A. Guseinov

Topic 10: Ethical theories in modern Western philosophy

Introduction

2. Ethics in the philosophy of existentialism

3. Humanistic ethics of E. Fromm

4. “The Ethics of Reverence for Life” by A. Schweitzer

Conclusion

Introduction

The twentieth century became a century of rapid development of science and technology, qualitative changes in production and at the same time - a century of global problems, such as the threat of nuclear war, environmental and demographic problems. On the one hand, we can talk about the crisis of the ideas of rationalism in our days, on the other – about excessive and one-sided rationalization and technicization of consciousness. The general crisis of culture and the desire to harmonize and improve the world and soul of individuals were reflected in ethical searches.

This paper highlights the provisions of some modern ethical theories that took place in the twentieth century. This topic is important because the development of history is largely determined by the views and ideologies that dominate society. Ethics is one of the components that has a direct impact on their development. It is necessary to know the basic ethical principles by which the history of the past developed in order to make your own ethical choices in the future.

The purpose of this work is to study the ethical and philosophical views of outstanding thinkers of the twentieth century.

1. Ethical concept of F. Nietzsche

The course of history in the 19th-20th centuries seemed to completely refute the foundations of humanistic classical philosophy, and reason and science, although they confirmed their triumph in the knowledge and subjugation of the forces of nature, also revealed their powerlessness in the structure of human life. The claims of classical philosophy, based on the belief in the natural structure of the world and its movement in the direction of progressive ideals, in the rationality of man and the world of civilization and culture he creates, in the humanistic orientation of the historical process itself, turned out to be unconfirmed. Therefore, it was necessary either to indicate new ways and means to realize these claims, or to expose their illusory nature and deliver humanity from vain expectations and hopes.

The philosophy of life of F. Nietzsche marked the final “revaluation of all values” of previous philosophy, culture and morality.

Nietzsche saw his task precisely in waking up humanity, dispelling its illusions, in which it was sinking deeper and deeper into a state of crisis and degeneration. This required powerful drugs that could shock and excite the public. Therefore, Nietzsche does not skimp on biting statements, harsh assessments, philosophical paradoxes and scandals. He considered his works a real “school of courage and audacity,” and himself a true philosopher of “unpleasant,” “terrible truths,” an overthrower of “idols,” by which he understood traditional values and ideals, and an exposer of misconceptions rooted not even in weakness of knowledge , and above all in human cowardice!

Many times he calls himself “the first immoralist”, a real “atheist”, “Antichrist”, “a world-historical monster”, “dynamite”, designed to explode the swamp of established ideas.

Nietzsche strives beyond the ordinary ideas of cultural consciousness, beyond the “values” of civilization and culture - religion, morality, science, to comprehend the true essence of being - the instinctive desire of life for self-affirmation. He understands life as a disordered and chaotic deployment of the energy of chaos inherent in being, a flow that is not derived from anywhere and is not directed anywhere, subject to the madness of the orgiastic principle and completely free from any moral characteristics and evaluations. In ancient culture, Nietzsche considered the symbol of such an understanding of life to be the ecstasy of the god of wine, the daring revelry and fun of Dionysus, symbolizing for a person a feeling of strength and power, the bliss of delight and horror from his emancipation and complete merging with nature.

However, it is inherent in the energy of life to go through periods of rise and fall, creation and destruction of life forms, strengthening and weakening of the instinctive desire for self-fulfillment. In general, this is a harsh and merciless struggle between various manifestations of life, distinguished by the presence in them of the “will to live” and the “will to power” over its other manifestations.

Therefore, according to Nietzsche, “life itself is essentially appropriation, harm, overcoming the alien and weaker, oppression, severity, the violent imposition of one’s own forms, annexation and... exploitation.”

Exploitation, oppression, violence are not, therefore, belonging to some imperfect, unreasonable society, but are a necessary manifestation of living life, a consequence of the will to power, which is precisely the will to life.

The stronger will to life and power suppresses the weakened will and dominates it. This is the law of life, but it can be distorted in human society.

Man is one of the imperfect manifestations of life, which, although superior to other animals in cunning and forethought, and in his ingenuity, is immeasurably inferior to them in other respects. He is unable to live a completely immediate instinctive life, obeying its cruel laws, because under the influence of consciousness and its illusory ideas about his “goals” and “destiny” his life instincts weaken, and he himself turns into a failed, sick beast.

Consciousness and reason strive to organize the vital energy of existence, to shape and direct the flow of life in a certain direction and subordinate it to the rational principle, the symbol of which in antiquity was the god Apollo, and if this succeeds, then life weakens and rushes to self-destruction.

Social life is the struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian principles in culture, the first of which symbolized the triumph of healthy instincts of life, and the second - the decadence experienced by Europe, i.e. a weakening of the will to power taken to the extreme, which led to the dominance in European culture of unnatural values that undermine the very sources of life.

The decomposition and degradation of European culture is due, according to Nietzsche, to its cornerstone foundations - the Christian morality of philanthropy, the exorbitant ambitions of reason and science, which “derive” from historical necessity the ideas of social equality, democracy, socialism and, in general, the ideals of the optimal structure of society on the principles of justice and rationality. Nietzsche attacks these values of traditional humanism with all his force, showing their unnatural orientation and nihilistic character. Following them weakens humanity and directs the will to live towards Nothing, towards self-destruction.

It was in the values of Christian morality, the ideals of reason and science that Nietzsche discerned “fraud of the highest order,” which he tirelessly denounced throughout his life, putting forward the slogan “revaluation of all values.”

Christianity is a “monstrous disease of the will” and arises out of fear and need, among the weakest and most wretched bearers of the weakened will to live. It is therefore permeated with hatred and disgust for a healthy life, masked by faith in a “perfect heavenly life,” which was invented only in order to better slander this earthly one. All Christian fantasies are a sign of the deep exhaustion and impoverishment of real life, its illness and fatigue, so that Christianity itself lives on the narcotization of human misfortunes.

However, remaining a manifestation, albeit sick, but still of the will to live, Christianity, in order to survive among the strong and cruel, invents a bridle for the strong and fearless through the most unbridled moralizing, identifying itself with morality. Through the cultivation of the moral values of Christianity, a sick life catches a healthy one and destroys it, and the more truly, the deeper the ideals of self-denial, self-sacrifice, mercy and love for one’s neighbor spread.

Such traditional humane morality is interpreted by Nietzsche as “the will to deny life,” “the hidden instinct of destruction, the principle of decline, humiliation.” Christian morality is initially permeated with sacrifice; it grows out of a slave state and seeks to extend it to its enslavers, inventing God for this. Faith in God requires the conscious sacrifice of one's freedom, pride, dignity, and open self-abasement to him, promising in return heavenly bliss.

Nietzsche very subtly plays on the basic tenets of Christian morality, revealing its hypocritical and deceitful nature. “He who humiliates himself wants to rise,” he corrects Christ’s sermon.

He deciphers the requirement of selflessness and selflessness, “not to seek benefit,” as a moral fig leaf for expressing powerlessness - “I no longer know how to find my benefit...”.

The consciousness, unbearable for a weak will: “I am worth nothing,” takes on in Christian morality the form “everything is worth nothing, and this life is also worth nothing.” The ascetic ideal of holiness, the cultivation of dispassion and suffering is for him an attempt to give meaning to the meaninglessness of suffering, when it is impossible to get rid of it due to one’s own weakness, for any meaning is better than complete meaninglessness. Dispassion is only the spiritual castration of a person, and by undermining the root of human passions, one can only destroy life itself.

Compassion and love for one's neighbor is only the flip side of painful self-hatred, for these and other virtues are clearly harmful to their owner, but they are useful and therefore hypocritically praised by his competitors, who seek to bind their owner with their help. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes, “if you have virtue, then you are its victim!”

Moreover, through mercy and compassion, Christian morality artificially supports too much of what should perish and give way to more powerful manifestations of life.

According to Nietzsche, one thing is essential in morality - that it is always a “long oppression” and a manifestation of the herd instinct in an individual person.

And although religion and the morality it preaches are necessary and useful for the overwhelming mass, for the herd, for strong and independent people who represent the dominant race, all this becomes superfluous. Nevertheless, they can use this additional means of their domination over the herd in order to better force it into obedience, without becoming prisoners of wretched morality. For along with this wretched morality, which requires the sacrifice of man to God, there are other higher “morals” in which God himself is sacrificed!

“We must free ourselves from morality in order to be able to live morally!” - Nietzsche exclaims, proclaiming the need to re-evaluate “eternal values”, abandon slave morality and restore the rights of life. This is available only to rulers, strong and free minds, holders of an indestructible will, who own their own standard of values and assign themselves a measure of respect and contempt for others. They are genuine aristocrats of the spirit who do not seek unanimity with others, retain the “pathos of distance” and the habit of “looking down on them.” They remain independent from the dogmas of ordinary morality, free from its fetters and have an aversion to all moral chatter about duty, selflessness, holiness, for they make their own laws.

This “master morality” is a morality of power and egoism, which “is the most essential property of a noble soul,” by which Nietzsche meant “the unshakable belief that a being “like us” must naturally be subordinated and sacrificed by other beings.” .

This morality also has certain duties, but only in relation to one’s own kind and equals; in relation to beings of a lower rank, “one can act according to discretion... being on the other side of good and evil.” “In every act of a superior person,” Nietzsche throws contemptuously towards the ordinary man in the street, “your moral law is violated a hundredfold.”

Nietzsche easily and originally deals with the problem of “free will”, which plagued previous ethics. Every will is a manifestation of the instincts of life, and in this sense it is not free and not rational. We need to talk not about free and unfree will, but about a strong will, which rules and commands and takes responsibility, and a weak will, which only obeys and executes. The first is free to the extent that it is strong, and the second is unfree in the same sense.

Therefore, the morality of freedom and dignity exists only for top people, and for others only a slave morality of self-denial and asceticism is available, in which the weakened instincts of life are discharged not outwardly, but inside the human soul with the aggression of self-destruction.

From the same positions, Nietzsche dealt with the “scientific” humanism of socialists and democrats. “Fraternity fanatics,” as he called them, just like Christian morality, ignore the laws of nature, striving to eliminate exploitation, overcome the natural inequality of people and impose on them “the common herd happiness of green pastures.” This will inevitably lead to the same result - the weakening and degradation of humanity, for man always develops in struggle and competition, and inequality and exploitation are necessary condition life.

In the morality of a socialist society, the will of God is replaced by social benefit derived from history and the common good, guarded by the state. At the same time, the interests of an individual do not mean anything, which is why Nietzsche views socialism as the younger brother of despotism, in which the state seeks to transform a person from an individual into an organ of the collective. A person, naturally, tries to resist this, and then state terrorism becomes an obligatory means of instilling loyal feelings, consciousness and obedience in actions.

In such a morality, everything that singles out and elevates an individual person above the general level frightens everyone, is condemned by everyone and is subject to punishment. The state pursues an equalizing policy, leveling everyone, naturally, to a lower level, as a result of which the democratic form of government is, according to Nietzsche, a form of crushing and devaluing a person and reducing him to the level of mediocrity.

Thus, Nietzsche's philosophy was a kind of revelation and a tub of cold water for traditional classical ethics, oriented towards humanistic ideals and the progress of reason. His idea that “there is no pre-established harmony between the promotion of truth and the good of humanity” became one of the central values in philosophy in the 20th century.

With his “philosophy of life” he passionately sought to destroy the idea of man as a “creature”, as an object and a means to achieve goals alien to him and to help the self-creation in him of a “creator”, a free agent. Nietzsche tried to overcome the idea of morality as an objective system of compulsions, norms and prohibitions, independent of man, alienated from him and suppressing him, and to present it as a sphere of freedom.

With his work, he defended the vitality and value of individualism, with which he associated a new understanding of humanism, but inevitably coming along this path to the absolutization of subjectivism and the relativity of moral values, to the opposition of aristocratic morality (“everything is allowed”) and the morality of lower beings.

Nietzsche was able to theoretically foresee and express the essential characteristics of the moral practice of the socialist reorganization of society, but did not see the internal kinship of his “new order” with totalitarian social systems. For the rights and moral freedoms of Nietzsche’s chosen ones were compensated by the lack of rights and ruthless suppression of the plebeians. The morality of the “superman” turned out to be a superhuman morality, free from moral obligations to humanity and permeated with contempt for universal human values.

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One and the other culture and a certain detachment from both12. * * * Concluding the conversation about the two great intellectual traditions of the East, we will draw the main conclusions that are essential for the design of this book. Turning its face to Chinese philosophical thought, modern philosophy can find in it a completely different model for the development of philosophical speculation, which has given rise to a discourse that has preserved the original model...

Second half of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. became a time of severe testing of philosophical doctrines, ideological and moral principles, and social systems themselves for their truth and humanity. In general, this era became a time of turning point, marking the end of classical philosophy and the emergence of a new, modern philosophy and ethics. This was expressed in a departure from the basic principles and guidelines characteristic of all classical ethics, or their rethinking in the light of new realities, the emergence of a huge variety of teachings and schools, and a change in the very methods and approaches to traditional problems.

The classical philosophy of man and morality was traditionally based on the cult of reason and rationality, on optimistic confidence in the regularity and logic of the structure of all existence and man himself, capable of consciously reorganizing his life on the principles of rationality, justice and humanity. Everything accidental, inauthentic, unreasonable, unfair, egoistic was considered as temporary characteristics of existence, through which, through the progress of science and enlightenment, the development of human consciousness, Reason would pave its way.

All classical ethics was permeated with humanistic principles, and the differences between movements and schools concerned mainly only the means of substantiating and affirming the ideals of humanism and justice, freedom and human dignity. These ideals were expressed in categorical form in the concepts of “human nature,” his essence and “purpose” and, ultimately, were of an abstract and generalized nature. They seemed to hang over the individual with his uniquely personal fate and random empirical interests, demanding submission to the rational-universal principle.

In general, we can say that the classical philosophy of man was characterized by confidence in the harmony of truth, goodness and beauty, both in being itself and in its knowledge. Individual “renegades” of the historical and philosophical process - skeptics, pessimists, agnostics - with their exclusivity only confirmed the general rule. Morality was thought of as an expression of the true essence of man, his purpose as a rational being.

Further, if in his empirical existence a person was far from his calling, Reason had to discover and formulate the principles of the structure of the world on the principles of humanity, goodness and beauty, and this truth, with its convincing attractiveness, had to inspire people to its implementation.

The course of history in the 19th-20th centuries seemed to completely refute these expectations, and reason and science, although they confirmed their triumph in the knowledge and subjugation of the forces of nature, revealed their complete powerlessness in the structure of human life. The claims of classical philosophy, based on the belief in the natural structure of the world and its movement in the direction of progressive ideals, in the rationality of man and the world of civilization and culture he creates, in the humanistic orientation of the historical process itself, turned out to be unconfirmed.

Therefore, it was necessary either to indicate new ways and means to realize these claims, or to expose their illusory nature and deliver humanity from vain expectations and hopes.

The least impact of these changes was on Christian ethics, which was never oriented toward a final resolution. moral problems of a person in earthly life, which easily accommodates crisis phenomena human civilization into an apocalyptic vision of this life. The changes that affected religious Christian philosophy were therefore expressed, first of all, in the fact that it tried to combine the religious picture of the world with the data of science by giving this picture an increasingly symbolic and allegorical meaning, and in a decisive anthropological turn of all religious issues to socio-ethical ones problems of personality, problems of its moral self-determination.

The most decisive attempt to preserve the classical heritage in a radically inverted form was made by Marxism, which tried to overcome the most significant drawback of all previous philosophy - its idealistic moralizing through the discovery of a materialistic understanding of history.

Marxism saw its merit in the fact that it correctly resolved the question of the relationship between spirit and matter, showing that the source of ideas, consciousness, values, goals and ideals is the socio-historical process unfolding on the basis material production. With this, Marxism sought to put an end to abstract moralizing as a means of changing the world and move on to an understanding of morality as a way of spiritual and practical mastery of reality, the sphere of social consciousness unfolding on the basis of social existence.

Morality had to be understood not as a special sphere of the spirit - the divine will, the world of ideas, some kind of universal Reason - opposed to inert, spiritless matter, not as an independent area of \u200b\u200bwhat is valuable and proper in contrast to the wretched existence, but as a product of social production, the basis of which is the method of production material goods.

At the same time, Marxism tried to overcome the naturalistic understanding of man and morality, which was derived from abstract human nature, but in fact was already present in this concept of human nature in an unconscious and hidden way. And here the world of the proper and valuable, the ideal, was opposed to reality from the very beginning and was only apparently deduced from it - it is not without reason that different philosophers derived from the same “human nature” completely different understandings of its purpose and calling.

Marxism saw the key to understanding the essence of man not in identifying some abstract general characteristics of representatives of the human race, not in their biological or anthropological existence, but in studying the totality of social relations created by man.

Man, being a being of nature, with his material and practical activity confronts nature, transforms it to satisfy his needs and in this process receives a powerful means for transforming himself. Expanding his skills and abilities, a person objectifies them in the products of his practical activity, objectifies his “essential powers”.

In this process, a person creates the total objective world of culture, containing in an accumulated form the total comprehensive activity and “essential forces” of humanity, as well as the world of social relations through which he joins this world of culture.

And each individual becomes a human person only in the process of actively engaging and mastering this universal cultural heritage, which is both the result and a prerequisite for the further development of man and society.

Thus, the world of human culture and social relations acquires the status of the true socio-historical essence of man, through familiarization with which man is only able to obtain his specific characteristics, overcome his individual limitations and turn into a universal and spiritual being.

Therefore, penetration into the essence of man means for Marxism the study of the process public life and the patterns of its development, together with the phenomena of consciousness and spiritual life that ensure this process - goals, values, ideals.

Then moral values, moral qualities of a person, his virtues and vices will appear not as originally given to him by nature, but as developed in the process of social development. Natural prerequisites for the emergence of certain needs and abilities, natural factors influencing the nature and content of spiritual processes in a person during the historical process, are gradually supplanted and replaced by socio-historical and cultural determinants. As a result, the very needs, drives, interests, goals and values of a person are increasingly not a natural, but a socio-historical product.

Everything that is actually human in a person - and, first of all, morality and the ability for spiritual self-improvement - is the result of a socio-historical process, the correct (materialistic) understanding of which becomes in Marxist philosophy the main explanatory principle for comprehending all forms of spirituality.

Based on the material of the formation of capitalism, Marx developed the content and principles of the materialist understanding of history, presenting it as an objective natural-historical process, occurring, although with the participation of consciously acting individuals, but on the whole independent of their consciousness, will and desires.

The decisive factor for understanding all manifestations of this process is the method of production of material goods, which determines the social, political and spiritual processes of society. Consciousness is nothing more than awareness of being, i.e. its reflection and expression. And it is possible to understand its origin, content, role and functions in society only by studying the structure and functioning of society itself, penetrating its structure, analyzing the forms of activity of social actors.

