 The same kind of argument used in the previous work, which begins with complex “facts” and reasons to their necessary conditions, is used in the Ethics. Hartmann held that the phenomena of moral exemplarity, the idealization of moral types, the phenomena of self-criticism and accountability, conscience, and even the historical dominance of content-oriented virtue theory, all testify to an a priori, intuitive sense for values. But Hartmann does not erect an intuitionism of values out of this. A persistent theme throughout his ethics is that morality is a creative enterprise, that it demands a discerning sense for values and creative efforts at synthesis that engage the whole person. “Ethics applies itself to the creative power in man,” he claims, and it awakens “man’s creative, spontaneous, living sense of what ought to be, of what in itself is valuable” (ET1Intro2). He repeatedly asserts that moral life is life in the midst of conflicts of value, and that these conflicts are almost never cleanly resolved. “Real moral life is not such that one can stand guiltless in it. And that each person must step by step in life settle conflicts, insoluble theoretically, by his own free sense of values and his own creative energy, should be regarded as a feature of the highest spiritual significance in complete humanity and genuine freedom” (ET2 25b).