Abstract

The exercise of our capacity to choose, to order and shape our world in order to share it with others beyond what is absolutely necessary for physical survival, is what distinguishes us as human, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Do we have a way today to make the choices necessary to solve the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life? What is the possibility of an ethics rooted in Gadamer's understanding of hermeneutics which would guide such choices? In this paper, I first examine Gadamer's basic view of understanding in general as an event that one is always already involved in; it is not the action of a discrete, ahistorical subject, but the ongoing application of past truths or preunderstandings to the future. The truths we already have are the ground out of which we understand anew and take action, even and especially when we overturn them. Such understanding always takes place in and through language. ;Aristotle shows us, Gadamer says, that moral discourse has this character of understanding, and this form of truth. Specifically, Aristotle noted that moral questions arise from, and are decided on the basis of one's ethos, by exercise of one's phronesis, or practical reasonableness. Phronesis is both determined by one's existing moral being--having a predisposition to seek and recognize the Good--and determines it further. A hermeneutic ethics, like Aristotle's 'practical philosophy,' would begin in the concrete determinateness of our being and refer back concretely to that determinateness of being. Its claim would be to comprehend the defining structures of the 'correct' ethos--continually to understand what the 'best' life for humans is. And since the disclosure of truth occurs in language, such truths could be shared, 'verified' and agreed-upon through dialogue. I argue that a hermeneutic ethics, grounded in common human concerns, would answer the problem of modem ethical skepticism and would be uniquely responsive to contemporary ethical dilemmas