These days Martin Heidegger is mostly talked about for being a Nazi.  Most of
the justification for dismissing his work stems from the assumption that his
philosophical views led him to a position of loyal Nazism, when in fact they
could have had very little to do with it.  Rather than argue the historical
points of the man's involvement, I think it useful to pursue the actual ethical
ramifications of the man's work.  In this way I hope to both encourage further
Heidegger scholarship without fear of the stigma involved as well as hopefully
advancing (or destructing) the field of ethics in the same way as with
metaphysics.

Because of the way he worded his arguments, many of Heidegger's most
value-neutral ideas have been interpreted as ethical macguffins.  Foremost
among these is the idea of authenticity, the mode of being of Da-sein
(Heidegger's term for one's self, which for now the reader not versed in
Heidegger can take to mean his or her self in particular) in which Da-sein is
attuned so thoroughly toward its death that it can "'choose' itself in its
being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only
'apparently' win itself.  It can only have lost itself and it can only have not
yet gained itself because it is essentially possible as authentic, that is, it
belongs to itself." [BT 42-43] This can begin to sound like a pursuit, since
words like "authentic", "belongs", "itself", "lose", and "win" carry
the burdens of good and bad sentiment.  The fact is that Heidegger explicitly
stated that authenticity was in no way "better" or "higher" than
inauthenticity.  The words are to be understood in a much more literal sense,
with any notions about the value of purity thrown aside as arbitrary and
irrelevant.  The terms simply describe motivations, the lines of thought
Da-sein follows in making decisions.  Authenticity and inauthenticity are both
essential features of Da-sein.  "[T]he inauthenticity of Da-sein does not
signify a 'lesser' being or a 'lower' degree of being.  Rather, inauthenticity
can determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited,
interested, and capable of pleasure." [BT 43]  In fact, getting beyond one's
existing understanding of the terms Heidegger uses is one of the most important
steps to understanding what he wrote.

This leaves the question, then, of what part of Heidegger's philosophy makes an
ethical claim, or if ethics is even possible in such a valueless system.  It is
true, of course, that the aim of his project is itself a value claim.
Heidegger's project is to get to the meaning of being, and the value claim is
that this is a worthy pursuit.  It is even clear from his language that he saw
it as necessary to properly engage in philosophy.  These are certainly value
claims, but he is careful to never claim that having these understandings can
dictate how a person should think or act.  This is because, from a perspective
of fundamental ontology, dictation can not be the shape of ethics.  The reasons
for this will reveal themselves as we investigate how Heidegger's understanding
of truth differs from that of what he calls metaphysics*, the western
metaphysical tradition. *"In its \textit{scholastic} mold, Greek ontology makes
the essential transition...into the 'metaphysics' and transcendental philosophy
of the modern period" [BT 22].

The conception of truth around which metaphysics operates is that of logos.
This is the idea of direct correspondence with a catalogue of fact, that one
can compare a claim to a reference point of knowledge and deduce its
correctness.  That a thing is either true or false is a guiding presupposition
of this conception.

Heidegger instead argued that, before Plato and Aristotle cemented this idea of
truth, another explanation was possible.  For this he used another Greek word
for truth, aletheia, which he translated as "unconcealment".  Instead of a
well-defined, whole, and rarefied expression of absolute fact, truth is a
"pulling back of the curtain", gaining a perspective on something while at the
same time covering part of it over [Undelivered Lecture (XII) Section 4,
p.179-181].  This is not a deficient form of truth, but rather a representation
of how anything like truth can exist in a phenomenological methodology.  When
one's access to a "thing itself" is one's relationship with it, truth is
something revealed in that relationship.

The ramifications of this approach for ontology are well explored and not the
focus of this paper.  Instead we shall look to its influence on the field of
ethics.  Namely, that it is not the job of ethics to proscribe action according
to an objective truth, but that ethics must instead guide action according to
the relationships beings have with each other.  We will explore these
relationships in depth later, but not before we look at the kind of ethics that
results from the conception of truth as logos.

