Kierkegaard on Choosing Oneself and the Ground of the “Moral Sense”

Abstract

Sören Kierkegaard does not develop a theory of the moral sense. In fact, he does not even make use of a term which could properly be translated “moral sense.” Even so it is not inappropriate to claim that some of his works contain what can be called a phenomenology of the moral sense, if by that term one means something fairly general, such as our capacity for making moral judgement, our ability to distinguish between moral right and wrong, good and evil, and — more fundamentally — our capacity to feel moral pleasure or pain through the observation of virtuous or vicious actions. Indeed, Kierkegaard has something of considerable interest to say about the source of moral distinctions, about our capacity for moral valuation, and — by implication — about the cognition of values. For example, he inverts what we ordinarily take to be the logical relationship between moral value and right action, and yet at the same time he can present a view of value as objective, universal, and absolute. He is as concerned as the moral sense theorists of the 18th Century to ground morality in nature, yet he develops a position which is not only anti-rational but, in a profoundly interesting way, anti-empirical as well.