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Ethics in modern foreign philosophy. Modern Ethics Features of professional ethics

18.08.2023

There are lines of morality that no one is allowed to cross. This is especially true of human health and personal tragedies. But, alas, in our world with its market relations, the anticipation of money destroys all moral foundations. Terrible proof of this were the photographs of the helpless Oleg Tabakov in the hospital, which circled the entire Internet. This act of the unfortunate journalist was sharply criticized by the musician Alexander Rosenbaum and other artists.

As you know, a few days ago, people's favorite Oleg Pavlovich was hospitalized. Friends of the 82-year-old actor and doctors say that the condition is serious. An operation was performed, after which the artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov was placed in intensive care. One of the Russian TV channels decided to secretly check the health of the artist. What came of it, the editors will tell "So simple!". We will also tell you about cyberethics, which you simply need to know about in our digital world.

Modern ethics

The journalist made his way to the intensive care unit to the bed of the helpless Oleg Pavlovich Tabakov. He photographed both the artist, wrapped in the wires of the devices, and his vital signs, and then he let it all out on the Internet. When this horror caught the eye of Alexander Rosenbaum, the musician could not contain his indignation. He also asked the Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent to contact him to express his point of view on such filming.

“I was on tour when they sent me these shots. I immediately called TV presenter Elena Malysheva and said that this was a disaster. What is happening in our lives and with our conscience? It's just beyond good and evil! We have fought for many years to ensure that patients can be visited in intensive care. Allowed. This is good.

But some person walked by with a phone and filmed everything: the actor himself, and even the monitor, on which Oleg Pavlovich's life parameters are visible. Blaming healthcare workers is wrong. Bad people, to put it mildly, those who exposed these shots, hung them on the Internet, and gave them on television.

When Princess Diana was in a fatal accident, no publication published pictures of her torn body. And there were a lot of photographers there. The fact that Tabakov was shown in this form is, from the point of view of humanity, just a crime. Something needs to be done so that this does not happen in nature.

I remind you once again that we should not blame the medical institutions here, which, according to the law, open the doors for the relatives of the patient. And those who publish such photos should be blamed. A great man, a people's favorite in the most difficult condition, and in such a form, at such a time ... This is beyond human understanding.

We fully agree that such antics of journalists are inhumane. After all, this is a personal tragedy of the artist and his family, and not the property of the public. And in general, there is such a thing as cyberethics - a philosophical area of ethics that studies human behavior on the Internet and on information portals in order to develop certain rules for using them. In many countries, it is given great importance and controlled by specialized bodies.

Cyberethics examines whether it is legal to broadcast personal information about other people on the Internet, such as current location, whether users need to be protected from false information, who owns digital data (music, movies, books, web pages) and what users are entitled to do with them, and also whether access to the Internet is a basic right for everyone.

Availability, censorship and filtering of information raise many ethical questions related to cyberethics. The existence of these issues continues to challenge our understanding of privacy and secrecy, and affects our participation in society. Cyberethics is based on the Code of Fair Use of Information. These requirements were introduced by the US Department of Health and Human Services back in 1973.

It is very important to respect yourself and others, as well as observe ethics both professional and any other. Yes, we have the right to freedom of speech and access to information. But our rights are limited where we violate others. You need to understand that there are things that are absolutely not intended for making money. You never know what will happen to you or your loved ones.

Modern ethics is faced with a rather difficult situation in which many traditional moral values have been revised. Traditions, in which the basis of initial moral principles was seen in many respects, often turned out to be destroyed. They have lost their significance in connection with the 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 justified, equally derivable from reason. This, according to A. McIntyre, led to the fact that rational arguments in morality were mainly used to prove the theses that those who cited these arguments already had in advance.

This, on the one hand, led to an anti-normative turn in ethics, expressed in the desire to proclaim an individual a full-fledged and self-sufficient subject of moral requirements, to lay on him the entire burden of responsibility for independently made decisions. The anti-normative tendency is represented in the ideas of F. Nietzsche, in existentialism, in postmodern philosophy. On the other hand, there was a desire to limit the area of ethics to a rather narrow range of issues related to the formulation of such rules of conduct that can be accepted by people with different life orientations, with different understanding of the goals of human existence, the ideals of self-improvement. As a result, the category of good, traditional for ethics, turned out to be, as it were, taken out of the bounds of morality, and the latter began to develop mainly as an ethics of rules. In line with this trend, the theme of human rights is being further developed, new attempts are being made to build ethics as a theory of justice. One such attempt is presented in the book by J. Rawls "The Theory of Justice".

