Abstract

This dissertation is a constructive interpretation of the significance of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's work for ethical theory. It argues that Ricoeur provides a concept of moral meaning which addresses more adequately than major contemporary alternatives, particularly Hebermas, MacIntyre, and Levinas, the problem of moral pluralism. Specifically, moral meaning for Ricoeur is a dialectical term which mediates the teleological good and the deontological right of tradition-interpreting selves. It renders productive these two poles of moral life, one Aristotelian and the other Kantian, in the formation of critical teleological goods which recognize each self's distinct otherness as an interpreter of their own moral being in the world even as their otherness is projected into provisional and imaginatively mediated aims in common. ;This thesis is made in four steps. First, the dissertation argues that any concept of tradition-constituted moral life implies a tradition-interpreting self capable of forming its given and plural background linguistically into appropriated meaning for its own being in the world. Second, this interpreting self is constituted ethically by a dialectical relation between on the one hand the narrative teleological goods it forms in time out of its interpretations of tradition, and on the other its deontological otherness as capable of forming these narrative goods for itself. Third, this dialectical relation is rendered productive in a critical teleology of moral meaning, which can be broken down into criteria of subjective conviction, interpersonal promising, and third-party community, each of which involves plural and other interpreting selves' mutual recognition. Fourth, this dialectical interpretive ethics is shown to be grounded in, and in the face of evil liberated by, its implied religious limits, specifically a dialectical economy of the gift expressed in the terms faith, love, and hope