Moral emotions and personal identity

Abstract

Chapter 4 of Iribarne’s De la ética a la metafísica deals with the question of personal identity in Edmund Husserl’s thought. The objective of this chapter is the exposition of a kind of “subject’s archaeology” which takes place between two poles: on the one hand, that what Husserl calls “fluent living present” and, on the other hand, this same concrete ego, but “now seen as unique and unique person”. An important step in this archaeological process has to do with personal identity considered on the level of the moral person. In this regard, this paper tries to show that the so called “moral emotions”, as interpersonal and therefore social experiences, play an important role in the constitution and revelation of the unique person each of us are. To do that I will refer to the recent book by A.J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions. Reclaiming the Evidence of Heart, which has to be considered in the more general frame of what he calls “vertical phenomenology”. In this way I try to develop Iribarne’s analysis on the mentioned chapter.