Ethical questions have been debated for thousands of years already. How is it to be explained, then, that the most fundamental ethical question – namely, whether human beings ought to exist at all – has hitherto been neglected? This might be connected with the fact that not least among the many things that ethics is its: an essentially vitalistic phenomenon, a philosophical manifestation of the drive to self-preservation. There would thus be comprised within the very “genetic structure” of ethics irrational answers to certain fundamental questions.[1] This can also be expressed by saying that ethics, in the most basic respect, remains at the stage of morality: it simply accepts as a “given” the (right to) being of human beings endowed with the Freedom to Do Evil, instead of questioning back behind this “given” after the manner of a true philosophy of morality.
[1] Compare the standpoint of Fernando Savater in his introduction to Cabrera‘s „Crítica de la moral afirmativa“.