Through identifying the patterns of development of the method of production of material goods, the change of socio-economic formations, Marx revealed, as he saw it, the general logic of the development of human society, penetrated into the historical necessity that determines both the development of society and the ways of understanding this development.

Thanks to this view, the study of the phenomena of moral life was placed on the basis of objective historical determinism. Social development has its own logic, which is specifically recognized (reflected and expressed) by morality in its inherent imperative-value form, in the form of developing demands and values. Their content is historically conditioned and has an objective nature, therefore it can be revealed not through subjective reflection, but through analysis of the logic of social development.

Thus, ethics gains the opportunity for objective knowledge and justification of moral values and requirements and can not only describe and systematize the reflections of moral consciousness, but penetrate into the very content of morality, the patterns of its development and functioning. At the same time, through juxtaposition and comparison of morality with other types of consciousness and forms of human spiritual experience, ethics turns out to be able to reveal its specificity, its special place in the structure of the spiritual development of reality.

Moreover, Marxist ethics saw its advantage over all other varieties of ethical theory in the fact that it is capable of understanding and explaining the very nature of their inherent errors.

The dramatic discrepancy between earthly life and the demands of Reason, the dictates of God or the values and ideals derived from “human nature”, the inability of man to live up to his “calling”, purpose or “essence” - everything that philosophers deified or fought against - began to be interpreted as a manifestation of idealistic fetishism.

This fetishism in ordinary consciousness manifested itself in views on morality as something that was initially opposed to human desires and aspirations, binding a person and limiting his opportunities in life. In ethical theories, it manifested itself in the affirmation of the originality and eternity of this state of affairs, its rootedness in the very structure of existence, in the imperfection and sinfulness of man himself, as a result of which even the most optimistic educational theories turned out to be powerless utopian projects.

In reality, the eternity of opposition to what is due to existence is an illusion, but an objectively conditioned one. This is the result of an alienated consciousness, unaware own premises and determinants.

Its source is the spontaneous social division of labor and the private property that secures it, which split human society, pit some social groups against others, alienate the social wealth of the human essence - the world of culture - from the majority of people, assigning it to the owners.

As a result, the accumulated social wealth itself, which is the result and condition for the development of mankind, including culture, morality, science, appears to the majority as an alien and unknown force, a means of their oppression, a sphere of coercion and lack of freedom.

A private property society approves such forms of life activity, the mastery of which presupposes an egoistic life attitude. In conditions where property is the focus of social power and real opportunities for self-affirmation, the success and well-being of individuals are directly related to the strength of possessive instincts and selfishness as a desire to assert themselves at the expense of others.

In such conditions, the social essence of man, making its way through the sublimely unselfish aspirations of morality to strengthen the bonds of collectivism and solidarity, is increasingly shifted to the periphery of social life - into the narrow sphere of the personal existence of individuals - and ultimately is completely divorced from reality as an independent sphere of consciousness .

Thus, morality moves into an ideal - conceivable, desired, required form of existence. Separated from reality, it becomes “an expression of social relations over which people have lost control.” It is under such conditions that it acquires the ability to be an ideal reproach to the imperfect egoistic life of people, to translate real social problems into the plane of moral condemnation, thereby preventing their actual resolution.

Therefore, from the point of view of Marxism, philosophical idealism in all its manifestations turns out to be identical to a moralizing approach to social life, incapable of really bridging the gap between the world of ideal values and reality. No development of enlightenment, construction of an ideally reasonable and fair society, strengthening of religious faith - none of this is in principle sufficient to realize the goal postulated by classical ethics - the harmony of truth, goodness and humanity.

Of course, the development of education, the improvement of laws, and the inculcation in a person of loyalty to spiritual values can have an impact on life through individual spiritual self-coercion, but it is very limited. In general, moral values, divorced from a solid material foundation, remain a purely ideological phenomenon, a fact of calling, obliging, admonishing and conjuring consciousness. At the social level, they form the phenomenon of official morality, which everyone recognizes in words and few people observe in practice.

Only the introduction into ethical theory of social practice aimed at transforming social existence, overcoming social antagonisms caused by private property, can overcome alienation and ensure the moral elevation of life and the return of morality to the earth.

Thus, Marxist ethics is based on the belief in the omnipotence of social practice, capable of radically transforming the system of social relations and thereby human nature itself. Unlike all previous philosophy, the historical optimism of Marxist ethics is based not on the belief that the world is arranged in such a way that ultimately truth and humanity coincide, but on the conviction that this ideal is achievable due to the fact that it is literally created by man himself.

At the same time, its creation required extremely powerful means that turned not only idealism on its head, but also the whole world: it was recognized that the “weapon of criticism,” which philosophy has always traditionally used, must be decisively replaced by “criticism with weapons.”

The cornerstone position of “the destruction of private property” can be considered the ethical maxim of Marxist philosophy, and since, of course, through the natural-historical process of socialization of production and property, it seemed too long to wait, the eradication of private property turned into the destruction of the owners themselves.

The theoretical basis for such questionable, from the point of view of humanity and morality, practical revolutionary transformations of society was the doctrine of the class essence of morality, its subordination to politics, the admissibility and even necessity of revolutionary violence and dictatorship.

Like primitive cannibals who feasted on human flesh in full confidence that the stranger was not a person, class morality demanded the destruction of people who did not agree with the historical necessity of eliminating private property, and therefore placed themselves outside human society and outside the morality of the progressive class.

Whoever is not with us is against us, and whoever is against us is an enemy, not a person - this is the logic of the class understanding of morality.

In accordance with this logic, “individuals and social groups become the object of struggle and revolutionary violence only to the extent that they identify themselves with reactionary social relations and act as their conscious and active bearers.”

It is unnecessary to add that both “reactionality” and “measure” are determined by the rapist himself.

The class essence of morality necessarily leads to its subordination to politics as a more direct and definite way of realizing class interests.

As a result, progressive morality is “derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat,” and at its basis “lies the struggle for the strengthening and completion of communism.”

Thus, morality was deprived of its originality, specificity, and turned into a means of justifying the utilitarian practice of those socio-political forces that, at a given historical moment, were operating on behalf of the historical necessity of progressive development.

Such morality was necessary to justify the dictatorship of the revolutionary class, that is, for power not bound by any laws, neither divine nor human, based on open violence, and supposedly necessary for a reasonable reorganization of social relations and thereby for the transformation of human nature.

It is not surprising that this concept of morality could not find enough followers in industrialized countries, where private property has demonstrated economic efficiency and the ability to act as a condition of human autonomy, not only for those who own this property, but also for those who do not own it. For only because control over the social means of production is dispersed among many unrelated owners, no one has undivided power over the individual, and he can act relatively independently. But if all the means of production are concentrated in one hand, even if these are representatives of the entire society, literally all members of society fall into the grip of absolute dependence.

The development of private property relations in industrial countries not only led to the emergence of effective self-developing and self-regulating market production, ensuring the satisfaction of the material needs of the entire society, but also made it possible to decentralize and depersonalize political and ideological power.

The clash of interests of owners led to the need to develop a state structure and laws that would protect not one from the other and against others, but the interests and rights of an abstract person as an owner in general, even if he had no other property except his working hands and head.

The social injustice of capitalism with its economic and property inequality was compensated by the legal and moral equality of citizens and turned out to be incomparably more attractive than the “justice” inherent in feudalism, according to which only those who have power and strength should be rich, and everyone else should vegetate under oppression in lawlessness and fear.

Oddly enough, it was Marx who was the first, looking back, to discover that the development of capitalism and private property prepared the development of all democratic freedoms and ensured the rights and dignity of the abstract human person.

But, peering into the future, he never thought about the question: if this is so, will all these values disappear along with the destruction of private property?

It is natural that the practical test of Marxist theory took place in Russia - a poor, backward feudal country with centuries-old autocratic-despotic and patriarchal-communal traditions, where private property never existed for the vast majority of the population, where they never heard of any rights except those what is allowed by the authorities.

The theory according to which private property turns into public property by the logic of its development began to be implemented in a country that had not yet lived up to private property and the corresponding economic, political and legal culture and moral superstructure in the form of democratic institutions and values expressing human rights and dignity.

Therefore, the inevitable, although, I would like to believe, unforeseen result of the bold revolutionary transformations of society according to Marxist-Leninist blueprints was the construction of a totalitarian society of tyranny and lack of freedom - with despotic power, an effectively operating repressive and ideological apparatus and the transformation of people into the wheels and cogs of the state machine.

The abolition of private property and its replacement with “public”, and in fact state, property, carried out in the name of historical necessity and in the interests of the oppressed and exploited people, resulted in an unprecedented concentration of state power in the hands of the party-state apparatus. This led to even greater oppression and exploitation of people by the state.

Collective freedom of united people" appeared as the absolute dependence of a person before the state and the officials representing it and all the horrors of a totalitarian society - intolerance and gross suppression of any dissent and independence, complete disregard for the life and happiness of an individual.

Social production, based on state centralized planning and management of all processes, created to overcome private competition and rationalize production, actually deprived it of internal incentives for self-development and required a return to methods of non-economic coercion in the form of repression and ideological indoctrination. Ultimately, such production created for the bulk of the population a way of life that did not even remotely resemble a civilized level.

The result of such a forced imposition of equality and brotherhood, solidarity and collectivism, consciousness and selflessness was the real equality of all in lawlessness and poverty, complete indifference and even aversion of man to social useful work, the public good and generally collectivist values.

An attempt to overcome idealistic moralization in relation to reality by introducing practice into ethical theory turned into even greater utopianism, when the most grandiose and brilliant plans of the classics turned out to be terrible caricatures of the ideals of a decent and moral life.

All this greatly compromised Marxist ethics in the eyes of thinking people and forced it to retreat to its roots. Having created one of the most fruitful concepts of morality - socio-historical, it, in full accordance with the recognition of practice as a criterion of truth, has now found itself busy rethinking its premises, content and conclusions.

The naturalistic ethics of the late 19th century tried to maintain fidelity to the traditions of science, which, unlike its previous varieties, received, as it seemed to its creators, a reliable natural science foundation in the form of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Thus, evolutionary ethics had to scientifically overcome the speculative nature of previous discussions about “human nature” and reveal its real content.

Darwin's theory showed that the basis of organic evolution is natural selection. Darwin revealed the patterns of evolutionary development of living nature, demonstrating that in the process of adaptation of organisms to a changing environment, those who managed to acquire useful traits that are inherited survive and reproduce. Those who fail to adapt die in the struggle for existence.

This is how natural selection occurs and the accumulation of properties and qualities of living organisms valuable for life, which are inherited and improved.

Thus, this theory dealt a blow to the religious-idealistic concept of man and made it possible to consider the highest human abilities - thinking, language, consciousness, morality - as a result of natural development, a product of natural evolution.

The founders of evolutionary ethics were G. Spencer and P.A. Kropotkin. The first of them considered social life and morality from the point of view of the operation of the laws of organic life and the processes of its evolution. He believed that man, like all animal organisms, adapts to the environment and his actions are aimed at satisfying his needs, and thereby satisfying the needs of the entire society and its organic evolution.

He represented social evolution as a long and gradual process of adaptation of the biological nature of man to the natural and social environment, during which the survival of the most capable people occurs, due to which the entire society is improved. The criterion of human behavior is the satisfaction of his needs and a pleasant life for his own pleasure, and since this is possible only in a prosperous, stable society, truly moral behavior is one that leads to a state of social harmony and solidarity between members of society.

Therefore, any attempt to transform or break social relations was regarded by him as pathological and unnatural, disrupting the smooth course of natural evolution. No social alchemy, Spencer believed, could turn lead morals into gold. Only time and the natural course of events can eliminate antisocial elements that are not capable of living in this society and the morals of which they are bearers. This is the only way social progress is possible.

Kropotkin believed that the basic law of nature and the main factor of organic evolution is the principle of mutual assistance, which promotes the survival of species of living beings in their struggle with the forces of nature or other species. It is sociability and mutual assistance that serve as a natural basis for the development of moral abilities and morality in general. From this sociability comes the habit of not doing to others what you don’t want for yourself, which means recognition of the equality of all people and the idea of justice.

Kropotkin's conclusion is that the concepts of good and evil, justice, the moral inclinations of man and his ability to self-sacrifice are deeply rooted in nature, must be derived from there and justified by it.

It must be said that Kropotkin’s energetic defense of these provisions was a forced measure aimed at protecting naturalistic evolutionary ethics from... no, not opponents, but the same consistent supporters of Darwin’s teaching. For the weakness of the naturalistic ethics of the past, when both his inclination to good and to evil was deduced from human nature, was also manifested in evolutionary ethics. Kropotkin was forced to argue with the English professor Huxley, the most prominent follower of Darwin and the founder of social Darwinism.

Huxley's main idea was that in the process of the evolution of nature, its main content is the “struggle for existence.” The entire life of nature, including plants, animals and humans, is nothing more, according to Huxley, than “a bloody fight of teeth and claws,” a desperate “struggle for existence, denying all moral principles.” The methods of struggle for existence characteristic of wild animals are the essence of this process, which captures even man with his unscrupulous desire to appropriate and retain everything he can, using the most cruel means.

Therefore, the lesson of nature is “the lesson of organic evil,” for nature is definitely immoral.

Nevertheless, the result of evolution is the emergence of man and society. At the same time, it is unknown where the “ethical process” comes from, which is certainly opposite to the lessons of the evolution of nature and is aimed at the development of civilization and human relationships.

In this case, if the moral principle could in no way be of natural origin, the only possible explanation for its appearance remains a supernatural, divine origin. And we have to congratulate the unbelieving naturalist Huxley on coming to the teachings of the church.

Social Darwinists went even further and extended the principles of biological evolution - natural selection and the struggle for existence - to society. Social life began to be viewed as an arena of the struggle of individuals and social groups for survival, where the strongest and most adapted to the laws of natural selection, distinguished by cruelty and cunning, achieve success.

This sanctioned the natural nature and insurmountability of social inequality, oppression and exploitation, aggression and violence both in public and in privacy. The artificial weakening of the struggle for existence under the influence of civilization, culture and traditional “humane” morality leads, in their opinion, to the spread of “inferior” and degenerate individuals and entire social groups, which is why all social ills occur.

And although social Darwinist sociology did not directly touch upon the issues of the origin and essence of morality, with its understanding of man and society it demonstrated the weaknesses of evolutionary ethics and its internal inconsistency.

At the same time, Social Darwinism became, perhaps, the first attack on humanistic ideals from the standpoint of real natural science, and not from speculative metaphysical reasoning. In terms of its content, it almost coincided with the philosophy of life of F. Nietzsche, which marked the final “revaluation of all values” of previous philosophy, culture and morality.

With his concept of radical nihilism, Nietzsche continued and developed the line of irrationalism in the philosophy of the 19th century, associated with the names of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Stirner.

This line arose as a reaction to the unjustified optimism of classical philosophy with its belief in the reasonableness of the world and the improvement of society. In fact, the “unreasonable” and unnatural relations of feudalism were replaced by capitalism, with its inherent social contradictions, giving rise to ever new clashes, vices and ulcers in social life, which in no way contributed to complacent illusions about the progress of reason in history. Humanity is afraid of losing these illusions, with which it is easier for it to live, but faith in the rationality of what is happening and its humanistic orientation can only deepen the crisis from which it cannot emerge.

Therefore, in rationalism and traditional humanism, in its optimistic belief in the possibility of reorganizing life on the principles of humanity, these philosophers saw a merciless mockery, the oblivion of the individual and his personal freedom, his transformation into a particle of a universal process, subordinate to natural necessity.

They contrasted the thesis about the regularity and necessity of the structure of the world with the assertion that the world is unreasonable, human knowledge is limited, and he is driven by instinctive life aspirations, blind will, fear and despair of finitude, the meaninglessness and doom of his own existence.

Of course, the most noticeable and striking figure in this series was F. Nietzsche, whose work had a strong influence on the development of philosophy, culture and mass consciousness in the 20th century.

This was not least a consequence of his creative talent, the bright, figurative, catchy and aphoristic style of his works, and his conscious rejection of the ponderous “scientific” nature of official philosophy in favor of his “fun science.” But to an incomparably greater extent, his influence was determined by the content and ideological orientation of his work.

Therefore, Nietzsche does not skimp on biting statements, harsh assessments, philosophical paradoxes and scandals. He considered his works a real “school of courage and audacity,” and himself a true philosopher of “unpleasant,” “terrible truths,” an overthrower of “idols,” by which he understood traditional values and ideals, and an exposer of errors rooted not even in weakness of knowledge , and above all in human cowardice!

Many times he calls himself “the first immoralist,” a real atheist, “Antichrist,” “a world-historical monster,” dynamite designed to explode the swamp of established ideas.

He understands life as a disordered and chaotic deployment of the energy of chaos inherent in being, a flow that is not derived from anywhere and is not directed anywhere, subject to the madness of the orgiastic principle and completely free from any moral characteristics and evaluations. In ancient culture, Nietzsche considered the symbol of such an understanding of life to be the ecstasy of the god of wine, the daring revelry and fun of Dionysus, symbolizing for a person a feeling of strength and power, the bliss of delight and horror from his emancipation and complete merging with nature.

The stronger will to life and power suppresses the weakened will and dominates it. This is the law of life, but it can be distorted in human society.

Social life is the struggle of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles in culture, the first of which symbolized the triumph of healthy instincts of life, and the second - the decadence experienced by Europe, that is, the weakening of the will to power taken to the extreme, which led to the dominance in European culture of unnatural values that undermine the very sources of life.

The disintegration and degradation of European culture is due, according to Nietzsche, to its cornerstone foundations - the Christian morality of philanthropy, the exorbitant ambitions of reason and science, which “derive” from historical necessity the ideas of social equality, democracy, socialism and, in general, the ideals of the optimal structure of society on the principles of justice and rationality.

Nietzsche attacks these values of traditional humanism with all his force, showing their unnatural orientation and nihilistic character. Following them weakens humanity and directs the will to live towards Nothing, towards self-destruction.

Christianity is a “monstrous disease of the will” and arises out of fear and need, among the weakest and most wretched bearers of the weakened will to live. It is therefore permeated with hatred and disgust for a healthy life, masked by faith in a “perfect heavenly life,” which was invented only in order to better slander this earthly one. All Christian fantasies, according to Nietzsche, are a sign of deep exhaustion and impoverishment of real life, its illness and fatigue, so that Christianity itself lives by the narcotization of human misfortunes.

Such traditional humane morality is interpreted by Nietzsche as the will to deny life, “the hidden instinct of destruction, the principle of decline, humiliation.” Christian morality is initially permeated with sacrifice; it grows out of a slave state and seeks to extend it to its enslavers, inventing God for this.

Faith in the Christian God requires the conscious sacrifice of one's freedom, pride, dignity, and open self-abasement to him, promising in return heavenly bliss.

Nietzsche very subtly plays on the basic tenets of Christian morality, revealing its hypocritical and deceitful nature. “He who humiliates himself wants to rise,” he corrects Christ’s sermon.