The most thorough example of western metaphysical ethics comes from Kant.  The
idea of treating people as something other than a means to an end, the point
that good actions are good not because of the action but the intent behind
them, and the necessity of behaving according to a rule that should be
applicable to anyone are central notions in Kant's ethics.  These ideas are
variously justified or annihilated by Heidegger's fundamental ontology of
Da-sein, as we shall see.

Even though his project was to get to the meaning of being---a far more
elaborate project than justifying an ethical system---Heidegger's demonstration
of Da-sein and being-in or -with is groundbreaking for discussion of "human"
motivation and will.  Because we are taking this route there are some features
common to ethical systems that we will be throwing away or replacing:

1: There is no rule.  Just as truth and existence have nothing to do with
correspondence to an outside feature, proper behavior can no longer have
anything to do with propriety or adherence to an absolute.  If this sounds
foolish and weak it's important to stress that at no point does Heidegger's
philosophy support purely "subjective" standpoints.  The discussion will no
longer be one of rationality and logic, but instead one of being-with,
circumspection, authenticity, and resoluteness.

2: There is no self.  Authenticity is a mode of being, not an absolute state.
It is impossible to be without being in the world, and the sealing of this
dichotomy (self and world) means we can no longer speak in rarefied terms about
what a person is.  This does not mean we're operating in some kind of
transcendent overmind!  If Heidegger's approach seems sometimes dangerously
close to solipsistic it is only because he so brazenly confronts the issue.
Few philosophers enjoy considering it for long, but the always-mine-ness of
Da-sein leaves no choice.  The result is that solipsism is always there, made
irrelevant by the new approach phenomenology affords and the new conception of
the self as being in a world.

There will be few thought experiments.

3: There is free will.  What form this takes is up for discussion, but as we
are starting from the position of that being that questions and makes decisions
we are in a great sense taking free will as a given.  This is not a
presupposition per se, but a consequence of the fact that our investigation
begins from experience rather than objectively measurable data.  Whether this
is an acceptable starting point is a matter of debate beyond the scope of this
paper.

If we are to continue at all we must address one of Heidegger's most
fundamental concepts: that of Da-sein.  For the purpose of simplicity the
reader can always take Da-sein to refer to his or her self, but the reasons for
and consequences of this term must be understood if any progress is to be made.
Most attempts at defining humanity are most dangerously flawed.  This is mostly
because they are simultaneously completely founded on an assumption and
blatantly tautological.  The assumption is that there must be some
characteristic of humanity that is unique among all beings, however they may be
defined, and the tautology is that, whatever distinction one uses as
justification for this assumption, it can only ever function within an argument
as a stand-in for "humanity".

Heidegger's approach was to abandon all presupposition of which beings ought to
interest his investigation and instead address the particular behavior that was
of interest to his project: being interested in one's own being.  In asking and
thinking about its being, this being exists both ontically, in that it exists
in the world, and ontologically, in that world exists for and with it, in that
it questions its own existence.  No assumption is made about whether all humans
have this kind of being, just as no assumption is made about whether any other
"species" of life has it.  In exploring its relationship with its world,
however, we find that neither issue is of any relevance at all.

What \textit{is} relevant, and what is fundamentally different from any
approach before, is that this being cannot be separated from its world.  The
entire stage of modern epistemology, where the subject is cut off from a world
of objects and has experiences based on sense data, has been removed from the
picture.  In its place we have this being, which is always in a there.  It is
therefore inappropriate to think of it in rarefied terms, and Heidegger dubbed
it Da-sein (being-there).  The ramifications of this approach will reveal their
relevance as our departure from Kant unfolds.

For Kant the world was a product of the subject, a rationally inferred
construction of sense data into a coherent system.  This was groundbreaking in
the way it evaded the problems of truth as correspondence, but it also dug
philosophy even deeper into the problems of Cartesian dualism and the res
cogitans, since the world was still founded upon something that the self has no
way of interacting with directly, and the modern dichotomy between determinism
and skepticism remained as strong as ever.

