 Before we can resolve fundamental problems regarding ethical norms, duties, rights, or happiness, Hartmann argues, we have to ask “what is valuable?” in the first place. The traditional moral question “what ought we to do?”, posed by the Kantian ethics of duty, presupposes the more fundamental axiological question, “what is valuable in life and the world generally?” (ET1Intro5) What is “practical” about ethics is not that it helps us find the means to reach ends, but that it helps us identify the ends of action themselves (ET1Intro3). These ends are values. In the Ethics, the only book to be translated into English in his lifetime, Hartmann rejects the putative subjectivism, formalism, and intellectualism of Kantian ethics, and draws on Aristotelian virtue ethics for inspiration. Although he was mainly influenced by Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics (1973 [1916]), which argues for a moral realism of values, Hartmann departs significantly from his approach in many ways (Kelly 2011a; Römer 2012). Hartmann also responded to Nietzsche’s call for a “transvaluation” of values, developed a typology of distinctively Modern values out of Nietzsche’s work, and defined a moderate position between the extremes of value absolutism and value relativism. Like his conception of problems, his conception of values carefully distinguishes between the transhistorical and the historical.