Abstract

According to a common prejudice in ethical theory, morality cannot be grounded in emotional experience unless we are to forfeit an a priori foundation for ethics. This prejudice in ethics is often buttressed by a formalist assumption about the a priori in general, according to which all a priori truth must ultimately redound to formal reason. Upon this view, even if we were to grant intentional directedness to certain affective experiential contents, the epistemic relevance of such contents would be limited to disclosing empirically contingent facts. In this paper, I aim to make some headway in over- coming this prejudice through an appropriation of Max Scheler’s material a priori account of values. On the Schelerian account I defend, law-like constraints on evaluative truths are grounded in emotionally given value essences, which constitute a unique domain of a priori experiential facts alongside those pertaining to all experiential modalities (e. g. color, tone, space, etc.).