Objectivity and truth in Ernst Cassirer's ethics

Cassirer’s view on ethical objectivity is puzzling. In his scarce comments on Kantian ethics, he defines the “pure will” as a “function of consciousness,” which he considers a prerequisite for the possibility of objective ethical normativity embedded in empirical reality. In the existing body of literature, we find two different interpretations of Cassirer’s account of ethical objectivity. The “meta-philosophical” interpretation takes objectivity as a telos that humanity gradually approaches, thereby emphasizing the historically relative truth standards to which the teleologically-evolving symbolic forms respond. The “Kantian” interpretation takes objectivity as a concept inherent to the conduct of the moral law, highlighting the evaluative and prescriptive aspects of his philosophical method. In this paper, I defend the thesis that, by interpreting Cassirer’s ethics through the lens of Hermann Cohen’s mature ethical theory, we can see that ethical deliberation in Cassirer involves a notion of universality that is a priori and depends on a substantiated concept susceptible to change. The proposed “contingent conception of universality” thesis accounts for both: the evaluative and teleological features of Cassirer’s ethical theory, grounding an a priori account of ethical objectivity conceptualized relative to contingent truth standards that gradually improve.