He deciphers the requirement of selflessness and selflessness, “not to seek benefit,” as a moral fig leaf to express powerlessness - I no longer know how to find my benefit.

The consciousness, unbearable for a weak will: “I am worth nothing,” takes on the form in Christian morality: “everything is worth nothing, and this life is also worth nothing.”

The ascetic ideal of holiness, the cultivation of dispassion and suffering is for him an attempt to give meaning to the meaninglessness of suffering, when it is impossible to get rid of it due to one’s own weakness, for any meaning is better than complete meaninglessness. Dispassion is only the spiritual castration of a person, and by undermining the root of human passions, one can only destroy life itself.

Compassion and love for one's neighbor is only the other side of painful self-hatred, for these and other virtues are clearly harmful to their owner. They are obviously useful and therefore hypocritically praised by his competitors, who seek to bind their owner with their help. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes, “if you have virtue, then you are its victim!”

Moreover, through mercy and compassion, Christian morality artificially supports too much of what should perish and give way to more powerful manifestations of life.

According to Nietzsche, one thing is essential in morality - that it is always a “long oppression” and a manifestation of the herd instinct in an individual person.

And although the Christian religion and the morality it preaches are necessary and useful for the overwhelming mass, for the herd, for strong and independent people who represent the dominant race, all this becomes unnecessary. Nevertheless, they can use this additional means of their domination over the herd in order to better force it into obedience, without becoming prisoners of wretched morality.

For along with this wretched morality, which requires the sacrifice of man to God, there are other higher “morals” in which God himself is sacrificed!

We must free ourselves from morality in order to be able to live morally!” exclaims Nietzsche, proclaiming the need to reassess “eternal values,” abandon slave morality and restore the rights of life.

This is available only to rulers, strong and “free minds”, holders of an indestructible will, who own their own standard of values and assign themselves a measure of respect and contempt for others. They are genuine aristocrats of the spirit who do not seek unanimity with others, retain the “pathos of distance” and the habit of “looking down on them.” They remain independent from the dogmas of ordinary morality, free from its fetters and have an aversion to all moral chatter about duty, selflessness, holiness, for they make their own laws.

This “master morality” is a morality of power and egoism, which “is the most essential property of a noble soul,” by which Nietzsche meant the unshakable belief that a being “like us” must naturally be subordinated and sacrificed by other beings.”

Therefore, the morality of freedom and dignity exists only for higher people, and for others only a slave morality of self-denial and asceticism is available, in which the weakened instincts of life are discharged not externally, but internally into the human soul with the aggression of self-destruction.

From the same positions, Nietzsche dealt with the “scientific” humanism of socialists and democrats. “Fanatics of brotherhood,” as he called them, just like Christian morality, ignore the laws of nature, striving to eliminate exploitation, overcome the natural inequality of people and impose on them “the common herd happiness of green pastures.” This will inevitably lead to the same result - the weakening and degradation of humanity, for man always develops in struggle and competition, and inequality and exploitation are a necessary condition of life.

Nietzsche tried to overcome the idea of morality as an objective system of compulsions, norms and prohibitions, independent of man, alienated from him and suppressing him, and to present it as a sphere of freedom.

With his work, he defended the vitality and value of individualism, with which he associated a new understanding of humanism, but inevitably coming on this path to the absolutization of subjectivism and the relativity of moral values, to the opposition of aristocratic morality (“everything is allowed”) and the morality of lower beings.

For the rights and moral freedoms of Nietzsche’s chosen ones were compensated by the lack of rights and ruthless suppression of the plebeians. The morality of the “supermans” turned out to be a superhuman morality, free from moral obligations to humanity and permeated with contempt for universal human values.

Dissatisfaction with the state of ethics against the backdrop of the successes of the natural and exact sciences, the development of scientific methodology based on description, systematization of facts, experiments and the construction of theories based on the principles and rules of logic, led in the 20th century. to a radical turn in the development of ethics. Ethics turned to the logical and methodological foundations of its own knowledge and took up the question of how ethical theories are generally constructed and in what sense they can claim scientific status.

The desire to overcome the “bad pluralism” of ethical theories, arising from the speculative nature of philosophical reasoning about human behavior, about its aspirations and values, its “essence” and from the oblivion of the basic principles of truly scientific methodology, led ethics to transform from “practical philosophy” into metaethics .

This name meant that ethics began to be viewed as a metatheory, that is, a theory about theory, about why and how ethical theories are built and why they are not able to reach generally valid conclusions. This meant a conscious refusal to study the phenomena of moral life and human behavior, at least until the nature of ethical knowledge and the possibilities of ethics to comply general principles scientific character.

Metaethics was based on the methodology of neopositivism, which seeks to cleanse philosophy of metaphysical speculation about what cannot be the subject of scientific knowledge, and considers it not as a theory about the world, but only as a method of reasoning.

Metaethics did not deny the existence of ethical theories about moral values and ideals derived from human nature, the will of God, absolute ideas or even mystical historical necessity, with corresponding practical, i.e. normative, conclusions, but it strongly objected to these theories claiming to be the authority of scientific knowledge and objective truth. Understanding truth as the correspondence of theoretical judgments to the actual state of affairs, metaethics set the task of analyzing the nature of ethical and moral judgments before ascribing truth to them and demanding their implementation.

On this path, it practically withdrew from knowledge of the nature of morality, the justification of its values and ideals and was reduced to the analysis of moral judgments and assessments expressed in language - to the analysis of the language of morality.

By this, she greatly disappointed those who expected and demanded from ethics precisely the solution of moral problems, obtaining certain answers to the questions of how to live, what to do, what is the meaning of human life, not realizing that scientific answers to them, common to all and only true ones, from the point of view of metaethics, do not exist.

The beginning of metaethics is associated with the work of J. Moore, who is credited with the merit of exposing the “naturalistic error” of all previous ethics, which led to its scientific inconsistency.

In his autobiography, Moore himself admits that the motive of his activity was not the desire to add one more to the numerous theories about human behavior and his happiness, but rather bewilderment at what was said and written by other philosophers seeking to make humanity happy, which nevertheless continues to live as if these theories have nothing to do with him. At the same time, Moore did not yet deny the possibility of the existence of normative ethics, the objectivity of the existence of moral values, demanding only that scientific ethics be aware of each step on the path to their comprehension and avoid mistakes.

He considered the most important, fundamental mistake of all previous ethics to be the unlawful identification of moral value, good as it is in itself, with the objective properties of existing reality - natural or supernatural, supersensible, metaphysical reality.

He called the first of them naturalistic ethics, which defines the concept of good through its correlation with the phenomena and properties of the natural world, and the second - metaphysical ethics, which defines good by pointing to a supersensible reality not given in sensory experience.

Varieties of naturalistic ethics are the ethics of hedonism, utilitarianism, evolutionism and all others, which derive the value and obligation of good from the natural manifestations of man, which can be revealed through experience.

Varieties of metaphysical ethics are religious concepts of good and duty and speculative philosophical doctrines that ignore experimental scientific knowledge and speculatively penetrate into supersensible reality, enthusiastically describing the structure of the “world of ideas”, “the self-development of an absolute idea” or even revealing a mystical idea that is not given in any experience. historical necessity,” which cannot be seen or felt. Moore himself did not bring his reasoning to such conclusions, but they inevitably followed from his concept.

It is clear that metaphysical ethics cannot in any way claim to be scientific, because, first of all, it relies on the heated imagination of its creators, which does not allow any experimental verification. Moore's point is deeper, however. He believes that even if there were experimental means of cognition of super-experienced reality, metaphysical ethics would only share the fate of naturalistic ethics, falling into the notorious “naturalistic error”, which defines good by pointing to some phenomena and properties of reality that a person values, to which strives, but which are not at all good in themselves.

Here an erroneous inversion occurs in consciousness - from the common ideas that pleasure, benefit, health, wealth, fame, money are something desirable and valuable, and therefore are good for the subject, ethics inverts the judgment and concludes that good is pleasure, benefit, health, wealth, money...

It is obvious that goodness defined in this way is beginning to more and more resemble that anecdotal goodness about which it was said in one epitaph: “Here lies a man who experienced an irresistible craving for goodness, especially that of others!”

Indeed, as soon as as a result of such a procedure a person identifies good with some thing or property of reality and rushes to pursue it, there will be no need to talk about morality, all means will be justified, and good will easily turn into evil.

Even such a value as health, which at first glance seems to be an absolute good, cannot, according to Moore, be identified with moral goodness, because health characterizes only the normal and energetic state of the body, but not the direction of its activity. And not everything that is normal is good, so there are cases when, in the name of the ideals of goodness, one has to sacrifice not only health, but even life.

For example, evolutionary ethics makes a naturalistic mistake when it tries, on the basis of the presence in nature of an experimentally established evolutionary process, to derive objective criteria of good from the development of nature, identifying it with “increasing life,” “spreading life in breadth and depth,” “improving adaptability to survival.” .

But “survival of the fittest does not mean, as one might think, that those who are better equipped to achieve good ends survive.” For there are no goals in nature, and the evolutionary theory only establishes what causes cause such and such consequences, and “whether they are good or evil, this theory does not pretend to judge this.”

In all attempts to derive the content of the concept of good from the properties of nature, Moore mercilessly reveals the unlawful and unconscious endowment of nature with value content inherent in consciousness, and then the alleged derivation of this content through observation and experience.

But where then does this concept of good come from in consciousness, how can it be defined differently?

The fact that it exists and people use the concept of good is obvious. Now it becomes clear that it cannot be defined scientifically, through pointing to something different from good itself, through identifying it with something else that defines good: pleasure, enjoyment, benefit, health, wealth, preservation and strengthening of life - all this can lie at the basis of both good and evil (selfishness, evil will).

Therefore, Moore is forced to admit that good is indeterminable through empirical or logical procedures, for it is a simple, indecomposable, primary concept, intuitively represented in consciousness.

In this respect, the concept of good resembles the concept of “yellow,” the content of which is impossible to explain to a blind person, to someone who does not yet know what “yellow” is. The concept of good is intuitively self-evident, but scientifically indefinable. The first should ensure the universal validity of morality and protect moral judgments from subjectivism, for intuition is the same for all people, and the second leaves a person with freedom of moral self-determination.

However, it is obvious that such a position did not contribute in any way to the justification of humanistic morality, because intuition is too shaky a support for such a justification. Moore actually gave negative definitions of good, leaving its positive content to the discretion of the subject, which opened the way to subjectivism, relativism and even irrationalism in the understanding of moral values.

Moore's appearance was symbolic, for it marked the emergence of a new type of philosopher - not an exposer-moralist, but a sober, rational analyst, free from all prejudices, from the pressure of religious authorities, public opinion, even from pseudoscientific considerations. Such a thinker relies only on common sense and logic and at the same time leaves a person scope for value self-determination, without imposing final conclusions on anyone. In the context of the unfolding ideological onslaught on people, such a philosophy left the intellectual with a rational mindset the possibility of a critical attitude towards imposed values and freedom of moral choice. All this predetermined the popularity of neopositivist metaethics, which grew out of Moore’s concept.

In its further development, metaethics went through the stages of emotivism (A. Ayer, B. Russell, R. Carnap) and linguistic analysis of the language of morality (S. Toulmin, R. Hear, P. Nowell-Smith), between which L. Wittgenstein can be placed. In their work, the formal analysis of moral judgments, which Moore considered as a means of solving ethical problems, turns into an end in itself and becomes the only task of ethics, which strives to be scientific.

Emotivism, in its analysis of moral judgments, came to the conclusion that they do not express anything about the state of things in the world, but are only an expression of the emotional state of the subject, express the inclinations and desires of the speaker and at the same time serve as a command for the listener. Therefore, they cannot be verified empirically; they are neither true nor false, because they do not assert anything factual. These judgments therefore cannot be substantiated, proven or refuted.

Their functions are to express the emotions and attitudes of the speaker and influence the emotions of others. All moral judgments in general can be represented, emotivism believes, as irrational reactions to a situation. They are devoid of internal structure and can even be collapsed, replaced by a gesture, intonation, or simply a facial expression.

It is clear that such a position is a deepening of the subjectivist understanding of morality, a complete loss of the objective basis of moral judgments and any criterion for comparing and evaluating moral positions.

Therefore, emotivism was inevitably supplemented by the principle of tolerance in ethics, the requirement to abandon attempts to compare moral positions, which ultimately led to moral nihilism and cynicism, recognizing the equivalence of the moral and the immoral.

Such odious conclusions and the inability to substantiate the general validity of moral values served as the impetus for the creation of a new form of metaethics - a school of linguistic analysis that seeks to soften the nihilistic conclusions of emotivist ethics.

However, analysts came to the same conclusions in a different way: moral judgments cannot be true or false, they cannot be proven with the help of factual knowledge, normative ethics cannot be constructed in a scientific way.

An example of a linguistic analysis of moral language is given by L. Wittgenstein in his “Lecture on Ethics”.

The purpose of his reasoning is to clarify the characteristics of “good” and, in general, what is important, valuable, what “makes life worth living.” In language, people use value or imperative judgments to express this content. What is behind these judgments, whether they have objective content that can be recorded, compared with the actual state of affairs and thereby determine their truth or falsity - this is the task for analysis.

First of all, you can see that imperative and value judgments are easily correlated with each other: “do this because it is right, good” or “this is good, so do it that way.” By expressing only the first half, we seem to imply the second.

But is it possible to establish the actual truth of a value judgment, that is, by reformulating it so that it affirms or denies something? What can be checked and verified purely experimentally without unnecessary discussions and appeals to God, world reason, or the “course of history”? It turns out that in one sense it is possible, but in another sense it is impossible.

Value judgments are expressed by people in the ordinary, trivial, relative sense and in the ethical, absolute sense.

When we say “a good chair”, “a wonderful pianist”, the right road, we are expressing value judgments about the relative value of an object or phenomenon, meaning suitability, suitability for a specific purpose.

Thus, a good chair is one that is most suitable for sitting on firmly and comfortably, beautifully, firmly and skillfully made, suitable for the interior, etc. A wonderful pianist means assessing the degree of skill, talent, technical capabilities of the pianist, his success with the public, etc.

All these characteristics, which reveal the meaning of our judgment, can be verified by comparing them with the actual state of affairs.

The situation is even clearer when people talk about the correctness of a certain road, having in mind a certain goal - the path will be correct in relation to this goal, which can be verified.

It turns out that “every judgment of relative value is simply a judgment of fact, and can be formulated in such a way that it ceases to appear to be a judgment of value at all.”

The right road, the right path is “the path along which you will get there,” and the wrong one is the path along which you will not get there.

In morality, value judgments are used not in a relative, but in an absolute sense, that is, without reference to a specific goal that has empirical characteristics and allows experimental verification.

Instead of the judgments “a good tennis player” or “a good runner”, which evaluate certain qualities in relation to a specific goal, here they say “a good person”, not meaning a specific goal, but as if appealing to the absolute ideal of a person who does not exist in the empirical world and which precisely therefore allows for all sorts of arbitrary speculative interpretations.

The right path in the ethical, absolute sense means nothing more than the judgment “the absolutely right road,” that is, one that, seeing which, everyone would either follow it, or feel shame if they did not go.

All these ethical judgments are expressed precisely in an absolute sense, appealing precisely to such goals that everyone must recognize and follow. But it is obvious that this is a chimera, because no factual state of affairs has in itself the coercive force of absolute value, some kind of absolute truth and the same persuasiveness for everyone.

It is with such chimeras that religion and ethics deal, whose judgments seem to make sense only by analogy with judgments about relative values. And if these latter have a factual basis, as a result of which they can be of interest to science, then ethical and religious judgments do not have such a meaning and mean going beyond the boundaries of language that has a natural meaning.

The conclusion that Wittgenstein draws is fully consistent with neo-positivist philosophy: “Ethics, insofar as it stems from the desire to say something about the original meaning of life, about the absolute good and the absolutely valuable, cannot be a science... But it is still evidence of a certain desire of human consciousness , which I personally cannot stop deeply respecting and which I will never ridicule in my life."

The sphere of moral values is the sphere of the “inexpressible,” mystical, very important for human life, but located beyond the boundaries of scientific knowledge, as a result of which scientific ethics cannot be normative, and normative ethics is not scientific.

Ethics should be concerned with theoretical analysis, and not with the solution of practical problems that have no scientific solution. Moral values, norms, principles, ideals cannot be substantiated scientifically in principle, because such is their nature; they can be accepted or rejected, but it is impossible to determine their truth and the preference of one to another.

This position was clearly directed against scientific moralizing, for the objectivity of the scientific view of the world, and therefore for neutrality in ideological and value issues, and tolerance of other people’s views, positions, and beliefs.

She expressed the point of view of liberal individualism, striving from a rational-critical position to maintain independence in ideological and moral issues in the face of growing trends towards an increasingly total socialization of human life in the 20th century. But this practical goal was achieved precisely through the rejection of a scientific solution to moral problems and turned into a theoretical justification for subjectivism and relativism in morality. Since morality is the sphere of the mystical and inexpressible, then there are no objective criteria of good and evil, and everyone can live as they please.

Although such a conclusion was never made by “analytic” philosophers, it inevitably followed from their theoretical concepts.

The liberalism of all metaethics consisted in its desire to overcome speculative metaphysical methodology and rationalistic philosophical tradition, the essence of which was the subordination of the individual as part of the dominance of the “universal” - human nature,” “will,” “Reason,” “idea,” “reasonable and planned organization of public life."

Personal independence, autonomy and freedom of moral orientation are the only absolute values, understandable and self-evident to every person, which scientific ethics must protect.

Metaethics in this regard can be called the ethics of individual reason, which protects a person from both illusory hopes and despair.

However, the universal nature of the intellect, which, like language, cannot be individual, as well as the desire to get to the primary foundations of human existence, stimulated powerful trends in the philosophical and ethical thought of the 20th century, associated with the desire to completely discredit the mind and the ability of man and society to conscious improvement.

This seemed to be facilitated by the very course of social development, which clearly demonstrated the final triumph and at the same time the impotence of reason and science. The mastery of humanity by the forces of nature and social development with the help of science turned into self-destructive world wars, the creation of totalitarian, despotic regimes over vast territories, an explicit or implicit attack on human freedom and dignity, rampant consumerism and lack of spirituality, poverty, poverty and cruelty, and the increasing alienation of man from society.

All this contributed to the growth of irrationalistic tendencies in philosophy, laid down by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, continued in the psychological concept of man by Z. Freud and in the philosophy of existentialism. At the same time, the matter should not be understood to mean that most philosophers of the 20th century. were mystics who despised rational logic and the methodology of knowledge.

No, many of them, like Freud, were rational scientists who sought to find objective truth.

A feature of the 20th century. it was that for the first time he gave birth to irrationalism, based not only on the failures of reason, but also on its successes.