New scientific discoveries and new technologies gave a powerful boost to the development of applied ethics. In the XX century. many new professional codes of morality were developed, business ethics, bioethics, the ethics of a lawyer, a media worker, etc. were developed. Scientists, doctors, philosophers began to discuss such problems as organ transplantation, euthanasia, the creation of transgenic animals, human cloning.

Man, to a much greater extent than before, felt his responsibility for the development of all life on Earth and began to discuss these problems not only from the point of view of his own survival interests, but also from the point of view of recognizing the intrinsic value of the fact of life, the fact of existence as such (Schweitzer, moral realism).

An important step, representing a reaction to the current situation in the development of society, was an attempt to understand morality in a constructive way, to present it as an endless discourse in its continuation, 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 ethics of discourse is directed against antinormativity, it tries to develop common guidelines that can unite people in the fight against global threats facing humanity.

The undoubted achievement of modern ethics was the identification of the weaknesses of the utilitarian theory, the formulation of the thesis that some basic human rights should be understood precisely in the absolute sense, as values that are not directly related to the question of the public good. They must be observed even when it does not lead to an increase in public goods.

One of the problems that remains as relevant in modern ethics as in the ethics of past years is the problem of substantiating the initial moral principle, the search for an answer to the question of what can be the basis of morality, whether moral judgments can be considered in as true or false, respectively - is it possible to specify any value criterion for determining this? A rather influential group of philosophers denies the possibility of considering normative judgments as those that can be considered true or false. These are, first of all, philosophers who develop the approach of logical positivism in ethics. They believe that so-called descriptive (descriptive) judgments have nothing to do with normative (prescriptive) judgments. The latter express, from their point of view, only the will of the speaker and therefore, unlike judgments of the first type, they cannot be evaluated in terms of logical truth or falsehood. One of the classic variants of this approach was the so-called emotivism (A. Ayer). Emotivists believe that moral judgments do not have any truth, but simply convey the emotions of the speaker. These emotions affect the listener in terms of forming his desire to take the side of the speaker, caused by emotional resonance. Other philosophers of this group generally abandon the task of finding the original meaning of moral judgments and put forward as the goal of theoretical ethics only a logical analysis of the connection between individual judgments, aimed at achieving their consistency (R. Hear, R. Bandt). Nevertheless, even analytical philosophers, who declared the analysis of the logical connection of moral judgments as the main task of theoretical ethics, still usually proceed from the fact that the judgments themselves have some basis. They can be based on historical intuitions, on the rational desires of individual individuals, but this already goes beyond the competence of theoretical ethics as a science.

A number of authors note the formalism of such a position and seek to soften it somehow. So V. Franken, R. Holmes say that our very initial understanding of morality will also determine whether some judgments contradict others or not. R. Holmes believes that the introduction of a specific value position in the definition of morality is unlawful. However, he allows for "the possibility of including some real content (for example, a reference to a public good) and an idea of the sources of morality." Such a position presupposes going beyond the limits of the logical analysis of moral statements, but despite the desire to overcome formalism (Holmes himself calls his position and the position of V. Frankena substantialist), it still remains too abstract. Explaining why the individual nevertheless behaves as a moral subject, R. Holmes says: “The very interest that prompts the individual to adhere to a normal and orderly life should also prompt him to create and maintain the conditions under which such a life is possible.” Probably, no one will object that such a definition (and at the same time the justification of morality) is reasonable. But it leaves many questions: for example, what does a normal and orderly life really consist of (what desires can and should be encouraged, and which should be limited), to what extent an individual is really interested in maintaining the general conditions of a normal life, why, let's say, sacrifice your life for the sake of your homeland, if you yourself don't see its prosperity anyway (a question asked by Lorenzo Valla)? Apparently, such questions give rise to the desire of some thinkers not only to point out the limited possibilities of ethical theory, but also to completely abandon the procedure for substantiating morality. A. Schopenhauer first expressed the idea that the rational justification of morality undermines the fundamental nature of its principles. This position has some support in modern Russian ethics.

Other philosophers believe that the procedure for substantiating morality still has a positive value, the foundations of morality can be found in reasonable self-limitation of interests, in historical tradition, common sense, corrected by scientific thinking.