Kant's reliance on logic and rational processes was the seed of his ethics,
too, and his definition of humanity as the capacity for reason and deductive
thought was instrumental in his adoption of logic as the horizon for ethics.
By emphasizing the need for internal consistency, Kant was able to require
various behaviors in order to preserve a system wherein the self could continue
to behave rationally.  As a result, any rational being must be treated as the
goal of ethics.  Hence, people must be treated as ends in themselves rather
than as means to ends.

This ideal arose partly out of Kant's preconception of what a proper ethical
system should look like ("The sole aim of the present Groundwork is to seek out
and establish \textit{the supreme principle of morality}.")[GMM 60] and partly
out of reverence for logical justification (arbitrariness)[GMM 69, Footnote 2].
Kant's project is a deductive proof of why a deductive system must preserve and
revere beings with the capacity for deductive reasoning, but this approach
values people only insofar as they behave rationally.  In Kant's words,
"Rational beings,...are called \textit{persons} because their nature already
marks them out as ends in themselves..." [GMM 96].  People are people because
their rationality is to be preserved in order to have a rational universe.  How
can we establish this without all these presuppositions?  What are other people
for Da-sein?

When Heidegger explains how Da-sein exists with other beings in the world, a
distinction is made between how Da-sein interacts with useful things, tools,
and how Da-sein interacts with other people.  The former is understood in terms
of in-order-to and what-for, and is taken as a matter of "care", whereas in the
latter case Da-sein recognizes others as being like itself and treats them with
"concern", which we will explore later in more detail.  While these other
beings are understood in how they are like Da-sein, they can not accurately be
called "Da-sein".  To Da-sein, they are those being with whom one is in the
world, and they are called "Mitda-sein" ("being-there-with")  This interaction,
and the concept of Mitda-sein, are significant aspects of any attempt at
Heideggerian ethics.

There is much ethical territory that Heidegger did not cover.  To fill these
gaps we will attempt to approach the fundamental aspect of ethics in the same
way Heidegger did the fundamental question of being.  The parallels are
extensive, most significantly in how both ethics and being are concepts most
frequently "explained" via assumption and then handled as rational structures.
Our approach will be Heidegger's: to discover what understanding of ethical
behavior Da-sein always already has but cannot express.  As with being, we will
be able to highlight this understanding throughout metaphysics while detailing
how it came to be misrepresented.

In a foundational work of western metaphysical ethics, Plato's
\textit{Republic}, the pivotal question was asked: do we behave justly for its
own sake or for the worldly rewards?  Glaucon supposed that, were one able to
turn invisible and act without fear of consequences, one would rape and/or
pillage whatever one could [Republic II 359-360].  Plato's response was an
elaborate analogy between the justice of an individual and the justice of a
city, a thought experiment culminating in his assertion that just behavior
leads necessarily to a healthy soul, and is therefore necessary for happiness
[Republic IV 444-445].  This split omitted an important possibility: that
relationships with people are valuable in their own right.  This aspect of
ethics would not be thoroughly entered into the equation until Kant, and by
then the damage caused by dualistic metaphysics was too extensive to come to
any worthwhile conclusions with the revelation, let alone approach it in a
pre-Platonic fashion.

One must take care now not to start attaching a value to "relationships with
people".  I bring it up not to chase after it as the seed of a logically
determined and arbitrary system, but to demonstrate that it is possible for the
aforementioned worldly rewards to be the kindness of others, or for it to feel
good to make another happy.  To suddenly treat kindness as a selfish behavior
may seem cynical, but we are not necessarily treating this relation as one
between a subject and object.  Kant was trying to get away from this, but his
system did not allow for any other kind of relation.  Heidegger offers us the
chance to look at benevolent behavior as an act of connection and familiarity.
Kant wanted people to be considered ends in themselves, but Heidegger's
contribution is to remove them from the system of means and ends entirely.
Mitda-sein are accomplices, other beings of the same kind as Da-sein.  In them
Da-sein can see its own possibilities.

