Ethics, within the depth-psychology corpus, is not treated as a settled body of prescriptions but as a living problem — one whose resolution depends on the very psychological structures that shape human motivation, consciousness, and unconscious life. The dominant tension runs between what Neumann called the ‘old ethic’ — collective moral codes that enforce conformity through repression of the shadow — and a proposed ‘new ethic’ demanding that individuals integrate unconscious contents into responsible moral selfhood. Jung reinforces this, noting that moral principles clarified at the ego-conscious level lose their power when the compensatory significance of the shadow is acknowledged. Nussbaum, working through Hellenistic sources, offers the complementary ‘medical model’ of ethics: philosophy as therapy oriented not toward knowing what virtue is, but toward becoming virtuous, with desire and emotion subject to rational scrutiny. Ricoeur situates ethics under the primacy of the ‘good life’ over mere moral obligation, grounding solicitude in a stratum deeper than normative rules. Brazier’s Buddhist formulation inverts the usual psychology-ethics relationship entirely, presenting ethical conduct (sīla) not as constraint but as the very path of psychological liberation. Together these positions frame ethics as irreducibly psychological — its foundations, failures, and renewal inseparable from the nature of selfhood, desire, and the unconscious.
it is no longer possible to capture life, with all its complexity and fateful power, in a single, simple moral formula such as ‘Thou shalt do this’ and ‘Thou shalt not do that’; and the truth is that he is now confronted with a compelling need for a new ethical orientation.
Neumann argues that the collapse of traditional moral formulas under modernity’s complexity necessitates a fundamentally new ethical orientation grounded in depth psychology.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
We might therefore define the ‘new ethic’ as a development and differentiation within the old ethic, confined at present to those uncommon individuals who, driven by unavoidable conflicts of duty, endeavour to bring the conscious and the unconscious into responsible relationship.
Jung defines the ‘new ethic’ as a psychological achievement — the integration of conscious and unconscious life — available only to those who face genuine moral conflicts that collective morality cannot resolve.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
Moral principles that seem clear and unequivocal from the standpoint of ego-consciousness lose their power of conviction, and hence their applicability, when we consider the compensatory significance of the shadow in the light of ethical responsibility.
Jung contends that the shadow’s compensatory function undermines the sufficiency of ego-based moral clarity, revealing a foundational weakness in conventional ethical systems.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
the process of coming to terms with it, in the ethical sense, acquires a special character. The process does not consist in dealing with a given ‘material’, but in negotiating with a psychic minority (or majority, as the case may be) that has equal rights.
Neumann reframes ethical self-cultivation as a negotiation with the unconscious, which possesses equal standing with consciousness rather than being mere raw material to be controlled.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
Since buddha nature is our inseparable unity with the whole of existence, ethics are not seen as a restriction, but as a liberation. They are the way to realize our core nature and consequently are the path of truth and happiness.
Brazier presents the Zen-Buddhist inversion of conventional ethical psychology: ethics are not external constraints upon desire but the very expression of one’s deepest liberated nature.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995thesis
Our wager is that it is possible to dig down under the level of obligation and to discover an ethical sense not so completely buried under norms that it cannot be invoked when these norms themselves are silent, in the case of undecidable matters of conscience.
Ricoeur argues for a stratum of ethical sense that precedes and grounds moral obligation, accessible precisely where normative rules fall silent.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
‘For we aim not to know what courage is but to be courageous, not to know what justice is but to be just, just as we aim to be healthy rather than to know what health is.’
Nussbaum, via Aristotle, establishes ethics as a practical discipline whose telos is transformation of character rather than theoretical knowledge of virtue.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
The ethical problems that cannot be solved in the light of collective morality or the ‘old ethic’ are conflicts of duty, otherwise they would not be ethical.
Neumann identifies genuine ethical problems as those that arise precisely when collective moral codes are insufficient, making real conflicts of duty the defining test of any serious ethical framework.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting
human good and evil are relative and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative: what is forbidden by one religion or another, what is regarded as good or bad by social opinion… an amalgam of all these view-points is the determining heterogeneous idea, constitutes the complex substance, of morality.