In order to give a positive answer to the question about the prospects for the justification of morality, it is necessary, first of all, to distinguish between the principles of the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtues. In Christian ethics, which can be called the ethics of duty, of course, there is an idea of morality as the highest absolute value. The priority of the moral motive implies the same attitude towards different people, regardless of their achievements in practical life. This is the ethic of strict limitations and universal love. One of the ways to substantiate it is an attempt to derive morality from a person's ability to universalize his behavior, the idea of what would happen if everyone acted the same way as I am going to do. This attempt was most developed in Kantian ethics and continues in modern ethical discussions. However, in contrast to Kant's approach, in modern ethics self-interest is not rigidly opposed to moral faculty, and universalization is not seen as something that creates moral faculty from the mind itself, but simply as a control procedure used to test various expedient rules of behavior against their common acceptability.

However, such an idea of morality, in which it is considered, first of all, as a means of controlling behavior, carried out from the point of view of not allowing violations of the dignity of other people, not grossly trampling on their interests, that is, not using another person only as a means for realizing one's own interest (which in a rough form can be expressed in extreme forms of exploitation, slavery, zombification in someone's political interests through the use of dirty political technologies) - turns out to be insufficient. There is a need to consider morality more broadly, in connection with its influence on the quality of the performance of all those types of social activities in which a person is actually involved. In this case, it again becomes necessary to talk about virtues in the ancient tradition, that is, in connection with a sign of perfection in the performance of a certain social function. The difference between the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtues is very important, because the principles on which these types of moral theory are based turn out to be contradictory to a certain extent, and they have a different degree of categoricalness. The ethics of duty gravitates towards an absolute form of expression of its principles. In it, a person is always considered as the highest value, all people are equal in their dignity, regardless of their practical achievements.

These achievements themselves turn out to be insignificant when compared with eternity, God, and that is why a person necessarily occupies the position of a “slave” in such ethics. If all slaves are before God, the real difference between the slave and the master turns out to be insignificant. Such an affirmation looks like a form of affirmation of human dignity, despite the fact that a person seems to voluntarily take on the role of a slave here, the role of a lower being, relying in everything on the grace of a deity. But, as already mentioned, such a statement of the equal dignity of all people in the absolute sense is not enough to morally encourage their practical social activity. In the ethics of virtues, a person, as it were, lays claim to the divine. Already in Aristotle, in his highest intellectual virtues, he becomes like a deity.

This means that the ethics of the virtues allows for different degrees of perfection, and not just perfection in the ability to control one’s thoughts, overcome the craving for sin (a task that is also set in the ethics of duty), but also perfection in the ability to perform the social function that a person undertakes to perform. . This introduces relativity into the moral assessment of what a person is as a person, i.e., in the ethics of virtues, a different moral attitude towards different people is allowed, because their dignity in this type of ethics depends on the specific character traits of people and their achievements in practical life. . Moral qualities are correlated here with various social abilities and appear as very differentiated.

Fundamentally different types of moral motivation are associated with the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtues.

In cases where the moral motive manifests itself most clearly, when it does not merge with other social motives of activity, the external situation serves as an incentive for the beginning of moral activity. At the same time, behavior is fundamentally different from that which develops on the basis of the usual sequence: need-interest-goal. For example, if a person rushes to save a drowning man, he does this not because he has previously experienced some emotional stress, similar to, say, a feeling of hunger, but simply because he understands or intuitively feels that the subsequent life with a sense of unfulfilled duty will represent for him torment. Thus, behavior is based here on the anticipation of strong negative emotions associated with the idea of a violation of a moral requirement and the desire to avoid them. However, the need to perform such selfless actions, in which the features of the ethics of duty are most manifest, is relatively rare. Revealing the essence of the moral motive, it is necessary to explain not only the fear of torment due to unfulfilled duty or remorse, but also the positive direction of long-term activity of behavior, which inevitably manifests itself when it comes to one's own good. It is clear that the rationale for the need for such behavior is carried out not in some extraordinary circumstances, and for its determination, not an episodic, but a long-term goal is needed. Such a goal can be realized only in connection with the general ideas of the individual about the happiness of life, about the whole nature of his relationships with other people.

Is it possible to reduce morality only to the restrictions that follow from the rule of universalization, to behavior based on reason, freed from emotions that interfere with sober reasoning? Certainly not. It has been known since the time of Aristotle that without emotion there is no moral action.

But if strictly defined emotions of compassion, love, remorse of conscience are manifested in the ethics of duty, in the ethics of virtues the realization of moral qualities is accompanied by numerous positive emotions of a non-moral nature. This happens because there is a combination of moral and other pragmatic motives of being. A person, performing positive moral actions in accordance with his virtues of character, experiences positive emotional states. But positive motivation in this case is introduced into a morally approved action not from some special moral, but from all the higher social needs of the individual. At the same time, the orientation of behavior towards moral values enhances emotional self-awareness in the process of satisfying non-moral needs. For example, the joy of creativity in socially significant activities is higher than the joy of creativity in a simple game, because in the first case, a person sees in the moral criteria of society a confirmation of the real complexity, sometimes even the uniqueness of the tasks he solves. This means the enrichment of some motives of activity by others. Considering such a combination and enrichment of some motives of behavior by others, it is quite possible to explain why a person has a personal interest in being moral, that is, being moral not only for society, but also for himself.