The field of ethics seems largely interested in expressing formally something
Da-sein feels it understands.  Liberated from the need to express it formally,
we are now free to examine this understanding that Da-sein always already has.
[B&T 124 is key here, and all of sections 26 & 27]  In being-with Mitda-sein,
Da-sein understands the need to be-excellent-with Mitda-sein.  The formal
ethics of Kant and co. are attempts to live according to certain rules of
action, but as you can see there is nothing in being-excellent which determines
any particular right or wrong action.  The emphasis here is on the interests of
Da-sein and Mitda-sein, on what they want or need and what they are willing to
do for one another.

It is beneficial at this point to elaborate on the role of Mitda-sein in the
constitution of Da-sein, since it is such a radical departure from the
solipsistic foundation of Descartes.  For Heidegger the other is not understood
as something distinct from the self, alien and separate, but rather as
"...those from whom one mostly does NOT distinguish oneself, those among whom
one is, too." [BT 118] In this way Da-sein understands its being-in-the-world
as a being-with others.  "The innerwordly being-in-itself of others is
Mitda-sein." [BT 118]

Over time this relation can lose its distinctiveness.  As Da-sein compares
itself to Mitda-sein, it takes on a pressure to equalize its difference from
others.  As this occurs, the specific "who" of Mitda-sein dissolves into a
"they", into das Man (note that this "they" is in actuality a "we").  This
relationship promotes "averageness", an equilibrium which discourages anything
but aquiescence to what is familiar and accepted.  This is variously referred
to as degenerate, levelled down, and public [BT 126-127].  Here we encounter
some of Heidegger's most value-tinted language, and it begins to look as though
the inquiry has found its hobgoblin.

But even authentic Da-sein does not simply remove itself from publicness.
"\textit{Authentic being one's self} is not...a state detached from the they,
\textit{but is an existentiell modification of the they as an essential
existential}." [BT 130] All we have here is an analysis of the different ways
Da-sein understands Mitda-sein, and how those affect Da-sein's understanding of
its world.  There is no reason to conclude that any of this is grounds for a
systematic ethics.  It does, however, provide us with the horizon for a new
approach.  Da-sein's understanding of the other in terms of its sameness
contributes both to Da-sein's understanding of itself and levelling down of
itself.  This is the span of human relationships in which something like ethics
becomes possible.

In being-excellent, Da-sein behaves ethically in the most primordial sense of
the term.  Whatever the particulars, Da-sein is behaving conducively to the
good of its being-with-others.  It's dangerous to think of this as behavior
that promotes entanglement, or that gives up the potential for authenticity.
Being-excellent is not a sacrifice of one's own interests or a plunge headlong
into entanglement in das Man.  Being-excellent is Da-sein's recognition that
when it is in a world with others, just as it is thrown together with
Mitda-sein its interests, too, are thrown together with those of Mitda-sein.

As you can see, this does not fall anywhere between resoluteness and
entanglement.  Excellence is not an aspect of Da-sein, but a mode of concern.
As Heidegger points out for us, there are two possible extremes of concern.
The first is to leap in for Mitda-sein and take its "care" away from it, to use
or manipulate it in ways seen or unseen [BT 122].  This is Heidegger's version
of treating people as means to ends.  The second is to leap ahead of
Mitda-sein, to give his care back to him.  This is concern about authentic
care, about Mitda-sein's existence, and not about the things it takes care of
[BT 122].  This is Heidegger's version of treating people as ends in
themselves.

Our goal lies not between these extremes, but across them.  In having concern
for Mitda-sein, Da-sein is constantly treating it in all of these ways and
more.  Being-excellent-with Mitada-sein is not a matter of maximizing behavior
of a particular kind, but of establishing alliance.  Being-excellent is a
looking-out-for, it is Da-sein carrying Mitda-sein along with it.  In having
allies, Da-sein can be authentically appreciating their influences or
inauthentically falling prey along with them.

