The What is ethics? Beyond techno-scientism

Abstract

In this article we approach the question that Álvarez Turienzo considered as essential for Philosophy and Humanities: What is ethics? In what consists ethical subject, that is its core? In order to answer the question this article will follow two steps. First, together with Turienzo it criticizes scientism, because it reduces ethics to science of customs or “philosophy of moral science”, theoretical knowledge without practical effect. In the second step the article dialogues
with Álvarez Turienzo’s ethical proposal, which considers that the path to get to moral subject is an intra-subject ethics, ethics of inwardness, according to the Socratic, Augustinian and Kantian tradition. However in the article we defend that specifically philosophical method must be transcendental, in Kantian intra-subject way or in intersubjective way of discourse ethics. Both of them, intra-subject and intersubjective ways to get to moral subject are complementary.