In the ethics of duty, the issue is more complicated. By virtue of the fact that a person is taken here regardless of his social functions, the good acquires an absolute character and causes the theoretician to desire to present it as an initial and rationally indefinable category for building the entire ethical system.

The absolute, indeed, cannot be excluded from the sphere of morality and cannot be ignored by theoretical thought that wants to free a person from the burden of phenomena that are incomprehensible to him and not always pleasant for him. In practical terms, proper behavior implies a mechanism of conscience, which is cultivated as a reaction imposed by society on an individual to a violation of moral requirements. In the manifestation of a strong negative reaction of the subconscious to the assumption of a violation of the requirements of morality, in essence, something absolute is already contained. But in critical periods of the development of society, when mass sacrificial behavior is required, automatic reactions of the subconscious and remorse alone are not enough. From the point of view of common sense and the theory based on it, it is very difficult to explain why it is necessary to give one's life for others. But then it is very difficult to give a personal meaning to such a sacrificial act only on the basis of a scientific explanation of the fact that this is necessary, say, for the survival of the family. However, the practice of social life requires such actions, and, in this sense, produces the need to strengthen moral motives aimed at this kind of behavior, say, at the expense of the idea of God, the hope for a posthumous reward, etc.

Thus, the rather popular absolutist approach in ethics is in many ways an expression of the practical need to strengthen the moral motives of behavior and a reflection of the fact that morality really exists, despite the fact that, from the point of view of common sense, a person seems to be unable to act against his own interest. But the prevalence of absolutist ideas in ethics, the assertions that the first principle of morality cannot be substantiated, rather testify not to the impotence of the theory, but to the imperfection of the society in which we live. The creation of a political organization that excludes wars and the solution of nutrition problems based on new energy and technology, as seen, for example, by Vernadsky (transition to autotrophic humanity associated with the production of artificial protein), will make it possible to humanize social life to such an extent that the ethics of duty with its universalism and strict prohibitions on the use of man as a means will actually become unnecessary due to the specific political and legal guarantees of the existence of man and all other living beings. In the ethics of virtues, the necessity of orienting personal motives of activity towards moral values can be justified without appealing to abstract metaphysical entities, without the illusory doubling of the world necessary to give moral motives the status of being of absolute significance. This is one of the manifestations of real humanism, since it removes the alienation caused by the fact that external, incomprehensible principles of behavior are imposed on a person.

What has been said, however, does not mean that the ethics of duty becomes unnecessary as such. It is just that its scope is shrinking, and the moral principles developed within the theoretical approaches of the ethics of duty are becoming important for the development of the rules of law, in particular, in substantiating the concept of human rights. In modern ethics, the approaches developed in the ethics of duty, attempts to derive morality from a person’s ability to mentally universalize his behavior, are most of all used to defend the ideas of liberalism, the basis of which is the desire to create a society in which an individual could satisfy his interest in the most qualitative way, not conflicting with the interests of others.

Virtue ethics correlates with communitarian approaches, in which it is believed that personal happiness is impossible without making concern for society the subject of one's own aspirations, one's personal desires. The ethics of duty, on the contrary, serves as the basis for the development of liberal thought, the development of general rules acceptable to all, independent of individual life orientations. Communitarists say that the subject of morality should be not only the general rules of behavior, but also the standards of excellence for everyone in the type of activity that he actually performs. They draw attention to the connection of morality with a certain local cultural tradition, arguing that without such a connection, morality will simply disappear, and human society will disintegrate.

It seems that in order to solve the urgent problems of modern ethics, it is necessary to combine different principles, including - to look for ways to combine the absolute principles of the ethics of duty and the relative principles of the ethics of virtues, the ideology of liberalism and communitarianism. Arguing from the standpoint of the priority of an individual, it would be very difficult, for example, to explain the duty to future generations, to understand the natural desire of each person to preserve a good memory of himself among his descendants.