Thus, the onslaught of ethical irrationalism in the 20th century. was a natural reaction to the failures of reason - “truly scientific” Marxist ethics with its class essence of morality, “scientific naturalism” of evolutionary ethics leading to social Darwinist conclusions, conscious self-restraint of metaethics in matters of scientific substantiation of humanistic ideas. In addition to these concepts, varieties of theories of “reasonable egoism” were widely circulated in the form of utilitarianism, pragmatism, etc., conformist doctrines that teach a person not greatness of spirit and moral dignity, but the ability to calculate and adapt.

However, ethical irrationalism owes its popularity no less to the successes of reason and science, which clearly demonstrated and proved the inhumanity of the world and the cruelty of history, and revealed the futility of human hopes for the possibility of a reasonable and fair reorganization of life.

This is already a kind of “new irrationalism” in ethics, which consists not simply in the rejection of rational, scientific methodology or in limiting the capabilities of reason in knowing and justifying morality, but often not even that at all.

It consisted in the fundamental position that, according to objective laws, the moral existence of a person is impossible, that morality generally belongs to the sphere of transcendental existence and draws strength and content from the depths of the irrational. With this understanding of ethical irrationalism, it is necessary to include not only metaethics developing in line with the “philosophy of science,” but even the “rationalist” Kant. After all, it was he who first showed that reason and science are not omnipotent, that there are objectively impossible things, practically insoluble problems and uncertain life situations when other ways of orientation in the world come into play.

The most significant contribution to the revision of views on the nature of man as a rationally acting being was made by 3. Freud, who for a long time had a trail of reputation as a sexually preoccupied irrationalist-myth-maker, who created the concept of man and morality on the basis of the absolute dominance of the instincts of sexuality and aggressiveness.

In fact, he sought to understand the true nature of human behavior, overcoming, with the help of impartial science, man’s illusions about himself, penetrating into the most intimate motives, motivations and experiences of man, revealing the content of contradictions and conflicts in man himself and his clash with reality.

Using the methods of scientific psychological analysis, he was able to demonstrate with experimental certainty that a person’s conscious impulses represent a secondary rationalization of deeper motives, over which the person himself has no control and the source of which is not aware.

In the collision of consciousness and its true irrational foundations, Freud saw the source of all illusions, illnesses and, in general, all human misfortunes, overcoming which is impossible, but some relief is possible through the use of psychoanalysis, which explains to consciousness its true content and softens the tension from their collision.

In contrast to metaphysical philosophers with their understanding of the determination of the content of consciousness by more fundamental factors than empirical reality, using speculative and arbitrary constructions (like divine grace, Pure and Practical Reason, World Will, Absolute Idea, Will to Life or Will to Power), Freud relied on the results of his psychotherapeutic practice, which led him to a certain conclusion.

Analyzing clinical cases of neuroses, phobias, perversions, encountering the hidden meaning of slips, slips, dreams, with facts of weakening of painful symptoms as a result of analytical conversations with patients experiencing a kind of catharsis, purification from speaking, relief internal tension, he came to an interesting conclusion. Freud concluded that in the human psyche there is an unconscious energetic force that puts pressure on the psyche from the inside, determines its experiences and their awareness.

The most clear evidence of this can be considered the facts of post-hypnotic suggestion, when a person who has the fullness of conscious orientation, nevertheless commits absurd and therefore unmotivated actions suggested to him, followed by an attempt to rationally motivate them.

In this way, Freud came to the discovery of an energetic unconscious principle in human nature, which is irrational in nature and determines the entire structure of the human psyche, the content of consciousness and all forms of cultural activity, including religion and morality.

Freud explained the irrational nature of the unconscious by the dominance in psychic energy of the passionate instinctive desire of life for immediate satisfaction, regardless of any circumstances. The unconscious therefore drives all the impulses and actions of a living being, represents the basic, primary level of mental life and is inherently immoral and irrational. The unconscious connects the human psyche with the animal psyche, indicates the unity of organic life and the animal nature in man. Its content is the inherent desire for self-preservation of all living things - individual and generic.

Both of these desires find full expression in the sexual instinct, in which the desire for procreation and intense pleasure coincide.

Therefore, the initial level of mental life, according to Freud, is subject to the principle of pleasure, and the essence of the unconscious is libido, the strongest sexual desire, the desire for pleasure and relief from suffering caused by the tension of undischarged mental energy.

Later, observing the inherent social life conflicts, clashes and wars, Freud added to the content of the unconscious erotic, libidinal instincts aimed at preserving life, instincts of destruction and death, seeking to return matter to an inorganic state. Leaving the language of the scientist, he spoke like a real metaphysician in mythological dialect, declaring Eros and Thantos the essence of the unconscious.

But how does the conscious emerge from the unconscious?

It does not arise where life's aspirations find their satisfaction at the initial level of the psyche of a living being, where instinct finds ways of immediate satisfaction, and the psychic energy of the unconscious finds temporary relaxation and calm.

But if, under the influence of social conditions, instinctive aspirations are blocked when faced with reality, the psychic energy of the unconscious cannot be discharged externally and turns inside the psyche, begins to look for workarounds to compensate for the impossibility of immediate satisfaction.

It is from this collision of the pleasure principle with the reality principle that the need arises to mediate the satisfaction of instinctive aspirations, to take into account real circumstances and conditions, and thereby complicate the mental and real activity of a person. From the energy of the unconscious, forced to look for roundabout roads to satisfaction, is born the ability to realize one’s desires and experiences and correlate them with reality, the ability to calculate and correct one’s objective consciousness and behavior.

It is in this way that the conscious arises from the unconscious, correlating its “I” with reality.

Having designated the unconscious as “it” and the conscious as “I,” Freud considers the former to be the true source of all mental and spiritual life, and the latter to be a manifestation of the differentiation of the unconscious, associated with the need to reckon with reality and control drives and passions through their rationalization.

Consciousness is called upon to combine, as it were, the innate energy of unconscious instinctive aspirations with reality, which does not allow them to run rampant uncontrollably. It adapts a person’s personality to reality, trying to suppress unconscious instinctive aspirations and drives that make a person incapable of living in society due to their asocial orientation, and trying to balance the pressure on the psyche from within by strengthening conscious self-control.

Therefore, consciousness is constantly in a struggle with unconscious aspirations, which it tries to suppress and push back into the sphere of the unconscious. But, being itself a product of the unconscious and feeding on its energy, consciousness can only temporarily suppress and repress, delay the manifestation of the unconscious, which is the true master of human destiny.

The action of consciousness is extremely narrowed - it is conscious and rational only as a means of serving the goals and aspirations of the unconscious, looking for time-delayed, but more reliable and less risky ways to satisfy the latter.

However, in the case of a complete inability to find satisfaction in the unconscious instincts, either due to an unfavorable reality or due to a weakening of the “I,” the unconscious can throw away all covers and break through in a person’s behavior with a psychological breakdown and illness or antisocial behavior.

Consciousness, along with the search for workarounds and rational means to satisfy its owner, i.e. unconscious, can also seek satisfaction through substituting the goals of activity.

Thus, the impossibility, due to a collision with reality, of satisfying sexual instincts and the reluctance of the “I” to look for workarounds for this by attracting prudence, cunning, seduction and deception, which, in fact, constitute the essence of consciousness according to Freud, can result in either neurosis and illness, or sublimate the energy of the unconscious into other, non-sexual areas of creative activity.

It is sublimation, i.e. the unconscious repression and replacement of sexual instincts, substitution of the goal of their aspirations and the direction of their strength and energy on non-sexual objects, that underlies human cultural activity, which forms the entire diversity of everyday life.

At the same time, society, trying to limit the destructive forces contained in the unconscious and strengthen the consciousness of “I”, develops in its development mechanisms of social regulation of the human generation - customs, prohibitions, traditions, religious requirements and moral norms that are instilled in a person from childhood. They form in his psyche a superstructure over his “I”, its modification in the form of a “super-ego”.

The super-ego, or the sphere of culture and social consciousness, is born in the same way as individual consciousness, from the collision of the energy of the unconscious with the reality of social life, from the desire to suppress and curb the destructive potential of the unconscious in a person and direct it to cultural goals.

For Freud, the superego turns out to be both the result of the sublimation of the unconscious and its further prerequisite. It is generated by the struggle of consciousness with unconscious drives and the switching of their energy to cultural activities, but it increasingly subjugates and binds a person, imposing on him authoritarian dogmas of religion and morality, a sense of duty and conscience, guilt and shame, entangling him with moral obligations and depriving him of the main thing. - satisfaction and happiness.

Morality, according to Freud, is initially a sphere of pressure, coercion and lack of freedom, like, in fact, the entire civilization and culture, with which society seeks to protect itself from the rampant elements of the unconscious.

Culture, religion, morality grow from the suppression and repression of instincts, from the sublimation of the energy of the unconscious and serve to suppress it in each individual person. Therefore, consciousness, both the individual “I” and the social “super-ego,” comes down not to expanding the scope of a person’s freedom and responsibility, his creative capabilities, but to the suppression of himself, his natural desires and aspirations.

The result of such suppression is a repressive culture and morality and a depressed, unhappy individual. While a person is alive, he is not able to free himself from the pressure on him of the unconscious, which persistently demands satisfaction.

Therefore, a person can never completely get rid of his greed and lust, greed and aggressiveness, the desire to subjugate others and rise above them by any means - power, wealth, violence, deception, slander. Human nature remains, according to Freud, egoistic and antisocial, and every person, deep down in his soul, is an opponent of the culture and morality that restrains him.

However, the presence of a person’s consciousness of “I” and “super-ego” helps him restrain his instincts, repress and block the energy of the unconscious, which, finding no outlet or release, is concentrated in his subconscious and can at any moment erupt in explosions of supposedly causeless aggressiveness and violence , neuroses, psychoses or sexual perversions.

A person is constantly under pressure from the indomitable force of the unconscious and the force of individual and social consciousness, which strives to restrain it. He feels like a hostage to these forces that are beyond his control and control his destiny, and in any case he turns out to be unhappy. If instincts win, a person turns out to be a criminal, and if they can be suppressed, he becomes a neurotic and a psychopath, retreating from unbearable and tearing pressure into illness.

Relatively normal behavior turns out to be possible only as a result of a temporary compromise, a balance between the demands of the unconscious and the consciousness that restrains it, seeking to sublimate instincts. This is a precarious balance that requires mental stress, moral hypocrisy and self-deception from a person, depriving him of true satisfaction and replacing it with illusory satisfaction with surrogates.

In fact, a person lives between two alternatives: either try to be happy, throwing away the conventions of consciousness and culture, crossing all barriers and freely realizing his desires, or enjoy the achievements of civilization and culture, constantly bumping into restrictions and prohibitions, feeling depressed, unfree and unhappy .

Freud pessimistically assessed the possibility of a favorable resolution for man and humanity of this contradiction of unconscious instinctive aspirations and demands of social organization and rationality. Sometimes he expressed opinions about rejecting the benefits of culture in the name of satisfying the natural desire for happiness, but more often he turned to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis he created, through which it is possible to penetrate into the depths of spiritual life and realize the dangers contained in it.

His entire teaching can therefore be presented as an attempt to rationally analyze the irrational and hidden impulses rooted in human nature and subjugate him, and on this basis to get rid of their power, at least partially, primarily through the demystification and de-fetishization of reason, culture, morality and the very existence of man.

A scientist, according to Freud, cannot and should not engage in social reform or preaching; his task is to penetrate into the essence of what is happening, demonstrate the dangers arising from it and the possibilities of avoiding them, if any.

With his teaching about the role of unconscious impulses in the life of human society and especially about their sexual origin, he for the first time openly expressed what people have always felt and experienced, what they suffered from internal self-destruction, but did not dare to admit in their thoughts to their secret desires, thereby only increasing your suffering.

Freud's teaching therefore had the effect of a bomb exploding, largely predetermining the directions of development of culture and ways of understanding it in the 20th century. At the same time, by its very appearance it demonstrated the effect of catharsis - liberation from the pressure of one’s own prejudices, prohibitions and censorship contained in classical, rationalistic and humanistic philosophy, culture, religion and morality.

Freud's interpretation of the relationship between the natural principle and consciousness in man, man's relationship to social institutions and values began to be used for a grandiose attack on this repressive culture and morality and the consciousness that oppresses the inner impulses of man.

In the name of emancipation and liberation of man, the affirmation of individual freedom, self-determination and the dignity of the individual, his right to happiness, literature, art, and science attacked lies, hypocrisy, absurdity and the repressive nature of society, its culture and morality. They penetrated into the dark abyss of human instincts, secret and hidden desires, vicious passions that possess a person, but not in order to overcome them, since this is impossible, but only to weaken their demonic power over a person due to their open awareness and recognition, conscious search for ways of their sublimation.

And if Freud himself admitted the possibility of achieving, on the basis of psychoanalysis, the relative well-being and satisfaction of a person who finds an optimal balance between the unconscious and the demands of consciousness and culture (which, by the way, is demonstrated by the positive results of the sexual revolution that took place in the West, which allowed millions of people to become much happier), then for The goal of most cultural figures who took the position of Freudianism was the destruction of culture itself.

The morality of duty and responsibility, mutual obligations and rights, feelings of conscience and shame was declared a false and interfering prejudice, getting rid of which supposedly liberates a person and makes him happy, or at least free and worthy in his tragedy.

It is clear that on this path society is threatened by cultural and moral degradation and self-disintegration, and that this threat is not empty is confirmed by the widespread rampant in modern society of anarchy and self-will, irresponsibility and licentiousness, violence and cruelty. Will modern man be able to find the intellectual and moral strength to resist the rampant nature of this element and at the same time humanize public morality and culture, or is society destined to plunge into a “new barbarism” and savagery, the metastases of which are already sweeping over entire regions even in the most developed countries?

So far this question does not have a clear answer, on which the future fate of humanity depends.

Without exaggeration, another great variety of ethical irrationalism that had a huge influence on the development of Western culture in the 20th century was the philosophy of existentialism (existence). Existentialism made a claim to revise the traditional classical philosophical canons and replace the “philosophy of being”, the philosophy of things with the philosophy of man, the philosophy of “universal essences” with the philosophy of the existence of an individual person.

The old humanism of classical philosophy was recognized as untenable and refuted by the entire course of social development. It was metaphysical, because it was built on one or another metaphysics of existence, at the basis of which were placed nature, God, reason, the laws of history, from which the essence of man was already deduced. His hostility to man was explained by the fact that he viewed man as a thing among things, and sought to impose his schemes on him and subordinate him to his metaphysical constructs.

Old humanism saw its task in comprehending the essence of man, his purpose, the ideal, expressing the proper modality of human life, and finding the reasons and ways to overcome the alienation of the real empirical existence of a person from his essence, what is from what should be.

Such an “essential” interpretation of man inevitably deprived him of self-determination, freedom and dignity and caused rejection and rejection of all philosophical programs for the reconstruction of society and man.

These programs initially turned out to be stillborn not even because knowledge was unable to comprehend the metaphysics of being and man, but because it always dealt with the “inauthentic” existence of man, while the “genuine” existence of man remained elusive to it.

Therefore, it was necessary to turn over the old humanism so that man himself became the basis of metaphysics, the understanding of existence as the existence of the human spirit.

Existentialism proceeds from the subjectivity of an individual, drawing a phenomenological picture of a person’s experience of his “being in the world,” which at the same time is comprehension of the “meaning of being from within.” Human existence is described in rather gloomy colors: it is always “immersed,” “involved,” “thrown” into “the other,” something that “is not itself.” A person is doomed to feel “drawn into a situation” contrary to his desires and will and to feel lonely and abandoned in these circumstances not chosen by him, where no one can relieve him of the doom to live and act in conditions beyond his control.

Therefore, his position in the world is characterized by uncertainty, a feeling of homelessness and disorientation, and defenselessness in the face of circumstances. He experiences fear, melancholy, anxiety, nausea - experiences characteristic of a person before a decisive test, the outcome of which is unpredictable and often determined by the random arbitrariness of certain “forces” and “authorities”.

And this is not a random coincidence of circumstances, but a manifestation of the essence of human destiny, which appears to one in an accident, catastrophe, betrayal, betrayal, and to another - in ruin, loss of a loved one, in everyday failures, disappointments, or before everyone - in historical cataclysms and disasters. Not a single person can live life without experiencing the feeling when the ground disappears from under one’s feet, when there is nothing to rely on and nothing to hope for, when one has to make a decision oneself in a situation of uncertainty, the absence of a sign or a hint. After all, even their presence does not relieve a person from the need to interpret their meaning himself and make a decision.

These unpleasant experiences are, from the point of view of existentialism, a sensory-intuitive awareness of the specifics of human existence - its illegality, randomness, and problematic nature.

For man is the only creature in the world whose existence precedes the essence, the cause, that which determines him. A person first exists, appears, acts, and only then is he defined, that is, receives characteristics and definitions. Human reality is therefore not a “fact”, an “event”, a certain “solid substance” that has a cause and essence, it is a dynamically unfolding process of self-creation and self-determination of its factuality.

This is a kind of emptiness, a crevice, a gap that exists in the clearing of being,” from which a person exists, from himself fills this being with his existence, his decisions and actions, giving this or that meaning to the being created by him.

Man is open to the future, and he projects himself into the future himself, so that incompleteness, incompleteness, and aspiration to the future belong to the structure of his existence. In fact, only death slams the doors, presenting a person as a complete being who has received its completeness and certainty, and therefore has acquired its essence. Therefore, any attempt at an essential interpretation of man, which is what the old humanism did, is “the burial of us during our lifetime” (Sartre).

It is this openness to the future, internal emptiness and initial readiness for free self-determination from oneself that is true existence, existence, identical to freedom.

Freedom as “self-thinking and self-action at one’s own discretion” is identical to human “selfhood,” existence, his authentic existence.”

And if in the world of things and objects determinism dominates, then in the world of existence, “being for oneself,” a person chooses himself. Here “there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom” (Sartre). After all, all the causes and factors affecting a person are necessarily mediated by his free choice, consent to these reasons or refusal to agree with them.

Therefore, Sartre declares that “determinism is the philosophy of scoundrels and opportunists” who seek to justify their weakness or betrayal by objective reasons.

Man is not free from freedom, he is in fact “condemned to be free.” Condemned because he did not initially create himself, and yet he is free, because in the future he creates himself and the world around him and bears responsibility for this.

Heidegger goes even further, declaring that a person generally exists only insofar as he exists. If he does not exist, he simply does not exist as a person, even if he continues to exist as a material object.

However, for most people who have realized their loneliness and abandonment, the lack of any support or guidance in the face of an unknown future, that is, true existence, turns out to be an unbearable burden. After all, freedom requires independence and courage from a person, it presupposes responsibility for choices that give one or another meaning to the future, which determines what the world will be like in the future. It is these circumstances that cause those unpleasant experiences of metaphysical fear and anxiety, constant worry that push a person into the sphere of “inauthentic existence.”

This is the sphere of a kind of sublimation of existence, renunciation of oneself and one’s freedom, from uncertainty, uncertainty and responsibility due to the dissolution of one’s own existence in the “way of existence of others”, “in the hectic everyday life” of public life.

