of the person’s ideal and individual value-essence is the understanding of his most central source, which is mediated through love of the person.” – Scheler

For 2026 we will be launching a series of sessions focused on 20th Century Ethics. The series will build progressively over the course of the year, but individual sessions can be explored independently. The goals of the series are to a) move beyond the ‘greatest hits’ of historical philosophical works into more contemporary 20th Century debates, b) create a landscape of the diverse traditions in phenomenology, virtue ethics, critical theory, and neo-Kantianism, c) explore modern issues of identity, communication, justice, and animal rights, and d) stage opportunities to contrast different thinkers critically. While the content is advanced, the format and discussion style still affords individuals new to these works and, indeed, new to philosophy in general an excellent opportunity to learn and discuss in structured discussion-based environment.
The series will include

• (Jan/26) Immanuel Kant – a foundational ‘grounding’ for the series
• (Feb & Mar/26) Max Scheler – critique of Kant’s formalism with an emphasis on value theory.
• Emmanuel Levinas – Ethics as First Philosophy and the responsibility of the Other.
• Paul Ricoeur – identity and ethical responsibility with a focus on selfhood and justice.
• Juergen Habermas – socially embedded ethics.
• Alasdair MacIntyre – challenges Kantian universality with Aristotelian virtues ethics.
• Phillippa Foot – naturalistic virtue ethics
• Christine Korsgaard – moral norms and an argument for contemporary Kantian Ethics.
• Onora O’Neill – global justice and bioethics.
• Epilogue for the series – a comparative look at the threads of autonomy, responsibility, virtue and discourse in a comparative roundtable.

In Session 3, ‘Love is the Answer’, we will build on last month’s reading of Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and non-Formal Ethics of Values, which focused of Scheler’s critique of Kant and his argument that value are ideal essences and how they are disclosed within a hierarchy of values. In this meetup, we will focus on Scheler’s development of the ‘person’. The person is an act center, not a psychological ego, and the bearer of value-responses. While values are a priori, a person differs in their capacity to disclose values. Here, Scheler is making a decisive break from Kant’s conception of the rational subject. Scheler argues that love is an act that reveals higher values, while hate conceals or distorts values. Hence, love is a movement of the person toward higher values within the hierarchy and higher moral character. I will be using the Northwestern University Press edition (1973).
The following sections will be discussed

• Part 2, Ch 4.1, Unsatisfactory Theories…of Moral Facts, pg. 162-203

• Part 1, Ch 6.A.3, Person and Act (read sections a, b, c, and d), pg. 382-396

• Part 2, Ch 6.B, The Person in Ethical Contexts

• 1, The Nature of the Moral Person, pg. 476-489

• 2, Person and Individual, pg. 489-494

In 2026 we will be recording the sessions to create an anonymized archive summarization of sessions, which will be shared with all attendees. I am truly excited about 2026 and hope that you will participate in the series and help make it a fulfilling experience for all of the participants.

Hope to see you at the session.