A.A. Huseynov. Ethics and morality in the modern world

The topic of these notes is formulated as if we know what "ethics and morals" are, and we know what the "modern world" is. And the task is only to establish a correlation between them, to determine what changes ethics and morality are undergoing in the modern world and how the modern world itself looks in the light of the requirements of ethics and morality. In fact, not everything is so simple. And not only because of the ambiguity of the concepts of ethics and morality - ambiguity, which is familiar and even to some extent characterizes the essence of these phenomena themselves, their special role in culture. The concept of the modern world, modernity, has also become uncertain. For example, if earlier (say, 500 or more years ago) changes that overturned the daily life of people occurred in periods much longer than the lifetime of individuals and human generations, and therefore people were not very worried about the question of what modernity is and where it begins , then today such changes occur in terms that are much shorter than the life of individual individuals and generations, and the latter do not have time to keep up with modernity. As soon as they get used to modernity, they discover that postmodernity has begun, and then postpostmodernity ... The question of modernity has recently become a subject of discussion in the sciences for which this concept is of paramount importance, primarily in history and political science. Yes, and within the framework of other sciences, the need to formulate their own understanding of modernity is maturing. I would like to recall one passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that the good, considered from the point of view of timeliness, will be different in different spheres of life and sciences - in military affairs, medicine, gymnastics, etc.

Ethics and morality have their own chronotope, their own modernity, which does not coincide with what is modernity, for example, for art, urban planning, transport, etc. Within the framework of ethics, the chronotope is also different depending on whether we are talking about specific social mores or about general moral principles. Morals are linked to outward forms of life and can change quickly, over decades. Thus, the nature of the relationship between generations has changed before our eyes. Moral foundations keep the stability of the century and millennium. For L.N. Tolstoy, for example, ethical-religious modernity covered the entire vast period of time from the moment when mankind, through the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed the truth of non-resistance to evil, to that indefinite future when this truth will become an everyday habit.

Under the modern world, I will mean that stage (type, formation) of the development of society, which is characterized by the transition from relations of personal dependence to relations of material dependence. This approximately corresponds to what Spengler called civilization (as opposed to culture), Western sociologists (W. Rostow and others) - industrial society (as opposed to traditional), Marxists - capitalism (as opposed to feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of society) . The question that interests me is the following: do ethics and morality retain their effectiveness at a new stage (in the modern world), in the form in which they were formed in the depths of ancient culture and the Judeo-Christian religion, were theoretically comprehended and sanctioned in the classical philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.

Can ethics be trusted?

Public opinion, both at the level of everyday consciousness and at the level of persons having explicit or implicit powers to speak on behalf of society, recognizes the high (one might even say, paramount) importance of morality. And at the same time it is indifferent to ethics or even ignores it as a science. For example, in recent years we have seen many cases when bankers, journalists, deputies, and other professional groups tried to comprehend the moral canons of their business behavior, draw up appropriate codes of ethics, and, it seems, each time they managed without graduates in the field of ethics. It turns out that no one needs ethics, except for those who want to study the same ethics. At least this is true of theoretical ethics. Why is this happening? The question is all the more relevant and dramatic because, in such a formulation, it does not arise before representatives of other fields of knowledge studying human behavior (psychologists, political scientists, etc.), which are in demand by society and have their own practical areas of professional activity.

When thinking about why in our scientific time real moral life proceeds without the direct participation of the science of ethics, one should keep in mind a number of general considerations related to the special role of philosophy in culture, in particular with the completely unique circumstance that the practicality of philosophy is rooted in its accentuated impracticality, self-sufficiency. This applies especially to moral philosophy, since the highest institution of morality is an individual and therefore ethics directly appeals to its self-consciousness, rational will. Morality is the instance of the sovereignty of the individual as a socially active being. Even Socrates drew attention to the fact that there are teachers of various sciences and arts, but there is no teacher of virtue. This fact is not accidental, it expresses the essence of the matter. Philosophical ethics has always participated in real moral life, including in the educational process, so indirectly that such participation has always been assumed, but it was difficult to trace it even in hindsight. Nevertheless, subjective trust in her existed. We know from history the story of a young man who went from one wise man to another, desiring to know the most important truth, which could guide his whole life and which would be so brief that it could be learned standing on one leg, until he heard from Khilela rule, which later received the name of the golden one. We know that Aristophanes ridiculed the ethical lessons of Socrates, and Schiller - Kant, even J. Moore became the hero of satirical plays. All this was an expression of interest and a form of assimilation of what the moral philosophers were saying. Today there is nothing like it. Why? There are at least two additional circumstances that explain the distancing from ethics of those who practically reflect on moral problems. These are changes: a) the subject of ethics and b) the real mechanisms of the functioning of morality in society.

Can morality be trusted?