This is the sphere of impersonal-anonymous existence, where everyone lives not as a unique person, but “like everyone else,” as an averaged and massed unit, whose existence is given, and whose behavior is scheduled and regulated.

This is the world of social organization, rationality and expediency, where a person takes upon himself social role and turns into a cog of a machine, an object of mechanical forces acting on it. Therefore, here he does not experience painful uncertainty about his choice and is freed from responsibility. Here everyone is destined for his role, rules of behavior, life interests and goals, here you can forget yourself, identifying yourself with the team and becoming “like others.”

This is a world of fundamental conformism, where everyone lives by someone else’s rules, thinks someone else’s thoughts and experiences other people’s desires, finding stability and certainty in the renunciation of one’s own “self”, liberation from the feeling of loneliness and abandonment.

This situation is constantly getting worse due to scientific and technological progress, concentration and socialization of production and all human life. The progress of science and technology has unleashed a “diabolical attack on human existence” (Heidegger), so that the most important feature of recent times has been the desire of man to go “where in the name of freedom one is freed from freedom” (Jaspers). However, an attempt to escape from one’s freedom and responsibility turns for a person into an exacerbation of torment from the loss of one’s personality, loss of independence, the impossibility of creative self-realization and, ultimately, the loss of the meaning of life and self-destruction. For, as Heidegger explains, “present being, dissolved in a preoccupied world, is not itself,” existential being turns into inauthentic existence only at the cost of its destruction.

Heidegger himself associated the return of man to existence with such a hieroglyph of freedom as physical death, the most “fundamental generalization of existence.” For if life can be “not mine,” dissolved in the way of being of others, then death is always my death.”

Therefore, everyone lives with a deeply hidden, but the only absolutely true thought that “no one can die instead of me,” coming to which, he realizes the real price of all social life and its values.

The pathos of existentialism lies in the need to resist all forms of collectivism, which is always a way of enslaving the individual - directly, through violence and suppression, blackmail and threats, or indirectly - by capturing illusory hopes for the possibility of a rational and effective, fair and humane reconstruction of life. It is obvious to him that any identification of oneself with others - a collective, a class, a party, a nation - although it gives temporary oblivion, the illusion of calm and stability, in reality imposes alien interests on a person and makes him an object of manipulation by hostile forces.

Therefore, it is necessary to openly realize your loneliness and abandonment, freedom and responsibility, the meaninglessness and tragedy of your own existence, gain strength and courage to live and act in the most unfavorable situations of futility and hopelessness.

Existentialism never tires of proving in different ways that human life is not a fairy tale with a happy ending, and therefore it is necessary to be prepared for the most unexpected turn of events, accumulating spiritual strength in order not to break down morally, to maintain one’s dignity and self-respect.

The logic of existentialism reproduces the logic of stoicism, it was not for nothing that it was called “new stoicism” - the moral confusion and despair of a person, the loss of his dignity and strength of spirit is not so much the result of the collision of our mind and morality with the meaninglessness of human life and the inability to achieve well-being in it, but the result disappointment in our hopes.

As long as a person wishes and hopes for a successful outcome of his endeavors, he will suffer failures and fall into despair, because the course of life is not in his control.

It does not depend on a person what situations he may find himself in, but it is entirely up to him how he gets out of them - by breaking down and abandoning his self, self-respect and dignity, or by maintaining greatness of spirit and dignity even at the cost of physical death. To do this, all he needs is what is in his power, to arm himself with the awareness of the inevitability of the tragedy of human existence and the readiness to preserve inner nobility, decency, honesty in the face of the constant threat of physical or moral death, the constant temptation to betray oneself or others.

For although man can be destroyed, he can never be defeated as long as he resists. Any resistance, struggle is an internal victory, even in defeat itself.

And if cynicism, immoralism, lack of spirituality and selfish prudence grow out of disappointment in morality, humanistic ideals, and the possibilities of reason, then moral fortitude turns out to be possible only at the cost of abandoning meaningless hopes, from the initial consciousness of the complete hopelessness of any action and the desire to resist spiritually, to preserve oneself morally.

The main thing here is not the effectiveness of our efforts in terms of achieving visible objective results, but the effect of self-affirmation, one’s own self-realization, in the ability to remain human, despite any threats and temptations.

In its most extreme forms, existentialism did not leave man any positive options for creating his life, because his choice always turned out to be forced and tragic. In life, unfortunately, people can only be divided into two categories - executioners and victims, so if you don’t want to be an executioner, then there is nothing else to do but consciously always take the side of the victims!

Softer versions of this teaching left a person the opportunity to try to be happy in the manner best expressed by the bohemian artists and writers of the “lost generation” after the first and second world wars: Remarque, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway.

At the center of their work is a loner, an outsider who does not trust society, the state, or religion, who ignores hypocritical public morality with its calls to serve the good of society, the fatherland, and progress, who does not complain about fate and does not count on anyone’s help. At the same time, this is always a person who has preserved purity, inner honesty, and loyalty to his moral values in his soul, the most important of which is human dignity.

He is capable of selfless friendship and love as the only types of spiritual communication with which he can overcome his own loneliness and closeness and, as it were, feel the soul of another person and support him in this dangerous world. At the same time, the existential hero is always internally prepared for the fact that at any moment everything will end, for parting, for the loss of what is most precious, simply because everything always ends.

The understanding that in this world one cannot be attached to anything, one cannot rely on anything, one cannot believe in anything, constantly encounters in his soul the need for spiritual communication, for a “thread” of trust and mutual understanding. After all, only thanks to it can you fill your existence with objective content and meaning, and feel that your life is needed by someone.

And the resolution of this contradiction is in an attempt to learn to live and love with a constant awareness of the fragility, finitude, insecurity of everything that a person loves, with the deeply hidden pain of doom, which gives human feelings a special purity and spirituality.

Thus, growing out of a situation of crisis, existentialism offers as a way out a proud awareness of the original hopelessness, giving a person the strength to rise above circumstances and assert his dignity in the face of an alien and hostile world.

The romantic spirit inherent in existentialism has always turned out to be extremely relevant in times of crisis, general instability, loss of support for at least something, accompanied by moral decline, the spread of lack of spirituality, moral unprincipledness and irresponsibility.

However, the fundamentally antisocial position of existentialism does not allow it to find and justify objective substantive criteria for a moral position, and it remains in the positions of formalism, subjectivism and ethical relativism.

The only criterion of human dignity here remains formal loyalty to one’s own ideals, inner sincerity and willingness to act freely and responsibly, without being guided by anything external, objective.

Action without hope of success, readiness to fail, of course, demonstrate the fundamental steadfastness and unselfishness of a person; they correspond to the logic of a moral act with its focus not so much on the objective result of the action, but on the moral effect. However, the absolutization of this aspect of human moral practice deprives it of any prospects at all.

The formalism of metaethics, the subjectivism and pessimism of existentialism, the dissatisfaction of scientists with the prospects of psychoanalysis against the backdrop of the rapid development of science gave birth in the 20th century. revival of interest in naturalistic concepts of man and morality. If earlier it was mainly based on data from biology and psychology, now evolutionary ethics seeks to use modern achievements of physiology, molecular biology and genetics in order to substantiate the objective nature of moral values.

However, the essence of the naturalistic concept of morality remains the same. Its first characteristic feature is the idea of refusing the supernatural and irrational source of moral values, in the desire to find their objective content in “human nature,” which is still interpreted in the spirit of reductionism - the reduction of purely human properties and qualities to natural phenomena, explanations of the highest level development of the material world by the laws of the lower.

The second feature of modern naturalism is the widespread use of methods of the natural sciences, especially psychology, physiology, molecular biology, and genetics to understand social phenomena. It is characterized by the identification of biological values with moral values and a clear exaggeration of the role of natural sciences. It is brought to the recognition of the possibility of their influence on the moral nature of man, on changes in human behavior with the help of genetic engineering or the technology of “operant behavior”.

The unsatisfactory nature of naturalistic ethics is demonstrated by naturalism itself, on the basis of which arise such different and contradictory theories of “human nature.”

Thus, K. Garnet, K. Lamont, A. Edel, T. Clements develop the ideas of humanistic naturalism, seeing in biology only the prerequisites for understanding human values, which they associate with a healthy, fulfilling life within certain cultural and social conditions.

They try to overcome the limitations of purely biologizing concepts of morality by including in the scientific analysis of social factors “a good human life”, “a healthy lifestyle”, but do not go further than recognizing the positive or negative influence of social factors on the unchanging “human nature”, do not reveal the patterns of social development as the true substance of moral life.

Others, first of all, the famous ethologist K. Lorenz, as well as R. Ardrey, from the same methodological grounds, develop social Darwinist motives, insisting on the innateness of “endogenous aggressive instincts” in humans and explaining social contradictions and clashes by the original aggressiveness of human nature, inherited them from animals.

And if humanistically oriented scientists, taking the position of naturalism, saw in genetic engineering and modern psychosurgery a powerful means of improving the moral nature of man and the morality of society, then the developers of various theories of “behavior modification” of a person saw in genetic engineering or the scalpel of a psychosurgeon a wonderful means for suppressing the “undesirable” behavior" and establishing one's own social control.

Indeed, if humanistic proponents of creating an ethic of genetic control seek to help a person become better than his genetic inheritance or brain disorders allow him, by influencing these physiological mechanisms of his behavior in order to correct and improve them, then why not extend this approach to criminals?

And if it is possible to “treat” people with antisocial criminal behavior in this way, then why can’t it be used for preventive purposes in relation to all “dissatisfied”, “prone to violence” and in general persons with orientations “undesirable” for the authorities? Having taken this path, it is gradually possible to extend this “treatment” to an increasingly significant number of people whose behavior “does not correspond” to the norms and who, although they are not yet “violators,” but clearly can become one, because “they do not behave that way.” ", "they don't dress like that", "they don't speak like that" and "they don't think like that".

If there is a developed technique and technology for influencing the physiological mechanisms of human behavior, such people can be treated, and in fact, their personality can be crippled with the goal of complete subjugation, and with technical and technological backwardness, they can be forcibly isolated in psychiatric hospitals and “treated” with more traditional psychotropic drugs, achieving the same goals.

Ethical naturalism, thus, in any of its varieties, turns out to be contradictory in scientific and technical terms and socially dangerous in practical terms. For, looking for the sources of moral and immoral behavior of a person in his physicality and naturalness, he actually removes responsibility for them from social reality, which is the true source of all moral life of a person.

The entire history of ethics testifies that no matter how differently morality is interpreted, it is always understood as something that is beyond the action of natural factors, that rises above nature.

The question here can be as Kant put it: either morality exists, and then it is not determined by human nature, or, if it is determined by this nature, then it simply does not exist.

Both moral and immoral behavior of a person, and his conscious and unconscious moral behavior are always socially mediated both by his individual life experience and by the course of the historical process of the entire society. It can be comprehended only by using the data of all sciences based on the methodology of socio-historical knowledge.

ethics morality samsara karma

Ancient philosophers studied the behavior of people and their relationships with each other. Even then, such a concept as ethos ("ethos" in ancient Greek) appeared, meaning living together in a house. Later they began to designate a stable phenomenon or sign, for example, character, custom.

The subject of ethics as a philosophical category was first used by Aristotle, giving it the meaning of human virtues.

History of ethics

Already 2500 years ago, great philosophers identified the main character traits of a person, his temperament and spiritual qualities, which they called ethical virtues. Cicero, having become acquainted with the works of Aristotle, introduced a new term “morality”, to which he attached the same meaning.

The subsequent development of philosophy led to the emergence of a separate discipline - ethics. The subject (definition) studied by this science is morality and ethics. For quite a long time, these categories were given the same meanings, but some philosophers distinguished them. For example, Hegel believed that morality is the subjective perception of actions, and morality is the actions themselves and their objective nature.

Depending on the historical processes taking place in the world and changes in the social development of society, the subject of ethics constantly changed its meaning and content. What was inherent primitive people, became unusual for the inhabitants of the ancient period, and their ethical standards were criticized by medieval philosophers.

Pre-antique ethics

Long before the subject of ethics as a science was formed, there was a long period that is commonly called “pre-ethics.”

One of the most prominent representatives of that time can be called Homer, whose heroes had a set of positive and negative qualities. But he has not yet formed a general concept of which actions are considered virtue and which are not. Neither the Odyssey nor the Iliad are instructive in nature, but are simply a narrative about events, people, heroes and gods who lived at that time.

For the first time, basic human values as a measure of ethical virtue were voiced in the works of Hesiod, who lived at the beginning of the class division of society. He considered the main qualities of a person to be honest work, justice and legality of actions as the basis of what leads to the preservation and increase of property.

The first postulates of morality and morality were the statements of the five sages of antiquity:

respect your elders (Chilo);
avoid falsehood (Cleobulus);
Glory to the gods, and honor to parents (Solon);
observe moderation (Thales);
pacify anger (Chilo);
promiscuity is a flaw (Thales).

These criteria required certain behavior from people, and therefore became the first for people of that time. Ethics, as well as the task of which is the study of man and his qualities, was just emerging during this period.

Sophists and ancient sages

Since the 5th century BC, the rapid development of sciences, arts and architecture began in many countries. Never before had such a large number of philosophers been born; various schools and movements were formed that paid great attention to the problems of man, his spiritual and moral qualities.

The most important philosophy at that time was Ancient Greece, represented in two directions:

Amoralists and sophists who denied the creation of moral requirements obligatory for all. For example, the sophist Protagoras believed that the subject and object of ethics is morality, a fickle category that changes under the influence of time. It belongs to the category of relative, since each nation at a certain period of time has its own moral principles.
They were opposed by such great minds as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, who created the subject of ethics as a moral science, and Epicurus. They believed that the basis of virtue was harmony between reason and emotions. In their opinion, it was not given by the gods, and therefore is a tool that allows one to separate good deeds from evil ones.

It was Aristotle, in his work “Ethics”, who divided the moral qualities of a person into 2 types:

ethical, that is, associated with character and temperament;
dianoetic - relating to the mental development of a person and the ability to influence passions with the help of reason.

According to Aristotle, the subject of ethics is 3 doctrines - about the highest good, about virtues in general and in particular, and the object of study is man. It was he who introduced the idea that morality (ethics) are acquired properties of the soul. He developed the concept of a virtuous person.

Epicurus and the Stoics

In contrast to Aristotle, Epicurus put forward his hypothesis of morality, according to which only the life that leads to the satisfaction of basic needs and desires is happy and virtuous, because they are easily achieved, which means they make a person serene and satisfied with everything.

The Stoics left the deepest mark on the development of ethics after Aristotle. They believed that all virtues (good and evil) are inherent in a person just as in the world around them. The goal of people is to develop in themselves qualities that correlate with goodness and eliminate the evil inclination. The most prominent representatives of the Stoics were Zeno in Greece, Seneca and Rome.

Medieval ethics

During this period, the subject of ethics is the promotion of Christian dogmas, since religious morality began to rule the world. The highest goal of man in the medieval era was service to God, which was interpreted through Christ’s teaching about love for him.

If ancient philosophers believed that virtues are a property of any person and his task is to increase them on the side of good in order to be in harmony with himself and the world, then with the development of Christianity they became a divine grace, which the Creator endows people with or not.

The most famous philosophers of that time are Augustine the Blessed and Thomas Aquinas. According to the first, the commandments were originally perfect, since they came from God. The one who lives according to them and glorifies the Creator will go to heaven with him, and the rest are destined for hell. Also, St. Augustine argued that such a category as evil does not exist in nature. It is committed by people and angels who have turned away from the Creator for the sake of their own existence.

Thomas Aquinas went even further, declaring that bliss during life is impossible - it is the basis of the afterlife. Thus, the subject of ethics in the Middle Ages lost contact with man and his qualities, giving way to church ideas about the world and the place of people in it.

New ethics

A new round of development of philosophy and ethics begins with the denial of morality as the divine will given to man in the Ten Commandments. For example, Spinoza argued that the Creator is nature, the cause of all things, acting according to its own laws. He believed that there is no absolute good and evil in the world around us, there are only situations in which a person acts in one way or another. It is the understanding of what is useful and what is harmful for the preservation of life that determines the nature of people and their moral qualities.

According to Spinoza, the subject and tasks of ethics are the study of human shortcomings and virtues in the process of seeking happiness, and they are based on the desire for self-preservation.

On the contrary, he believed that the core of everything is free will, which is part of moral duty. His first law of morality says: “Act in such a way as to always recognize in yourself and others the rational will not as a means to an achievement, but as an end.”

The evil (selfishness) initially inherent in a person is the center of all actions and goals. To rise above it, people must show full respect for both their own and others' personality. It was Kant who revealed the subject of ethics briefly and clearly as a philosophical science that stood apart from its other types, creating formulas for ethical views on the world, state and politics.

Modern ethics

In the 20th century, the subject of ethics as a science is morality based on non-violence and reverence for life. The manifestation of good began to be viewed from the perspective of the non-increase of evil. Leo Tolstoy revealed this side of the ethical perception of the world through the prism of good especially well.

Violence begets violence and increases suffering and pain - this is the main motive of this ethics. It was also adhered to by M. Gandhi, who sought to make India free without the use of violence. In his opinion, love is the most powerful weapon, acting with the same force and precision as the basic laws of nature, such as gravity.

Nowadays, many countries have come to understand that the ethics of nonviolence gives more effective results in resolving conflicts, although it cannot be called passive. It has two forms of protest: non-cooperation and civil disobedience.

Ethical values

One of the foundations of modern moral values is the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer, the founder of the ethics of reverence for life. His concept was respect for all life without dividing it into useful, higher or lower, valuable or worthless.

At the same time, he recognized that, due to circumstances, people can save their own lives by taking someone else’s. His philosophy is based on a person’s conscious choice to protect life, if the situation allows it, and not thoughtlessly taking it away. Schweitzer considered self-denial, forgiveness and service to people to be the main criteria for preventing evil.

In the modern world, ethics as a science does not dictate rules of behavior, but studies and systematizes common ideals and norms, a general understanding of morality and its significance in the life of both an individual and society as a whole.

Morality concept

Morality is a sociocultural phenomenon that forms the fundamental essence of humanity. All human activities are based on ethical standards recognized in the society in which they live.

Knowledge of moral rules and ethical behavior helps individuals adapt among others. Morality is also an indicator of the degree to which a person is responsible for his actions.

Ethical and spiritual qualities are cultivated from childhood. From theory, through right actions towards others, they become a practical and everyday aspect of human existence, and their violation is condemned by the public.

Objectives of ethics

Since ethics studies its place in the life of society, it solves the following problems:

describes morality from the history of formation in ancient times to the principles and norms characteristic of modern society;
gives a description of morality from the position of its “ought” and “real” version;
teaches people basic knowledge about good and evil, helps to improve themselves when choosing their own understanding of the “correct life”.

Thanks to this science, the ethical assessment of people's actions and their relationships is built with a focus on understanding whether good or evil is achieved.

