The irreducible experience that certain actions are categorically required — not merely advantageous or conventional. The moral ought cannot be derived from desire, social convention, self-interest, or pure reason alone. Hildebrand: “Every good that possesses a value imposes upon us the duty to give it an adequate response.” Reinach demonstrated the irreducibility of moral obligations.
The Moral Ought is a archphenomenon (Urphänomen) — it cannot be reduced to anything else. It presupposes Moral Relevance: only where an entity possesses a value can an ought arise. The Moral Ought is realized in the Third Dimension of personhood, in which the person, through her supra-actual fundamental dispositions, thoughts, words, and deeds, becomes morally more perfect or worse (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 215–225).
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: Archphenomenon
Ontological relations:
- presupposes: Moral Relevance
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood, Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2 (natural moral law and moral obligation)
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von: Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis (1922). (German) (Irreducibility of the moral ought)
- Reinach, Adolf: Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes (1913). (German) (Irreducibility of moral obligations)
See also
Moral Relevance, Value-Response, Reverence, Personalist Norm, Third Dimension, Dignity, Person, Free Will, Natural Law, Naturalistic Fallacy, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Adolf Reinach