After Kant, the disposition of ethics in relation to morality as its subject changed. From the theory of morality, it has become a critique of morality.

Classical ethics took the evidence of moral consciousness, as they say, at face value and saw its task in substantiating the morality preassigned to it and finding a more perfect formulation of its requirements. Aristotle's definition of virtue as the middle was a continuation and completion of the demand for measure, which was rooted in the ancient Greek consciousness. Medieval Christian ethics, both in essence and in subjective attitudes, was a commentary on evangelical morality. The starting point and essential foundation of Kant's ethics is the conviction of moral consciousness that its law is absolutely necessary. The situation has changed significantly since the middle of the 19th century. Marx and Nietzsche, independently of each other, from different theoretical positions and from different historical perspectives, come to the same conclusion, according to which morality, in the form in which it presents itself, is a complete deceit, hypocrisy, Tartuffe. According to Marx, morality is an illusory, transformed form of social consciousness, designed to cover up the immorality of real life, to give a false outlet to the social indignation of the masses. It serves the interests of the ruling exploiting classes. Therefore, working people do not need a theory of morality, but to free themselves from its sweet intoxication. And the only position worthy of a theoretician in relation to morality is its criticism, exposure. Just as the task of physicians is to eliminate diseases, so the task of the philosopher is to overcome morality as a kind of social disease. Communists, as Marx and Engels said, do not preach any morality, they reduce it to interests, overcome it, deny it. Nietzsche saw morality as an expression of a slave psychology - a way by which the lower classes manage to put on a good face in a bad game and pass off their defeat as a victory. She is the embodiment of a weak will, the self-aggrandizement of this weakness, the product of ressentiment, self-poisoning of the soul. Morality humiliates a person, and the task of a philosopher is to break through on the other side of good and evil, to become in this sense a superman. I am not going to analyze the ethical views of Marx and Nietzsche, nor to compare them. I want to say only one thing: both of them stood on the position of a radical denial of morality (although for Marx such a denial was only one of the minor fragments of his philosophical theory, and for Nietzsche it was the central point of philosophizing). Although Kant wrote the Critique of Practical Reason, Marx and Nietzsche were the first to give a real scientific critique of practical reason, if we understand by criticism the penetration of the deceptive appearance of consciousness, the revelation of its hidden and concealed meaning. Now the theory of morality could not but be at the same time its critical exposure. This is how ethics began to understand its tasks, although never later on their formulation was so sharp and passionate as that of Marx and Nietzsche. Even academically respectable analytic ethics is nothing more than a critique of the language of morality, its unfounded ambitions and pretensions.

Although ethics convincingly showed that morality does not say what it says, that the unconditional categorical nature of its requirements cannot be justified in any way, hangs in the air, although it cultivated a suspiciously wary attitude towards moral statements, especially moral self-certifications, no less morality in all its illusory and unreasonable categoricalness has not gone away. Ethical criticism of morality does not cancel morality itself, just as heliocentric astronomy did not cancel the appearance that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Morality continues to function in all its "falsity", "alienation", "hypocrisy", etc., just as it functioned before the ethical revelations. In one of the interviews, the correspondent, embarrassed by B. Russell's ethical skepticism, asks the latter: "Do you at least agree that some actions are immoral?" Russell replies, "I wouldn't like to use that word." Despite what Lord Russell thinks, people nevertheless continue to use the word "immoral" and some other, much stronger and more dangerous words. Just as on desktop calendars, as if to spite Copernicus, every day the hours of sunrise and sunset are indicated, so people in everyday life (especially parents, teachers, rulers and other dignitaries) continue to preach morality in defiance of Marx, Nietzsche, Russell.

Society, assuming that ethics speaks in its name, in its relationship with morality finds itself in the position of a husband who is forced to live with his wife, whom he had previously convicted of treason. Both of them have no choice but to forget or pretend to have forgotten about the previous revelations and betrayals. Thus, to the extent that society appeals to people, it seems to forget about philosophical ethics, which considers morality unworthy of being appealed to. This way of behavior is quite natural, just as the actions of an ostrich are natural and understandable, which, in moments of danger, hides its head in the sand, leaving its body on the surface in the hope that it will be mistaken for something else. It can be assumed that the above-mentioned disregard for ethics is an unfortunate way to get rid of the contradiction between the ethical "head" of morality and its social body.

Where is the place of morality in the modern world?

The transition from a predominant apology of morality to its primary criticism was not just due 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 a new European civilization with its unprecedented scientific, technological, industrial and economic progress. This shift, which radically changed the whole picture of historical life, not only marked a new place for morality in society, but was itself largely the result of moral changes.