Types of ethics

In modern society, the activities of people in numerous spheres of life are very closely connected, therefore the subject of ethics considers and studies its various types:

family ethics deals with the relationships between people in marriage;
business ethics - norms and rules of doing business;
corporate studies relationships in a team;
trains and studies the behavior of people in their workplace.

Today, many countries are implementing ethical laws regarding the death penalty, euthanasia and organ transplantation. As human society continues to evolve, so do ethics.

Ethics of modern society. Moral progress: illusion or reality?

Table of contents
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..3
1. Ethics. Definition…………………………………………………………………… …………………4
2. History of ethics. Current state of ethics……………………………………...4
2. 1. Ethical problems of our time…………………………………………… ...5
2. 2. The place of morality in the modern world…………………………………………........... 11

3. Moral progress: illusion or reality…………………………………...15

3. 1. Supporters of the existence of moral progress…………………………15
3. 2. Opponents of the existence of moral progress…………………………19
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..21
References……………………………………………………………………23

2. 2. The place of morality in the modern world

The transition from the primary apology of morality to its primary criticism was due not just to the progress of ethics, but at the same time it was associated with a change in the place and role of morality in society, during which its ambiguity was revealed. We are talking about a fundamental historical shift that led to what can be called the new European civilization with its unprecedented scientific, technological, industrial and economic progress. This shift, which radically changed the entire picture of historical life, not only marked a new place for morality in society, but was itself largely the result of moral changes. 10

Morality has traditionally acted and been understood as a set of virtues that are summarized in the image of a perfect person, or as a set of norms of behavior that define the perfect organization of social life. These were two interconnected aspects of morality, transforming into each other - subjective, personal and objectified, objectively developed. It was believed that the good for an individual and the good for the state (society) are one and the same. In both cases, morality was understood as the specificity of individually responsible behavior, the path to happiness. This, in fact, constitutes the specific subject matter of European ethics. If we can single out the main theoretical question, which at the same time constituted the main pathos of ethics, then it is as follows: what is the free, individually responsible activity of a person, which he can give a completely virtuous form, direct to achieve his own good, what are its boundaries and content. It was precisely this kind of activity in which a person, remaining a sovereign master, combined perfection with happiness, and was called morality. She was considered the most worthy, considered as the focus of all other human efforts. This is true to such an extent that philosophers from the very beginning, long before Moore methodically developed this question, already, at least since Aristotle, came to the idea that goodness cannot be defined except through identity with oneself. The arena of morality (and this is essential!) was considered to be society and social (cultural) life in all the richness of its manifestations; it was assumed that, in contrast to nature and in contrast to it, the entire area of joint life mediated by consciousness (knowledge, reason), including politics and economics, decisively depends on the decision, choice of people, the measure of their virtue. Therefore, it is not surprising that ethics was understood broadly and included everything that related to the second nature, self-created by man, and social philosophy was called moral philosophy; according to tradition, it sometimes still retains this name to this day. The sophists' distinction between nature and culture was fundamental to the formation and development of ethics. Culture was distinguished according to the ethical (moral) criterion (culture, according to the sophists, is the sphere of the arbitrary, it includes those laws and customs that people at their own discretion guide in their relationships, and what they do with things for their own benefit, but does not follow from the physical nature of these things). In this sense, culture was initially, by definition, included in the subject of ethics (it was precisely this understanding of ethics that was embodied in the well-known tripartite division of philosophy, formed in Plato’s Academy, into logic, physics and ethics, according to which everything that was not related to nature was included in ethics) . eleven
Such a broad understanding of the subject of ethics was a fairly adequate understanding of the historical experience of the era when social relations took the form of personal connections and dependencies, when, therefore, the personal qualities of individuals, the measure of their morality and virtue were the main supporting structure that supported the entire edifice of civilization. In this regard, we can point to two well-known and documented points: a) outstanding events, the state of affairs basically had a pronounced personal character (for example, the fate of the war depended decisively on the courage of soldiers and commanders, a comfortable peaceful life in the state - on the good ruler, etc.); b) people’s behavior (including in the business sphere) was entangled in morally sanctioned norms and conventions (typical examples of this kind are medieval guilds or codes of knightly combats). Marx has a wonderful saying that a windmill produces a society led by an overlord, and a steam mill produces a society led by an industrial capitalist. By using this image to indicate the uniqueness of the historical era that interests us, I do not simply want to say that a miller at a windmill is a completely different human type than a miller at a steam mill. This is quite obvious and trivial. My idea is different - the work of the miller specifically as a miller at a windmill depended much more on the moral qualities of the miller’s personality than the work of the miller as a miller at a steam mill. In the first case, the moral qualities of the miller (well, for example, such a fact as whether he was a good Christian) were no less important than his professional skills, while in the second case they are of secondary importance or may not be taken into account at all. 12
The situation changed radically when the development of society took on the character of a natural-historical process and the sciences of society began to acquire the status of private (non-philosophical) sciences, in which the axiological component is insignificant and even in this insignificance turns out to be undesirable, when it turned out that the life of society is regulated by laws so as necessary and inevitable as the course of natural processes. Just as physics, chemistry, biology and other natural sciences were gradually isolated from the bosom of natural philosophy, so jurisprudence, political economy, social psychology and other social sciences began to be isolated from the bosom of moral philosophy. Behind this was the transition of society from local, traditionally organized forms of life to large and complex systems (in industry - from a workshop organization to factory production, in politics - from feudal principalities to national states, in economics - from subsistence farming to market relations, in transport – from draft power to mechanical means of transportation, in public communication – from salon conversations to the media, etc.). 13
The fundamental change was as follows. Various spheres of society began to be structured according to the laws of effective functioning, in accordance with their objective parameters, taking into account large masses of people, but (precisely because these are large masses) regardless of their will. Social relations inevitably began to acquire a material character - regulated not according to the logic of personal relationships and traditions, but according to the logic of the subject environment, the effective functioning of the corresponding area of joint activity. The behavior of people as workers was no longer set taking into account the totality of mental qualities and through a complex network of morally sanctioned norms, but was dictated by functional expediency, and it turned out to be the more effective the closer it came to automated, emancipated from individual motives, the accompanying psychological layers, the more more people became workers. Moreover, human activity as a subjective element of a social system (worker, functionary, activist) not only bracketed moral differences in the traditional sense, but often required the ability to act immorally. Machiavelli was the first to explore and theoretically sanction this shocking aspect in relation to state activities, showing that one cannot be a good ruler without at the same time being a moral criminal. A. Smith made a similar discovery in economics. He established that the market leads to the wealth of nations, but not through the altruism of economic entities, but, on the contrary, through their selfish desire for their own benefit (the same idea, expressed in the form of a communist sentence, is contained in the famous words of K. Marx and F. Engels that the bourgeoisie, in the icy waters of selfish calculation, drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, knightly enthusiasm, and petty-bourgeois sentimentality). And finally, sociology, which has proven that free, morally motivated actions of individuals (suicide, theft, etc.), considered according to the laws of large numbers as moments of society as a whole, are arranged in regular series, which turn out to be more strict and stable than, for example, seasonal climate change (how can one not recall Spinoza, who said that if a stone thrown by us had consciousness, it would think that it was flying freely). 14
In a word, modern complexly organized, depersonalized society is characterized by the fact that the totality of professional and business qualities of individuals that determine their behavior as social units depends little on their personal moral virtues. In his social behavior, a person acts as a bearer of functions and roles that are assigned to him from the outside, by the very logic of the systems in which he is included. Zones of personal presence, where what can be called moral education and determination are decisive, become less and less important. Social mores depend not so much on the ethos of individuals, but on the systemic (scientific, rationally ordered) organization of society in certain aspects of its functioning. The social price of a person is determined not only and not so much by his personal moral qualities, but by the moral significance of the overall great business in which he participates. Morality becomes primarily institutional and is transformed into applied spheres, where ethical competence, if we can talk about ethics here at all, is determined to a decisive extent by professional competence in special fields of activity (business, medicine, etc.). The ethical philosopher in the classical sense becomes redundant. 15

3. Moral progress: illusion or reality

3. 1. Proponents of the existence of moral progress

To understand the essence of a person’s moral life, it is important to know whether morality changes during the historical development of society or remains practically unchanged. Already in the ancient world, ideas about the development of morality arose. In Protagoras, Democritus, Plato, and Lucretius Cara, there are thoughts that humanity came to its contemporary state from savagery. Plato, in his essay The State, wrote that people initially lived in enmity with each other (even the gods were at enmity with each other!), They committed injustice, but, having tasted all this in abundance, they found it expedient to come to an agreement with each other so as not to commit injustice, and not suffer from it. This is where legislation and mutual agreement originated. In other words, with the formation of the state, a certain order was established, hostility and riots decreased. 16

This was also expressed in religious ideas: Plato was no longer pleased with Homer and Hesiod because they so easily portrayed gods who supposedly did not only good, but also evil. 17

According to Plato, the destiny of the gods is only good deeds. In a word, moral consciousness has already become a tangible factor in social life and culture.

Similar thoughts are also expressed by Lucretius Karozh in his poem On the Nature of Things. He noted that initially people not only could not use fire, but they did not care for the common good. The ideas of social and moral progress received their greatest development and recognition during the Enlightenment. The famous economist A. Turgot, in his famous speech “Consistent successes of the human mind,” argued that in society there is a continuous development of the human mind, morals are softening. Another enlightener, Condorcet (1743-1894), proclaimed that the human mind has the capacity for endless improvement, and called for building a society in which truth, happiness and virtue would be linked by a single chain. He heartily proclaimed: Development will never go backwards! An optimistic view of the spiritual and moral development of society was also shared by many representatives of utopian socialism (Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, etc.), revolutionary democrats, and Marxists. Since the end of the twentieth century, the idea of progress began to lose its influence in a certain part of society (the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, etc. played a role here), nevertheless, it is still recognized, perhaps more cautiously and prudently a significant part of the population. 18

Belief in progress is still common to many people.

What arguments are usually given in favor of this view of the history of morals? First of all, the evidence of progress in science, technology, technology and a number of other types of human activity is noted.

Morality, as a regulatory factor, cannot stand aside; it must also be improved and enriched. Another thing is that moral progress has its own specifics. This specificity is expressed, first of all, in the fact that moral progress does not proceed synchronously with the progress of science and technology. The invention of a steam locomotive or a computer does not yet mean a revolution in morals or in the manifestation of virtue. Moral progress itself is not a linear ascent, but is a rather complex, contradictory movement with backward retreats, going to the side, etc. Finally, it should be noted that the different levels and components of morality do not progress equally. In morality there is a fairly stable, albeit thin, layer of eternal postulates and axioms that change to an insignificant extent.

It is mainly the scope of their application that is changing. As we have already noted, the norm do not kill initially applied only to members of the clan, but now it has acquired a universal, universal character. The forms of their implementation are changing. Fundamentally new postulates appear extremely rarely. Another thing is morals. In this layer of moral life progress is more obvious. As many authors have already noted (starting with V. Solovyov, if we take Russian thought), from century to century there is humanization, an ennobling of morals, direct relationships between people, and an enrichment of moral culture. As noted by Vl. Soloviev, “with the advent of the state, with the development of spiritual culture, communication between people becomes different. I can have angry feelings towards someone. But I don’t rush at him, as was the case in the early stages of human history, with fists, I don’t gnaw at him with my teeth, but on the contrary, I treat him, perhaps with emphatic courtesy. “In the same way,” the Russian philosopher continued, “in relations between peoples, mutual hostility and mistrust do not always lead to war.” The wars themselves, wrote Vl. Soloviev, “in the twentieth century they are more like a formally determined duel of two decent people than a fight between two drunken artisans. And the war itself, especially after the bloody events of the 20th century, is considered fundamentally unacceptable and immoral.”

Although it should be recognized that wars, mainly local ones, have not yet disappeared from the face of the earth. This only means that people are not always guided by moral principles in their actions. 19

The improvement of morals has many other manifestations. For example, back in the 15th century, mentally ill people were kept in unbearably difficult conditions, beaten, put on chains, and shown naked to respectable ordinary people for a fee. Only at the very end of the 15th century were madmen elevated to the rank of patients, and their chains were removed. The forms of punishment for various crimes were gradually softened. As we have already noted, in the ancient world the punishment of death was quite common. Moreover, the death penalty took the most inhumane, painful forms.

“If a person plans injustice, for example, to become a tyrant, and he is grabbed and, having been grabbed, stretched on the rack, castrated, his eyes burned out, tormented with all kinds of, the most varied and most painful tortures, and even forced to watch how his children and wife are tortured, and in the end ultimately crucified or burned over a slow fire,” we read in Plato’s work Gorgias (473 pp.). Similar tortures were practiced in the Middle Ages. In Russia, until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, people of ignoble origin were subjected to public punishment. Even women. One involuntarily recalls the following lines from a poem by N. A. Nekrasov:

Yesterday, at about six o'clock, I went up to Sennaya;

There they beat a woman with a whip, a young peasant woman...

However, the legal consciousness of the broad masses was not distinguished by delicacy. Until the end of the twentieth century, there were cases of lynching, reprisals by crowds against a suspect. So, in the 70s of the last century, Russian newspapers wrote that a crowd of people almost beat to death a woman suspected of inducing an illness on a boy with the help of an enchanted apple.

At the end of the twentieth century, punishments became softer, more humane, and it began to be taken into account that the criminal is a person and has the right to have his dignity respected. The death penalty has been abolished in many countries. The living conditions of prisoners have improved significantly. Unfortunately, the latter applies mainly to industrialized countries, and not to Russia. 20

A. V. RAZIN

HISTORICAL FORMS OF MORALITY AND MODERN ETHICS

The article examines the historical forms of morality. The specificity of ancient virtue ethics is shown, what problems were solved in medieval ethics are considered, and in what new perspective the ethics of modern times began to consider morality. The shortcomings of the universalist approach in ethics are shown. Based on a comparison of the characteristics of ethical thought in different historical eras, the author concludes that the development of ethical codes and the convergence of morality with law do not exclude the importance of virtue ethics. Instead, virtue ethics and institutional morality are complementary components. The most important feature of solving applied issues is the development of the decision-making mechanism, which means an increasing role of subjective motivation. The methodology used is the historical consideration of morality, the method of systemic research, and the principle of complementarity.

Key words: morality, ethics, motivation, institutions, virtue, decisions, responsibility, discourse.

The article considers the historical forms of morality. It shows the specific features of ancient virtue ethics, examines which tasks were solved by the medieval ethics and what new perspective was disclosed in the Ethics of New Time. The limitations of the universalist approach in Ethics are also revealed. On the basis of comparative studies of different Ethical paradigms the author concludes that the development of ethical codes and a partial unification between moral and law does not mean the lowering of virtue ethics. On the contrary, the virtue ethics and institutional moral are complementary components. The main feature of the solutions of applied tasks is the elaboration of decision-making procedure. This implies an increasing role of subjective motivation. The methodology is based on historical consideration of morality, involves the method of system research, and complementary principle.

Philosophy and Society, No. 1 2017 61-91

Keywords: moral, Ethics, motivation, institutions, virtue, solutions, responsibility, discourse.

Ancient ethics mainly developed as a theory of virtues. Virtue is a moral concept that characterizes the qualities of a person that allow her to consciously pursue goodness. In contrast to the norms and principles of morality that characterize the transpersonal, generally binding side of morality, virtue represents morality at the personal level and reflects the unique uniqueness of various social and moral qualities of an individual. In this sense, it is more subjective compared to norms and principles.

Virtue is a character trait that reflects a person’s ability to perform some type of socially significant activity, the development of his ability to live together with other people and the ability to intelligently organize his own life. The term itself gets its meaning from the category of good, which in Antiquity meant any perfection, the correspondence of a thing to its purpose. This means that virtue is a conscious striving for good, the desire to realize it in one’s activities and at the same time achieve perfection (including in one’s profession).

Virtue presupposes a stable direction of character. This means that moral behavior for a virtuous person becomes to a certain extent habitual, his moral choice is made easier due to the fact that the very nature of the character shows how to act in a particular case.

When deciding to be virtuous, a person always accepts some program of improvement for himself. It involves managing one’s own affects, abandoning some desires, considered lower, in favor of others – higher. This means that the person is consciously working to transform own nature in accordance with some moral and social ideal, that he does not want to remain what he is, but always strives for more, for what he can in principle achieve.

But it is not some abstract person who is improving, but a person acting as an active being, participating in the affairs of society. Therefore, in virtue ethics, a certain goal is attached to morality, which can be considered not only in its own moral, but also in its general social meaning. I. Kant considered the doctrine of virtues precisely in connection with a person’s idea of goals.

When considering the problem of virtues, Kant poses the question as follows: since there are free actions, there must also be ends to which they are directed. But are there goals that are also a duty? If not, then ethics becomes meaningless, since every teaching about morality is a teaching about what should be (that is, first of all, a teaching about duties).

Kant names two such goals: one’s own perfection and the happiness of others. One’s own happiness, from Kant’s point of view, cannot be a duty, since everyone strives for it by nature, but someone else’s can. One's own perfection can also be a duty, because no one strives for it by nature. Perfection, from Kant’s point of view, is a culture of natural inclinations, but at the same time, a culture of will based on a moral way of thinking. Therefore it is: “1. It is the duty of man, through his own efforts, to emerge from [the state of] the primitiveness of his nature, from [the state of] animality (quoad actum), and rise ever higher to the human [state], only thanks to which he is able to set goals, make up for the lack of his knowledge and correct mistakes. .. 2. Raise the culture of his will to the purest virtuous way of thinking, when the law also becomes the motive of his actions consistent with duty, and obey the law out of a sense of duty.” [Kant 1994: 428].

Virtue, therefore, is related to duty in the sense that it requires effort (will), and not related to it in the sense that it is the result of a free choice of goal. It also involves the development of natural inclinations, and therefore the determination of one’s predispositions and abilities. Thus, the sphere of virtue is not only the sphere of action of universal imperatives, but also the ability to subordinate yourself to what you are disposed to.

The latter still needs to be determined, and universal imperatives here, in fact, cannot give anything.

A controversial issue is the question of the so-called “proper moral” emotions that can motivate and accompany moral action. There were philosophers who allowed such emotions. For example, A. Shaftesbury wrote: “Not a single soul has done good deeds so that it would not do them with greater readiness - and with greater pleasure. And deeds of love, mercy or generosity were never done except with increasing joy of the heart, so that the performer did not feel more and more love for these noble actions" [Shaftesbury 1975: 113]. But I believe that the motivator of virtuous action is not moral emotion itself. Their nature (if such emotions are allowed) is incomprehensible, since morality orients us towards what is due, and if morality were motivated by some basic emotion, it would be necessary to recognize a moral need.

By the way, D. Hume directly writes about this, comparing moral feelings with feelings generated by the process of satisfying other needs.

In his work “An Inquiry into the Principles of Morals,” Hume proceeds from the presence in everyone of a certain universal human feeling that allows one to distinguish between good and evil. He calls this feeling philanthropy.

