A ground for ethics in Heidegger's being and time

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 261-279

  Miyasaki, Donovan ^a  

^a WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949788021     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2007.11006618     Document Type: Article

References (3)

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Tune, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco: Harper Collins 1962, p. 284. Hereafter referred to as BT. All references are to the pagination of the German edition, given in the margins.
2. For a more detailed discussion of primordial 'Being-guilty,' see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 306: "Existential guilt reveals not inauthentic Dasein's moral lapses, or its essential failure to choose; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein - its being is not under its own power." The pejorative language ("essentially unsatisfactory," "something wrong") is rather misleading, since primordial guilt, as an ontological condition, should be strictly separated from the moral sense of 'guilt.'
3. In Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, Frederick A. Olafson uses a similar point to argue the priority of virtue over vice in a Heideggerian-based ethics. See p. 75: "the very possibility of wrongdoing is dependent on there being in place something like a common norm of expectation in relation to which certain actions have to count as violations."