Morality traditionally acted and was understood as a set of virtues, which were summed up in the image of a perfect person, or as a set of norms of behavior that set the perfect organization of social life. These were two interrelated aspects of morality, passing into each other - subjective, personal and objectified, objectively deployed. It was believed that the good for the individual and the good for the state (society) are one and the same. In both cases, morality was understood as the concreteness of individually responsible behavior, the path to happiness. This, strictly speaking, is the specific objectivity of European ethics. If it is possible to single out the main theoretical question, which at the same time constituted the main pathos of ethics, then it consists in the following: what is the free, individually responsible activity of a person, which he can give a perfect virtuous appearance, direct to achieve his own good, what are its boundaries and content. It is this kind of activity in which a person, remaining a sovereign master, combines perfection with happiness, and was called morality. She was considered the most worthy, was 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, have come to the conclusion that good cannot be defined except through identity with oneself. Society and social (cultural) life in all the richness of its manifestations were considered the arena of morality (and this is essential!) it was assumed that, in contrast to nature and in opposition to it, the entire area of common life mediated by consciousness (knowledge, reason), including politics, 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 related to the second nature, self-created by man, and social philosophy was called moral philosophy, according to tradition, it still sometimes retains this name to this day. The implementation by the sophists of the distinction between nature and culture was of fundamental importance for the formation and development of ethics. Culture was distinguished according to an ethical (moral) criterion (culture, according to the sophists, is the sphere of the arbitrary, it includes those laws and customs by which people, at their discretion, are guided 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 originally, by definition, included in the subject of ethics (it was precisely this understanding of ethics that was embodied in the well-known three-part division of philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, which was formed at the Platonic Academy, according to which everything that did not belong to nature belonged to ethics) .

Such a broad understanding of the subject of ethics was a fairly adequate understanding of the historical experience of an era when social relations took the form of personal connections and dependencies, when, consequently, the personal qualities of individuals, the measure of their morality, virtue were the main supporting structure that held the entire building of civilization. In this regard, we can point out 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 generals, a well-organized peaceful life in the state - on 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 workshops or codes of knightly duels). Marx has a wonderful saying that a windmill produces a society headed by an overlord, and a steam mill a society headed by an industrial capitalist. Denoting with the help of this image the originality of the historical epoch that interests us, I want to say not just that the miller at the windmill is a completely different human type than the miller at the steam mill. This is quite obvious and trivial. My idea is different - the work of a miller, precisely as a miller at a windmill, depended much more on the moral qualities of the miller's personality than the work of a miller as a miller at a steam mill. In the first case, the moral qualities of the miller (well, for example, the fact that 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.

The situation changed dramatically 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 the guild organization to factory production, in politics - from feudal principalities to national states, in the economy - from subsistence farming to market relations, in transport - from draft power to mechanical vehicles, in public communication - from salon conversations to the media, etc.).

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 they are large masses) regardless of their will. Social relations inevitably began to acquire a material character - they were regulated not according to the logic of personal relations and traditions, but according to the logic of the objective environment, the effective functioning of the relevant area of joint activity. The behavior of people as workers was now set not taking into account the totality of spiritual qualities and through a complex network of morally sanctioned norms, but was dictated by functional expediency, and it turned out to be all the more effective, the more it approached the automated, emancipated from individual motives, incoming psychological layers, than more man became a worker. Moreover, human activity as a subjective element of the social system (worker, functionary, doer) not only bracketed moral distinctions 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 activity, showing that one cannot be a good sovereign without being at the same time a moral criminal. A. Smith made a similar discovery in economics. He established that the market leads to the wealth of peoples, but not through the altruism of business 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 water of selfish calculation drowned the sacred awe of religious ecstasy, chivalrous enthusiasm, petty-bourgeois sentimentality). And finally - sociology, which proved that the free, morally motivated actions of individuals (suicide, theft, etc.), considered according to the laws of large numbers as moments of society as a whole, line up in regular rows that 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).

In a word, the modern complexly organized, depersonalized society is characterized by the fact that the totality of the 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 upbringing and determination are of decisive importance, are becoming less and less important. Social mores no longer depend 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 value of a person is determined not only and not so much by his personal moral qualities, but by the moral significance of the total great work in which he participates. Morality becomes predominantly institutional, transforming into applied areas, where ethical competence, if we can talk about ethics here at all, is determined to a decisive extent by professional competence in special areas of activity (business, medicine, etc.). The ethical philosopher in the classical sense becomes redundant.

Has ethics lost its subject?