“The concept of morality implies some feeling common to all mankind, which recommends the same object as worthy of general approval, and causes each person, or the majority of people, to agree with each other, arriving at the same opinion or decision regarding it. This concept also implies a certain feeling so universal and all-embracing that it extends to all mankind and makes the actions and conduct of even the most remote persons an object of approval or condemnation according to whether they are consistent or inconsistent with the established rules of right. These two necessary circumstances are connected only

with the feeling of philanthropy on which we here insisted” [Hume 1996: 269].

In conclusion, Hume definitely connects this feeling with a need that is essentially similar to other human needs, only with greater universality.

“If there were no need (emphasis added by us. - A.R.) preceding self-love, this inclination could hardly ever have an impact, for in this case we would experience insignificant and weak suffering or pleasure and would know little grief or happiness that should be avoided or achieved. Further, is it difficult to imagine that the same can be the case with benevolence and friendship, and that, thanks to the original make-up of our character, we can wish another person happiness or good, which, thanks to this passion, becomes our own good, and then becomes an object of desire, based on a combination of motives of benevolence and self-satisfaction? [Ibid: 296].

But then morality as such would not be needed at all, because the need, if it already exists (or even if it is gradually formed), does not need the additional motive of duty. She herself initiates behavior aimed at her satisfaction. Another thing is the formation of such personality qualities that would allow her to participate in complex types of social activities. They, as well as the desire for these types of activities themselves, are not given to man by nature. In indicating the need for strenuous activities as a social service and in developing the social qualities necessary for this, morality can undoubtedly play a role. It really influences the process of formation of the highest social needs of the individual and those social qualities of a person (his abilities) that are necessary to satisfy them. Emotions are included in moral action from the side of the process of satisfying all the highest social needs of a person. Indirectly, they have moral significance, since in recognition of his merits by society a person sees the criteria of his own achievements and confirmation of his own dignity. At

In this case, the moral component of a complex action increases the tension of emotions from the very process of satisfying higher needs, because awareness of the degree of uniqueness of the activity performed and the complexity of the tasks being solved undoubtedly receives a corresponding emotional coloring. The result always causes greater emotions, the more difficult it is to achieve.

As for moral emotions themselves, they can only accompany a moral action in the sense of consciousness of a fulfilled duty; a state of calm conscience, satisfaction from the consciousness of one’s own dignity, caused by the fact that a person was able to overcome himself; or stimulate moral action in the sense of the anticipatory role of negative emotions (to prevent a state of remorse, disrespect for oneself, etc.).

In connection with the above, the development of personality in virtue ethics cannot be imagined as a process different from its integral social formation, that is, it is impossible to imagine a person who is incapable of specific types social activity, who has not achieved perfection in them, but nevertheless is highly moral in the sense that he does not deceive anyone, does not cause physical harm to others, does not encroach on other people’s property, etc.

For ancient society, virtue was clearly associated with the dignity of the individual, especially in heroic morality.

But then in philosophy and religion the displacement of this idea began. A person was required to be virtuous, but at the same time not to determine the measure of his dignity through this, since in ethics, oriented towards submission to the absolute, to God, everyone has the same dignity.

Hence, in Stoicism, and then in Christianity, a stable tendency emerged to separate moral qualities proper from other social abilities of the individual. Even earlier you can see

this tendency in Plato (in his ethics of moral perfection, which was a simultaneous movement towards truth and beauty).

For ancient ethics, the separation of morality and other aspects of human life, however, was not as sharp as for the ethics of modern times. The moral development of the individual was constantly conceptualized in terms of practical skills, compared with the development of other human abilities, and sometimes considered as a single process with the formation of other social qualities. Thus, Protagoras says that cithara players, teaching young people their art, for their part take care of the prudence of young people, in addition, in the very process of training, they become acquainted with the works of good poets and songwriters, in which there are instructive instructions [Plato. Prot. 326b].

The idea of the need to separate the actual moral qualities of an individual and his other social abilities intensifies as society becomes larger, the connection with the group becomes less direct than before, and selfish motives associated with the acquisition of wealth begin to manifest themselves more and more in the motivation of activity.

Until the Hellenistic era, man was not faced with the question of why he should act for the benefit of the polis. This was part of his life, consistent with his idea of true good.

Only in Seneca do the so-called bourgeois virtues appear, which indicate the need for a person to participate in public affairs, an attitude towards oneself that does not allow one to relax or indulge in idleness. But the problem of bourgeois virtues itself can only develop in those conditions when a person has a real choice to live one way or another.

For the vast mass of people in medieval society, the possibility of such a choice simply disappears. This society was class-based and hierarchical. Estates reflected the inevitability of fulfilling their social functions. Hierarchy implied the division of classes into higher and lower. The possibility of at least some choice of lifestyle, along with the struggle to assert one’s

social status was inherent only to the upper classes. Therefore, knights participated in tournaments or wars, representatives of the clergy delved into the study of sacred books and theological discourses. Kings asserted their dignity through conquest. As for the peasants and artisans, they bore their cross without complaint.

Nevertheless, medieval ethics reflected a higher assessment of human sensuality compared to Antiquity, a higher assessment of labor, including simple labor associated with handicraft production and agriculture. From the 11th to the 111th centuries. labor even began to be viewed not as a punishment from the Lord, but as a means of salvation, as a test that a person must endure, demonstrating his devotion to God. Certain types of labor were associated with a significant variety of life and with different virtues. But these virtues themselves, as certain social skills, even containing signs of perfection, have ceased to be a measure of the expression of personal dignity. This manifested itself even more clearly in Protestantism, which equated different types of labor in moral dignity, and in fact deprived them of such dignity altogether. Perfection began to correlate only with the idea of being chosen by God. What were social prerequisites such a turn?

During this period, society faced two tasks: 1) to preserve the social inequality that had already arisen; 2) provide variety labor functions, without linking their execution with a claim to change, an increase in individual social status. This meant that bearing one’s cross had to be taken for granted, without any hint that this was associated with the assertion of some dignity.

In the Middle Ages, the vast diversity of moral decisions characteristic of Antiquity was contrasted with the divine absolute as a single authoritative source of moral good. In Christianity, God performs punitive functions and at the same time sets the ideal of moral perfection. He is supposed to be all-good, all-seeing, omnipresent. Christian ethics, in contrast to ancient Greek and Roman ethics, basically became

ethics of duty. It formulated other criteria of moral goodness. Qualities such as courage and military valor faded into the background. They were opposed to tolerance, mercy, charity, and care for one's neighbor. The main virtues were Faith, Hope, Love. All people began to be viewed as equally worthy. In classical virtue ethics, the dignity of people looked different, depending on their achievements and the degree of development of virtues.

However, it cannot be said that in the Middle Ages there was a leveling of personality, that the goals of personal existence were simplified, reduced to self-restraint of one’s own sensuality and a benevolent attitude towards one’s neighbor, that man abandoned the independent search for moral truth and began to trust in the mercy of God in everything.

The Old Testament contains numerous examples of violations of traditional norms of behavior. But all this is done for reasons of realizing some higher values and receives the approval of the highest authority, that is, God. These are well-known stories related to Jacob's appropriation of the birthright, Joseph's use of a magical means to divide property (with his father-in-law) in his favor, etc. Each time after performing such actions, biblical heroes meet God in a dream and actually receive his approval.

Modern ethics had a complex history. From the very beginning, it was based on various, even contradictory principles, which received their own special combination in the concepts of individual thinkers. It is based on humanistic ideas developed during the Renaissance, the principle of personal responsibility introduced through Protestant ideology, the liberal principle that placed the individual with his desires at the center of reasoning and posited the main functions of the state in protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual.

In the 17th century moral theories reflect the complexities of the process of the emergence of capitalist society, man's uncertainty about his fate, and at the same time encourage initiative aimed at practical achievements. In ethics this leads to co-

the tandem of two opposing approaches: the desire for personal happiness, pleasure, joy at the lowest empirical level of the subject’s existence and the desire to achieve stoic peace at another - the highest level of existence. The highest moral being is comprehended through purely rational constructions associated with the affirmation of intellectual intuition and innate knowledge. In them, the sensory aspects of the subject’s existence are actually completely overcome. An emotionally charged attitude to reality is considered meaningless, because in a causally determined world nothing can be changed. Therefore, you can only accept this world and be calm about your fate. So mechanics as the leading scientific concept of the 17th century. used to argue moral ideas.

This is well confirmed by Descartes’ rules for practically valid morality (morality that a person can accept for himself even when the theory has not yet developed final moral ideas):

1) “... to obey the laws and customs of my country, strictly adhering to the religion in which, by the grace of God, I was brought up from childhood, and being guided in all other respects by the opinions of the most moderate, alien to extremes and generally accepted among the noblest people, in the circle which I will have to live";

2) “to remain as firm and decisive in my actions as possible, and, having once accepted any opinion, even doubtful, to follow it as if it were completely correct”;

3) “always strive to conquer ourselves rather than fate, changing our desires rather than the order of the world, and in general get used to the idea that only our opinions are in our complete power and that after we have done everything possible with the objects around us , what we failed should be considered as something absolutely impossible” [Descartes 1953: 26-28].

The first two theses indicate that a person is forced to live in conditions of lack of knowledge about the world. He can adapt to it only practically, focusing on moderate

opinions, since since the time of Aristotle it has been known that moderation is further from extremes and thereby further from vice, further from wrong. Firmness in decisions gives confidence in life, so opinions should not be changed. The third rule obviously demonstrates the stoic attitude of moral consciousness, resulting from the thesis that essentially nothing can be changed in the world.

XVIII-XIX centuries associated with a relatively calm period in the development of capitalism. Moral theories here are more oriented towards the sensory aspects of human existence. But feelings are understood not only in eudaimonic terms, as conditions for achieving happiness, as positive emotions that contribute to the joy of life. In a number of concepts, they begin to acquire a purely moral meaning, appearing as attitudes that express a humane attitude towards another, support for his existence, which contributes to the harmonization of social life. Along with moral theories that appeal to the proper moral feelings, primarily the feeling of compassion, the sensory understanding of morality also contains calls for a radical transformation of society, the creation of a social organization in which all the sensory aspects of human existence can receive adequate, consistent expression. This is often expressed in the well-known concept of rational egoism.

As a reaction to the sensory and eudaimonic understanding of morality, an approach arises in which morality appears as a rational construct derived from pure reason. Kant is trying to formulate an autonomous approach to the justification of morality, to consider the moral motive as not connected with any pragmatic motives of existence. Kant's categorical imperative, based on the procedure of mental universalization of one's behavior as a means of its control by the autonomous moral will, is still used in various versions in the construction of ethical systems.

Nevertheless, basically all these systems appealed to the individual consciousness of the individual, to reasoning on moral issues of a single individual.

The idea of history finds expression in the ethics of modern times. In the concepts of the Enlightenment, G. W. F. Hegel, K. Marx, morality is understood as relative, specific to each specific stage of development of society; in Kantian philosophy, the historical consideration of morality, on the contrary, is subordinated to the study of those conditions under which absolute moral principles can become effective , practically feasible. In Hegel, the historical approach develops on the basis of the thesis that the autonomous moral will is powerless and cannot find the desired connection with the whole. It becomes effective only due to the fact that it is based on the institutions of the family, civil society and the state. Therefore, as a result of historical development, Hegel conceives of morality as coinciding with perfect tradition.

Historicity is already inherent in Christian moral doctrine. The idea of history is expressed by the very genesis described in the Bible. This is not just a change of events, but a change in the person himself, his acquisition of moral qualities, his preparation to accept the divine commandments, and then to rethink them in the light of a new stage of understanding of divine truth, which only an already changed, New Testament person is capable of perceiving.

K. Marx and mainly his followers tried to combine the Hegelian and Kantian approaches in a clever way. Hence, morality, on the one hand, turned out to be class-based, historically relative, on the other hand, it was presented as the only means of regulating behavior in a communist society, when, according to the classics of Marxism, all social circumstances distorting the purity of morals would disappear, all social antagonisms would be overcome.

Medieval morality gives us a significant range of ideas from different strata about the tasks of moral life and virtues. The highest nobility lived according to one morality, the clergy - according to another, special moral ideas serving the purpose of expressing their mission were formulated by numerous knightly orders, merchants were divided into guilds, artisans into guilds. Even the poor had their own morals. Compared to Antiquity, this in no way looks like a simplification.

But the morality of the 17th century. shows much greater uniformity. Why? The answer, in general, is clear. The development of universal connections that correspond to the material form of relationships between people in a capitalist society requires the unification of their relationships. As for those moral ideas that determined the goals of people’s activities, they largely lose their moral foundations. This is very well shown by W. Sombart, who notes the following historical trend: “In those days when efficient and dutiful business people praised diligence to the younger generation as the highest virtue of a successful entrepreneur, they had to try, as it were, to drive a strong the foundation of duties, they had to try to evoke in each individual by exhortation a personal direction of will. And if the admonition bore fruit, then the diligent business man practiced his lesson through strong self-restraint. Modern economic man reaches his fury in completely different ways: he is drawn into the whirlpool of economic forces and carried away by it. He no longer cultivates virtue, but is under the influence of coercion. The pace of the matter determines its own pace” [Zombart 2009: 142]. Consequently, the task of improving man in the sense of cultivating the so-called bourgeois virtues has ceased to be relevant. His “virtue” began to be determined by the pace of production, and not by his subjective volitional efforts.

However, such an assessment is not suitable for modern society. Nowadays, human labor in production is becoming more and more creative, and creative work is difficult to control externally, its rhythm is not set external factors the systemic organization of production, at least, is not specified as strictly as these factors can determine the specific labor associated with the implementation of individual production operations.

Hence, in ethics, attention to virtues is again increasing, including in the sphere of public morality, in applied and professional ethics.

Modern morality

The specific features of the moral life of modern society, about which most researchers agree, are:

1. Moral pluralism, the development of systems of professional and corporate codes, reflection of the diversity of cultures, the division of morality along ethnic lines.

2. The rapprochement of morality and law, the institutionalization of morality (formalization of requirements and tightening of sanctions).

3. Orientation of ethical rules to the standard, contrasting this with the call for limitless perfection in the Christian sense (be perfect, like your heavenly father).

4. Collective decisions and collective responsibility.

5. The utilitarian approach, which involves making decisions based on the logic of the lesser evil (which is not always perfect, since it involves the use of some groups of people or individuals as a means).

In Russian ethics of the 1970s. morality has traditionally been viewed as a “non-institutional” regulator of individual behavior. Sometimes, however, it was noted that morality may be associated with the activities of certain non-state institutions, for example, with the church, but this was considered historically transitory and inconsistent with its nature. Traditional moral imperatives were addressed to the consciousness of the individual. Characteristics dependent on the capabilities of the individual were associated with such distinctive features of morality as freedom of choice (voluntary assumption of moral obligations); virtuous lifestyle (conscious striving for good); readiness for self-sacrifice (the fundamental affirmation of the interest of society as superior to the interest of the individual); equality between people (the willingness to treat others the same way as oneself, hence the universality of expression of moral requirements); the idea of self-improvement (hence the conflict between what should be and what is).

The state of modern society largely refutes a number of the provisions noted above. Thus, in the development of professional ethics, a massive process of codification of moral principles began.

normal The implementation of standards is monitored by certain organizations: ethical or appeal committees at universities; professional meetings of doctors that have taken on additional functions of moral assessment; committees on parliamentary ethics, assessing the acceptability or impermissibility of the behavior of deputies from a moral point of view, professional organizations of business communicators or organizations of public relations workers, councils on journalistic ethics, one way or another ensuring that the public receives truthful information about the state of affairs in individual corporations and public life in general. It is clear from this that morality becomes partly institutional. At the same time, the norms of professional ethics are no longer addressed to all people on Earth or not to all beings endowed with reason, as Kant believed, but to representatives of a given profession.

Along with the division of morality along professional lines, a division arose along the lines of corporate affiliation. Many modern corporations have developed their own codes of ethics and proclaimed their own moral missions, which reflect how the activities of a given corporation contribute to the growth of the public good as a whole, how this type of business contributes to meeting the needs of people.

To this we must add that those moral requirements that traditionally addressed each individual, for example, caring for one’s neighbor, in modern society often become the subject of activity of special government bodies. People working in such bodies essentially perform special moral functions serving the entire society.

All of the above really gives grounds for the assertion that morality has, to a certain extent, ceased to be what it was. R. G. Apresyan calls modern society postmodern. He notes that moral pluralism is a characteristic feature of a given society.

Analyzing the existing literature, which in one way or another reflects the problem of public morality, R. G. Apresyan comes to the conclusion about the need to distinguish between individual

new ethics of improvement and public, or social, morality. Western sources offer slightly different solutions: public morality and individual morality (T. Nagel), social and individual ethics (A. Rich), institutional ethics and institutional design (R. Hardin).

The term “public morality” seems to us more accurate, since all morality is inherently public. In individual morality, a person most of all pays attention to such personal qualities that can make existence conflict-free with a close circle of people, with his neighbors, and also ensure reasonable mutual assistance with those with whom he has to come into personal contact in one way or another. In public morality, a person deals with large groups of people, impersonal connections, and the performance of various public functions. The imperatives of public morality cannot be as universal as the well-known requirements of Christian ethics, because public functions are different and their implementation often involves selective treatment of different people.

The imperatives of individual morality may look like a way of resolving questions about what properly organized sexual relationships should be, how one should treat members of one’s family, how one should live in order to be happy, etc. In public morality, groups of people are identified as having certain specificities , different from other groups. Therefore, the principle “treat others the same way you would like to be treated yourself” does not fully apply here. Imperatives of public morality can be provisions such as “don’t be racist”, “take part in elections”, if you perform any general public function, then perform your duties honestly, do not give advantages to anyone in accordance with your personal likes and dislikes and etc.

It is clear that when performing many public functions it is simply impossible to treat another in the same way as oneself. A person, by necessity, finds himself forced to act against another. In "Ethics for Opponents"

A. Appelbaum notes: “Professionals and political figures perform roles that often force them to act on the basis of opposing intentions, strive to achieve incompatible goals, and destroy the plans of another. Prosecution and defense attorneys, Democrats and Republicans, secretaries of state and national security advisers, industry and environmentalists, investigative journalists and official sources, doctors and insurance companies often find themselves pitted against each other as a result of their mission, work and agitation" [Lrebelaish 1999: 5]. It is clear that this requires the development of special ethics, the basis of which is the rules of fair play, respect for the enemy, and consideration of the public interest. It is also necessary to take into account the relationships of subordination that inevitably arise when performing public functions, which imposes special moral obligations, and in some cases gives the right to control the destinies of other people.

Let's say an officer can decide who to send on a deadly mission and who to leave in reserve. These decisions will be based on the logic of choosing the lesser evil in order to eliminate the greater. They also allow what traditional ethics strongly prohibited, that is, saving the lives of some at the expense of the lives of others. Here, however, it is necessary to make a reservation that such decisions can be morally justified only in an emergency period that is officially recognized (an officially declared war, a natural disaster, a global environmental disaster, etc.).

