[에세이] 도덕적 실재론, 회의주의, 그리고 실존주의적 윤리학

2년 전 실존주의 수업에서 쓴 기말 페이퍼의 서두를 옮겨본다. 메타-윤리학의 해결되지 않는 실재론 대 반실재론의 아포리아 사이에서 나름의 해결책을 찾으려고 시도했던 페이퍼였다. 워낙 급하게 쓰느라 말미로 가선 글 심지가 많이 약해졌지만, 서두의 문제의식과 접근 방법만큼은 여전히 유효하다고 생각한다. 더구나 지금 읽어봐도 문장들이 그리 유치하지만은 않다.

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"God is dead," Nietzsche declared, and then there was chaos. God had been the towering figure of guidance, the normative standard of being, the objective reality that bestowed upon our life the meaning it ought to have. Without this essence by which each and one of us were to abide, we could no longer comprehend the world—the "absurdity" (Camus) of our existence in the world revealed itself to be apparent.

One critical problem that arose as the result of such Nietzschean revolt was that it eviscerated the world of the rightful "oughts" and "ought-nots." Values as espoused beforehand in the name of God, the state, or society were deprived of their weight, and Dostoevsky's creed that "If God is dead, then everything is permitted" became the zeitgeist. Even more than a century afterwards, this failure of ethics persists, and the charge of nihilism is still a highly tempting one. Indeed, if one begins with the subjective aspect of the human condition, we find that it is extremely difficult to justify the existence of a priori moral values, or even if it supposedly existed, to justify that any person would have the capacity above all others to grasp correctly what that value is as a thing-in-itself. If there was such a method of investigating objective values and if it had struck chord with our ethical experience, the question of ethics would not have occurred to us a question in the first place.

But at the same time, the nihilist answer to ethics is far from being sufficient. The stance that an absolute ethics does not exist and that therefore all ethical judgments are simply subjective does seem irrefutable in its own right, but at once it is a sentence utterly without any substance. Even if we do accept the proposition, this does not add a single bit to our understanding of the intricacies that play out in the domain of ethical experience itself. The moral conscience does not disappear just because we acknowledge that our values are subjective. We will continue to have moral intuitions, and we will continue to judge and act based on it. We will face situations in which an ethical choice is called for, and the subjectivist decree that approves of any choice in equal terms will be of no help in making that decision. As much as we would like to be Meursault, free from guilt and able to "not play the game" (L'Étranger, Camus) we cannot; all of us live more like Clamence, perpetually guilt-ridden and conscience-stricken (La Chute, Camus). In this way, Nietzsche's dictate to rise above and become the Übermensch, over the boundaries of traditional morality, "beyond good and evil," is an empty call. No one ever has or can respond to and meet such calling. It is, so to speak, man's Original Sin—the inevitability of the ethical experience.

As such, either meta-ethical narratives, whether it be objectivist or subjectivist, fail to provide us any meaningful insight into our daily ethical comportments. This unsatisfactory status of ethics is, therefore, the point of departure for this essay. We must devise a framework for an understanding of ethics that is at once powerfully descriptive of the ethical experience but also fundamentally prescriptive so that it does not degenerate simply into a sort of moral psychology. In this essay, I dare contend that an existential phenomenological approach to ethics is the most perspicacious account of adumbrating such an ethics, and wish to show its viability. It will be an attempt at justifying and sketching a phenomenological foundation for a non-nihilistic yet non-absolute ethics. This is in fact precisely a project that has been embarked upon by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir in her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although she does not explicitly acknowledge phenomenology as her guiding principle or methodology, along various points in my essay, I will refer to Beauvoir's approach to ethics to borrow her insights into the nature of ethics and show that her method is indeed phenomenological.

For now, the question has been introduced and the goal set. To envision a non-static, non-formulaic, non-permanent yet clearly firm and palpable ethics—that will be the task of this essay.