Aurobindo critiques conventional ethics as a heterogeneous amalgam of relative standards that addresses symptoms rather than the psychic roots of moral malady.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
The ethical and moral determinations of action will be treated here as predicates of a new kind, and their relation to the subject of action as a new mediation along the return path toward the self.
Ricoeur treats ethical predicates as constitutive mediations through which the acting self comes to understand itself, linking ethics structurally to selfhood and narrative identity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
The medical model of philosophizing in ethics can be better understood by contrasting it with two other approaches to ethics that were available in ancient Greece: what I shall call the Platonic approach, and what I call the approach based on ordinary belief.
Nussbaum situates Hellenistic ethics within a tripartite schema, distinguishing the therapeutic-medical model from Platonic rationalism and ordinary-belief approaches.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
an ethics understood along medical lines still insists on systematizing and rendering consistent the intuitions and desires with which it begins. In fact, a large part of its activity consists in the scrutiny and sorting of beliefs toward the end of consistency.
Nussbaum argues that a medically-modelled ethics retains epistemic rigour by subjecting beliefs, desires, and passions to systematic scrutiny for internal consistency.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Narrative ethics guides people, whether ill or healthy, lay or professional, in the moral commitments that illness calls them to.
Frank proposes narrative ethics as the appropriate framework for illness experience, grounding moral commitment in the storied self rather than in abstract clinical principles.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
there are three kinds of philosopher’s theorems, logical, ethical and physical. Secondly, what should be ranked first of these are the logical, next the ethical, and third the physical.
The Stoic curriculum as reported by Chrysippus places ethics as the second division of philosophy, structurally dependent on logic and preparatory to physics, framing it as integral to philosophical life.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
there are equally profound disagreements, especially about the role that reason should play in the ethical life and about the value of ethical theory.
Nussbaum maps the contested terrain of virtue ethics by identifying the role of reason and the legitimacy of ethical theory-making as the central disputed questions.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
the American Psychological Association modified its ethics code to provide cover for psychologists participating in the interrogation of detainees and to allow the ‘just following orders’ defense made infamous at Nuremberg.
Herman instances the institutional corruption of professional ethics under political pressure as evidence that ethical codes require more than formal articulation — they demand principled resistance.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
when the Stoics defined the appropriate act, they did so in terms of reasonableness or probability (to eulogon)… general rules about which types of actions are generally appropriate… None of these can be absolutely reliable.
Inwood demonstrates that Stoic ethics, grounded in probabilistic reasoning about appropriate action, resists absolute rules and operates within irreducible moral uncertainty.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985supporting
War, being an abrogation of ethical and cultural systems, recognizes no standard of good and evil.
Evans-Wentz illustrates the radical suspension of ethical systems under conditions of collective violence, pointing to the illogic of morality in the unenlightened mass mind.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
That the system knows its own relativity within itself, that it be formed according to this relativity, that its own metastability be incorporated into its conditions of equilibrium: such is the path according to which the two ethics will have to coincide.
Simondon frames ethics as the dynamic self-knowledge of a normative system — two ethical orientations must converge through the incorporation of their own relativity and transductive transformation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Fairness ethics lend themselves to confusion with the… ‘do unto others as you would like them to do unto you’… but actually, it was formulated originally as a more popular expression… the Jewish-Christian norm of brotherly love is entirely different from fairness ethics.
Fromm distinguishes the capitalist ethics of fair exchange from the deeper norm of brotherly love, critiquing market rationality as a distortion of genuine ethical relation.
, The Art of Loving, 1956supporting
Aristotle is not the ordinary-belief philosopher of our first chapter because he refuses any simple majoritarian principle for sorting appearances, insisting on a deeper and more critical scrutiny.
Nussbaum clarifies Aristotle’s ethical method as critically scrutinizing rather than simply recording ordinary beliefs, distinguishing his approach from both relativism and majoritarianism.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994aside
Tronto asks whether such an ideal of care can be ‘sufficiently broad [as a] moral idea to solve the problems of distance, inequality, and privilege’.
Frank relays Tronto’s challenge to care ethics — whether the moral ideal of care possesses adequate universality to address structural inequalities beyond intimate communities.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995aside