As modern morality becomes pluralistic again, the era is passing when philosophers tried to formulate universal imperatives, to subject behavior to uniform rules that allowed no exceptions.

The very logic of these imperatives is called into question. G. Simmel was one of the first to see this turn in modern ethics. He criticizes Kant's categorical imperative precisely because it does not take into account the individual person, his contradictory feelings, conflict situations, etc.

“The irresistible rigor of Kant’s morality is associated with his logical fanaticism, which strives to give all life a mathematically precise form. The great moral teachers, whose source of teaching was exclusively an assessment of the moral, were by no means distinguished by such rigorism - neither Buddha, nor Jesus, nor Marcus Aurelius, nor St. Francis... This is connected with the fact that Kant, for whom ethical interest significantly exceeds theoretical interest , poses only the problems of the most everyday and seemingly crude events of moral life. He examines everything that is accessible to general concepts in moral data with unprecedented grandeur and acuteness. However, all the deeper and more subtle questions of ethics, the aggravation of conflicts, the complexity of feelings, the dark forces in us, in the moral assessment of which we are often so helpless - all this seemed unknown to him - he, penetrating into the deepest, subtle and refined functions of the mental human activity. The lack of imagination and primitiveness in the formulation of moral problems, on the one hand, the sophistication and scope of flight in theoretical ones, on the other, prove that he introduces into his philosophical thinking only that which allows penetration by logical thinking" [Zimmel 1996: 12-13 ].

Simmel believes that Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers assumed in principle that all people are the same in their essence. Hence, universal rules can be applied to them, and the society itself must be one in which the application of these universal rules becomes possible, that is, in the long term - a society of universal equality. This gave rise to revolutions that were themselves based on a false idea.

". Class, guild and church ties created countless manifestations of inequality between people, the injustice of which was very keenly felt; therefore it was concluded that with the removal of these institutions, with which this uneven distribution of rights would disappear, there would no longer be any inequality in the world at all. There was a confusion of existing meaningless differences with inequality in general, and the opinion was established that freedom, which would destroy them, would lead to general and permanent development.

royalty And this was combined with the rationalism of the 18th century, for which the subject of interest was not a special person, incomparable in his originality, but man as such, man in general” [Simmel 1996: 149].

One can discuss how correct this assessment of enlightenment as a whole is, but there is no doubt that general imperatives can govern people’s lives only if all motives other than the motives for preserving society at the level general rules, are taken beyond the bounds of morality. In relation to virtue ethics and in relation to modern society, this, I believe, is wrong.

And Simmel, I think, is right when he writes about the continuity of life and those rules that do not follow from general laws, but from this very continuity. “Everything that is changeable and in its sense unique, fluid in the continuity of life without precise boundaries, not subject to a pre-existing law, as well as abstract sublimation into a universal law - all this henceforth receives an obligation over itself, for this latter itself is life and preserves its continuous form" [Ego 2006: 60].

Despite the significant subjectivity presented in this argument, there is also a rational grain here. A person is motivated to action not only by abstract universal duty, but also by his own choice, the choice of goals, life program, which corresponds to the ethics of virtues. This corresponds to the individualization of moral actions and moral assessments in virtue ethics.

XIX century - This is also a period that gives a powerful surge to the utilitarian understanding of morality. Utilitarianism considers morally positive behavior that leads to an increase in the amount of happiness of the greatest possible number of people. This theory arises along with the development of capitalist society, which has dramatically increased the total amount of material goods produced and raised consumption to a new qualitative level. Material goods are considered in utilitarianism as one of the main conditions for happiness. Utilitarianism differs from traditional hedonistic theories in that it speaks about the public good, including how to increase it

social institutions must work, while classical hedonism largely viewed the path to happiness in terms of lifestyle preferences.

One important criticism of utilitarianism is that the happiness of the many can be more effectively secured at the expense of the few. Even if we take into account all the restrictions that have been formulated in connection with this objection, for example, that along with the utilitarian principle other rules must be followed, that all proposed norms of behavior must undergo a procedure of universalization in the sense that everyone must agree to them accept (rule utilitarianism), this remark is not completely removed. Not all social life can fit into rules. In addition, when they are accepted, everyone does not expect to find themselves in such a critical situation when it is their interests that will need to be sacrificed.

In contemporary ethical discussions, the utilitarian approach is often seen as appropriate for addressing issues of public morality, in contrast to traditional ethics, which is often characterized as an ethic of individual improvement. The utilitarian approach seeks to resolve issues in the interests of the majority and assumes that such solutions, in principle, allow for some minimal evil.

Of course, the task of, for example, politics is precisely to help increase the public good. At the same time, the interests of everyone cannot be taken into account to the same extent. For example, economic modernization often requires the destruction of the traditional way of life of some social groups. However, in the future, this turns out to be justified for the members of these groups themselves, although they, most likely, will not support such a policy.

However, utilitarian theory cannot be applied to all aspects of the organization of life and the public sphere. Most people have an understanding that some basic human rights should be understood in an absolute sense, as values that are not directly related to the issue of social

social good. They must be respected even when this does not lead to an increase in public goods.

However, despite some obvious principles following from common sense, our moral intuitions, many years of practice of the existence of society in the sense of the survival of those groups that adhered to these principles, in theoretical terms the question always remains relevant, when exactly can we adhere to utilitarian principles, and when - no.

The big question in modern ethics is whether morality itself is not destroyed if behavior is oriented towards some standard expressed, say, in professional code behavior.

Exploring the problem of modern morality, A. A. Guseinov notes that it has undergone significant changes compared to traditional morality. The essence of these changes is formulated in a brief thesis that the relationship between morality and civilization seems to change places. If earlier civilization was subject to moral criticism, now, on the contrary, civilization acts as a critic. Indeed, changes in the understanding of what is moral and what is not, what is acceptable in our behavior and what is considered reprehensible, are happening with incredible speed. Many moral researchers have pointed this out. In this case, the question arises: is there anything stable in morality at all, what moral concept can we accept to confirm the truth of our moral judgments?

A. A. Guseinov notes that the specificity of modern morality has become the expansion of the morally neutral zone, the desire for liberation from ideological justifications and, in many respects, from the complex associated with developed motivation and the search for individual solutions. Instead, institutional ethics is being developed, that is, the ethics of rules developed for certain social systems. “Each of. social practices turn out to be more effective the less they depend on personal connections and, what seems particularly paradoxical, on individual moral motivation” [Guseinov 2002: 119]. This does not mean that morality as such loses its meaning. It’s just that “morality moves

from the level of motives of behavior to the level of consciously set and collectively developed general frameworks and rules according to which the corresponding activity takes place” [Guseinov 2002: 121]. This process expresses the development of institutional ethics that characterizes post-traditional society. A. A. Guseinov does not say that institutional morality completely replaces virtue ethics, which is associated with developed individual motivation and a focus on individual improvement. He only draws attention to the fact that the ratio of the two components present in morality and previously is changing noticeably in the sense of the role they play in modern society. “The ethics of virtues, associated primarily with the motives of behavior, retains important (perhaps even increasing) importance in the field of personal relationships and in all situations that have a pronounced personal, individualized character, that is, generally speaking, in areas of personal presence. In systemic (socially functional, professionally tough) behavior it is complemented by institutional ethics” [Ibid: 123].

We can agree that the noted changes are associated with a change in the share of moral components identified by A. A. Guseinov. The expansion of the significance of the public life of society and the complication of the very nature of public relations undoubtedly leads to the need for the codification of morality and the creation of special institutions that monitor the implementation of codes in a formal sense.

However, I do not think that the sphere of what is morally neutral is expanding in modern society. For example, even in economics, traditionally considered as a sphere far from morality, where the desire to establish private interest dominates (this is how A. Smith viewed economic relations), the morality of modern society is increasingly gaining its position.

In his study on issues of trust, F. Fukuyama showed that large corporations historically arose precisely in societies with high level trust, that is, in the USA,

Japan and Germany. They were later joined by South Korea, where large corporations arose largely due to state intervention in the economy, but were also associated with the peculiarities of national identity. However, not only the development of large corporations, in which people’s trust, manifested in production connections between individual links, leads to a reduction in costs legal registration contractual relations, but the development of network structures that meet the information society is also based on trust. “It is no coincidence that it was the Americans, with their penchant for public behavior, who were the first to create a modern corporation in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, and the Japanese who were the first to create a network organization in the 20th century” [Fukuyama 2006: 55]. How, then, can one deny the role of morality in economics?

Numerous professional and corporate codes do not eliminate individual motivation. If this were so, man would simply act as a moral automaton. Many standards of corporate ethics are formulated in the form of positive and recommendatory requirements. But then their implementation necessarily requires the activity of the individual.

Let's take, for example, the following group of norms of the code of PR activities formulated by A. Page: “Fulfill your duty as a public relations specialist as if the well-being of your entire company depends on it. Corporate relations is a management function. None corporate strategy cannot be implemented without taking into account its possible impact on the public. A professional in the field of public relations is the creator of company policy, able to perform a wide range of activities related to corporate communications" [cit. from: Scott et al. 2001: 204].

It is clear that norms formulated in this form require professionalism, and professionalism cannot be achieved without subjective motivation, without virtue, which precisely shows a person’s path to some standard of perfection.

In the public sphere, we constantly encounter situations where a person is responsible not only for the fact that he did not do something

bad, morally condemnable, but also for the fact that he did not fulfill what was provided for by him professional responsibilities. Therefore the requirements professional competence, official compliance become the most important requirements of public morality.

Thus, the development of institutional ethics does not limit the necessity of existence and does not narrow the scope of virtue ethics. In my view, virtue ethics itself permeates institutional morality. Their interaction is carried out on the principle of complementarity, and not mutual exclusion. I believe that the importance of virtue ethics in modern society is expanding precisely in connection with the increasing diversity of moral relations, their extension to such relationships between people that were previously considered morally neutral. This forces many researchers (E. Anscombe, F. Foote, A. MacIntyre) to talk about the need to revive virtue ethics.

In business communications, personal qualities such as the ability to work with other people, the ability to understand their characteristics and even the emotional states of the moment become of fundamental importance. This turns out to be important both for relationships with one's colleagues and for communications between professionals belonging to different organizations.

Exploring the question of the manifestation of a person’s emotional abilities in business communications, D. Goleman, referring to P. Drucker, notes: “At the end of the 20th century, a third of the American workforce consisted of knowledge processors, that is, people whose activity is to increase the value of information , whether they are market analysts, theorists or computer programmers. Peter Drucker, the renowned business scholar who coined the term “knowledge processor,” points out that the expertise of such workers is limited to narrow specializations and that their productivity depends on the extent to which their efforts, as part of an organizational team, are coordinated with the work of others: theorists do not have relationships with publishers, and computer programmers do not distribute software. Although people

have always worked together, Drucker notes, when processing knowledge, teams, and not an individual, become a working unit" [Goleman 2009: 253].

Despite the fact that in modern ethics, of course, subordination to a standard becomes important and the institutionalization of morality takes place, informal relationships do not lose their importance. They necessarily accompany network interactions, because network communication presupposes the free association of people, the free choice of who you want to communicate with, and the search for like-minded people, including in solving business problems.

“Informal networks are especially important for solving unexpected problems. A formal organization is created to easily cope with expected difficulties, reports one study of such networks. “But when unforeseen problems arise, the informal organization comes into play. Its complex web of social connections is formed every time colleagues communicate and strengthens over time, turning into surprisingly strong networks” [Ibid: 257-258].

Without such strong networks, it is difficult to imagine the development of science and business, because despite the fact that business organizations strive to preserve their know-how, they are still interested in learning about new fundamental discoveries of science and the possibilities of new technologies. The modern world, by the way, suffers from the fact that many people in it strive to hide knowledge. In the first half of the 20th century. More fundamental discoveries of a practical nature were made than in the first half of the 21st century. But if anything can counter the tendency to hide knowledge in the modern world, it is informal connections.

“...There are at least three types of communication networks - who talks to whom, expert networks that unite those people who are asked for advice, and trust networks” [Goleman 2009: 258]. For the development of business, science, and decision-making in politics, expert networks are, of course, of fundamental importance. Experts are professionals in their field

areas that constantly communicate with each other and therefore have a level of development modern science or are specialists in specific areas of economics, regional studies, ethnography, etc. It is not so important how they do their work, for money or not, it is important that such people exist. And they wouldn’t exist if they assessed every step they took only from the point of view of the possibility of making a profit, if they never communicated with their colleagues just like that, without a second thought about some benefit. Otherwise, they simply would not be communicated with and they would be excluded from the informal community that is being formed in this field of knowledge or other areas of culture. Consequently, there is inevitably an ethical attitude present here, and it is precisely this attitude that belongs to the sphere of virtue ethics.

A standard is a requirement for professional qualifications, a requirement for a degree of personal excellence that corresponds to this standard. But the path to this very perfection has its own characteristics for each person; it is connected with the efforts of his will, with overcoming everything that distracts him from the corresponding professional development, and morality certainly cannot be eliminated from this process. In a number of cases, subordinating one’s behavior to a standard requires special motivation aimed at limiting excessive manifestations of one’s own individuality, especially when this leads to arrogance and borders on violation job descriptions, traffic rules, etc.

Modern ethics is certainly faced with a rather difficult situation in which many traditional moral values have been revised. Traditions, which previously were largely seen as the basis of the original moral principles, often turned out to be destroyed. They have lost their importance due to global processes developing in society and the rapid pace of change in production, its reorientation towards mass consumption. As a result, a situation arose in which opposing moral principles appeared as equally valid, equally deducible from reason. This, according to

to you A. MacIntyre, led to the fact that rational arguments in morality mainly began to be used to prove those theses that the one who presented them previously already had. The category of good, traditional for ethics, turned out to be, as it were, taken beyond the boundaries of morality, and the latter began to develop mainly as an ethics of rules, and those that can be accepted, despite the different life ideas of each individual person. This made the topic of human rights extremely popular and led to new attempts to build ethics as a theory of justice. One such attempt is presented in the well-known book by J. Rawls, “A Theory of Justice.”

Another important step, representing a reaction to the modern situation, was an attempt to understand morality in a constructive way, to present it as an endless discourse (communication and those communicating, taken in an inextricable unity), aimed at developing solutions acceptable to all its participants. This is developed in the works of K. O. Apel, J. Habermas, R. Alexi and others. The fundamental position of discourse ethics is the rejection of the strategy of reward and punishment as a means of controlling some people by others. Instead, it is proposed to search for agreement, justification and approval in public life of such principles that all parties interested in communication are ready to accept. The same applies to the strategy of making political decisions. A distinctive feature of discourse ethics is also the assertion that the foundations of morality cannot be derived from the reasoning of an individual. There is no need to guess the interests of others. They are openly presented and discussed in discourse along with a rational justification for the necessary forms of communication and other acceptable for all conditions of social life.

In modern ethics, there is certainly a distinction between different principles, such as the principles of liberalism and communitarianism.

Liberalism proceeds from the idea of protecting human rights, reserving to him the right to determine the path to his own happiness, taking this issue beyond the boundaries of theoretical ethics. From a liberal point of view

In general, there is no basis to say that one way of life brings more happiness than another. When determining basic human rights, they proceed from obvious values: living is better than dying, living in abundance is better than living in poverty, every person strives for recognition of his merits by others, the desire for self-affirmation is natural for a person, etc.

The communitarian point of view, opposite to liberalism, proceeds from the fact that a person’s life without connections with a certain community is impossible. On this basis, the ideas of ancient virtue ethics are being revived in modern society.

Classical liberal concepts consider the functions of the state in a very limited way, reducing them mainly to the protection of human rights, the protection of his property, taking questions about life preferences, normative programs, and happiness beyond the scope of morality. Accordingly, they deny the task of searching for the ideal of moral development of the individual; in fact, the problem of the goals of human spiritual activity is not considered. Even if all this is recognized as a significant fact of life, it is not considered as an area of influence of morality on human behavior. On the contrary, communitarian ethics says that the highest moral manifestations cannot be understood without a person’s connection with the life of a certain community.

The position of liberalism is attractive because it allows one to accept general moral rules without striving for the unification of cultural life different nations, allowing for all diversity individual differences. However, with the utmost expansion of the concept of human rights, theoretical thought encounters some barriers. For example, if there are no grounds for preferring one way of life to another, if a person himself chooses how to build his own life, his right to be recognized, to assert his dignity in the eyes of other people, is essentially meaningless. It is clear that achievements are always assessed by some community that has specific goals of activity, confirmed by accepted values. But then communitarian, not liberal, principles work, and they turn out to be built-in

into the very values of liberalism. The liberal point of view faces problems when resolving such moral issues as the question of the admissibility of prostitution, suicide, euthanasia, abortion, because if a person is the master of his body, he, logically, can do whatever he wants with it.

In my opinion, to resolve the above-mentioned contradictions, modern ethics needs to expand the basis of its reasoning. It can no longer rely on the individual’s ideas about his moral life, on the operations that he can perform with his mind. Integration with the entire store of human knowledge, with the natural sciences, modern ideas about the brain, and the process of formation of human consciousness is required.

Here we can reason as follows. It is generally accepted that human consciousness is formed gradually, in the process of its development in childhood. During this formation, a person masters a language that is fixed in the culture of a given society. He uses many cultural symbols that constitute his personality. It is no coincidence that P. Florensky said that culture is an environment that nourishes personality. But then the consciousness of an individual cannot be recognized exclusively as his personal property? Accordingly, the human body, which is a unique carrier of socially conditioned consciousness, cannot be recognized as personal property. Thus, liberal approaches to this problem may well be adjusted from the standpoint of communitarianism.

Modern society also needs a new look at the problem of human dignity. Only on the basis of ideas about personal dignity can a degree of trust corresponding to modern production be ensured, because creative work, as already mentioned, is difficult to control externally. The system of traditional morality, still operating in some societies (for example, the work ethic based on Confucianism in Japan), is gradually losing its significance in connection with the process of development of human individuality and the destruction of his ties with local communities. This can only be countered

a sense of personal dignity and a desire for recognition at the universal level of communication (real, virtual, or even just ideally believed to be possible).

But for this we need to rethink the problem of solidarity. By and large, solidarity is a way of uniting different layers of society into a whole and uniting these layers themselves with the whole. This does not mean that society should be solidary in the sense that some should live at the expense of others, that someone can count on constant help from society. But this means that society must represent a single organism that is capable of assessing the contribution of its members to the common good not only from the point of view of their remuneration, but above all in terms of the criteria for determining and approving their dignity.

In conclusion, we can say that the variety of positions presented in modern ethics is not its drawback, but only means that when deciding on moral motivation and moral duties, it is necessary to combine various principles. How to do this is a matter of social practice. This is mainly the sphere of politics, the sphere of social management. As for ethics, its task is to show the advantages and disadvantages of reasoning built on the basis of one or another principle, to determine possible scope its application and necessary restrictions when transferring to some other area.

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