A notion in Heidegger that can not be left uninvestigated in any attempt to
make his work ethical is that of conscience.  For Heidegger, conscience is not
what calls Da-sein to ethical behavior or "doing what's right", but instead it
is quite specifically calling Da-sein back to itself, out of entanglement and
back to authenticity.  Even guilt, for Heidegger, is ontological.  Guilt is the
lack, the not-yet, of Da-sein's being.  Da-sein's progression toward its end is
"put off" by entanglement, its awareness of the inevitability of death is
"tranquillized" by das Man.  As constantly communicating, das Man covers over
Da-sein with talk.  Conscience calls Da-sein back to its possibility of
authenticity through reticence, allowing (but not forcing) Da-sein to come
forth from das Man [BT 271-274].  In understanding this call, in choosing
itself and becoming free for the call, Da-sein is aware of the putting off of
its end and wants to have a conscience, wants to be called back to its ownmost
potentiality of being [BT 287-288].

The traditional idea that conscience is the call back to just behavior is a
misunderstanding of where the call comes from.  The call does not come from
outside of Da-sein.  The caller is not defined by anything worldly, but is
uncanny, thrown being-in-the-world, is Da-sein's being-in-the-world itself.
Not alien to Da-sein, the caller is alien to the average, everyday self of das
Man [BT 276-278].

"This being guilty first gives the ontological condition for the fact that
Da-sein can become guilty while factically existing.  This essential being
guilty is, equiprimordially, the existential condition of the possibility of
the 'morally' good and evil, that is, for morality in general and its possible
factical forms." [BT 286] Facticity is the way a being exists in the world,
distinguished from factuality in that it does not exist as objectively present
but as in the world, bound up in its destiny with the other beings there
encountered [BT 56].  This quote refers to morality, addressing the derivative
form of conscience as a call back to just behavior.  The "morality" of the
understood call is Da-sein being responsible, letting "its ownmost self
\textit{take action in itself} in terms of its chosen potentiality-of-being"
[BT 288].

Let us take care not to forget that the ownmost self of Da-sein is not the ego
cogito, but a being-in-the-world that understands its being as a
being-with-others.  Even authentic being-a-self is a modification of the they
[BT 267].  What form does "self-love" take when the self is thus defined?  It
does not look at all like Glaucon's supposition that if one could keep others
ignorant of our wrongdoings one would steal and rape.  Being-excellent is the
primordial ethics which the so-called "vulgar understanding of being [which]
understands 'being' as objective presence" [BT 389], the Cartesian concept of
the self as an isolated spirit, can only understand as self-love in Glaucon's
sense.  The action taken as Da-sein, in being-guilty, chooses its
potentiality-of-being, being-excellent is a love of the relationship Da-sein
has with Mitda-sein, is the ethical imperative of concern.

In the wake of Heidegger's ontological work, we can start to outline the shape
ethics takes for Da-sein.  Just as with spatiality and temporality, the Western
tradition of metaphysics has covered over the possibility of ethics by assuming
that behaviors must be morally calculable as independent "universal"
principles.  An ontologically-grounded approach to ethics does not designate
correct factical action, but instead lays bare the role and meaning of
Mitda-sein.  In being-excellent-with Mitda-sein, Da-sein already understands
being-excellent as concern, as the role of its being-with-others in its
understanding of the call of conscience.

The problem of ethics has never been defining justice or goodness.  These are
degenerate forms of excellence, which is always already understood.  The
problem of ethics is recognizing what beings Da-sein understands as Mitda-sein.
A vegetarian may recognize an animal in the mode of being-with where a
carnivore does not, or where the carnivore understands its being-with the
animal from a position of gratefulness to it for its sustenance.  One person
believes a barely-formed fetus to be Mitda-sein, and will thus react to an
abortion in a manner very different from one who merely sees a thing at hand
and objectively present.

This approach is, perhaps, of little use in answering these problems.  This is
because the problem is already answered for Da-sein.  Instead of debating what
action is right, we can only try to convince each other of what beings deserve
to be treated excellently.  Only on this basis can we begin to approach our
most common ethical questions, and even then they can never be solved.  Instead
of codifying rules of behavior, by being-excellent Da-sein pulls back the
curtain on the problem and approaches it based on its relationship to it.