Ethics, as a traditionally developed area of philosophical knowledge, continues to exist in the usual theoretical space, enclosed between two opposite poles - absolutism and antinormativity. Ethical absolutism proceeds from the idea of morality as an absolute and, in its absoluteness, incomprehensible precondition for the space of rational life; one of its typical extreme cases is moral religion (L.N. Tolstoy, A. Schweitzer). Ethical anti-normativeism sees in morality an expression (as a rule, transformed) of certain interests and relativizes it, its ultimate expression can be considered philosophical and intellectual experiments, called postmodernist. These extremes, like any extremes in general, feed each other, converge with each other: if morality is absolute, then it inevitably follows that any moral statement, insofar as it has a human origin, is filled with a specific, definite and in its certainty limited content, will be relative. , situational and in this sense false; if, on the other hand, there are no absolute (unconditionally binding and universally valid) definitions of morality, then any moral decision will have absolute meaning for the one who makes it. Within this framework there are modern ethical ideas both in Russia (an alternative to the religious-philosophical and socio-historical understanding of morality) and in the West (an alternative to Kantianism and utilitarianism).

Absolutism and anti-normativeism in their modern versions, of course, differ from their classical counterparts - primarily in their excess, exaggeration. Modern absolutism (unlike even Stoic or Kantian) has lost touch with social mores and recognizes nothing but the selfless determination of the moral person. Only the absoluteness of moral choice, and no legality! It is significant in this respect that L.N. Tolstoy and A. Schweitzer oppose morality to civilization, in general they refuse civilization a moral sanction. Supporters of anti-normativism, genetically related and essentially continuing the eudemonistic-utilitarian tradition in ethics, were strongly influenced by the great immoralists of the 19th century, but, unlike the latter, who denied morality in the context of a supra-moral perspective, they do not set the task of overcoming morality, they simply reject it. . They do not have their own “free individuality”, like K. Marx, or a superman, like Nietzsche. Not only do they not have their own super-morality, they do not even have post-morality. In fact, such philosophical and ethical super-dissidence turns into complete intellectual surrender to circumstances, as happened, for example, with R. Rorty, who justified the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 by referring to the fact that the “good guys” fought the “bad guys” there. Despite all the features of absolutism and antinormativity in modern ethics, we are nevertheless talking about traditional mental schemes. They represent a reflection on a certain type of social relations, which is characterized by internal inconsistency (alienation) between the private and the general, the individual and the genus, the individual and society.

Whether this contradiction retains its fundamental nature today is the question that we must answer, reflecting on what is happening with ethics and morality in the modern world. Is the social (human) reality preserved today, the comprehension of which was the classical image of morality, or, in other words, is not the classical ethics presented in our works, textbooks, the ethics of yesterday? Where in modern society, which has become mass in its direct cultural design, and institutionalized and deeply organized in its driving forces, where are niches of individual freedom, zones of morally responsible behavior located in this ordered sociological cosmos? To be more specific and professionally accurate, the question can be reformulated as follows: isn't it time to take a more critical look at the legacy of critical philosophy and question the definitions of morality as unselfishness, unconditional duty, universally valid requirements, etc.? And can this be done in such a way as not to abandon the idea of morality and not to replace the game of life with its beaded imitation?

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The study of human behavior and their relationship with each other was carried out by ancient philosophers. Even then, there was such a thing as ethos ("ethos" in ancient Greek), meaning living together in a house. Later, they began to designate a stable phenomenon or feature, for example, character, custom.

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

History of Ethics

Already 2,500 years ago, great philosophers identified the main features of a person’s character, his temperament and spiritual qualities, which they called ethical virtues. Cicero, having familiarized himself 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 fact that a separate discipline stood out in it - ethics. The subject (definition) studied by this science is morality and morality. For quite a long time, these categories were given the same meaning, 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 has constantly changed its meaning and content. What was inherent in 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, which is commonly called "pre-ethics".

One of the brightest representatives of that time can be called Homer, whose heroes had a set of positive and negative qualities. But the general concept of which actions are virtues and which are not, he has not yet formed. Neither the Odyssey nor the Iliad have an instructive character, but are simply a story 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 the 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 elders (Chilon);
avoid untruth (Cleobulus);
glory to the gods, and honor to parents (Solon);
observe the measure (Thales);
subdue anger (Chilon);
licentiousness 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 tasks of which is the study of a person and his qualities, was only in its infancy during this period.

Sophists and ancient sages

From 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 trends were formed that paid great attention to the problems of man, his spiritual and moral qualities.

The most significant at that time was the philosophy of ancient Greece, represented by two directions:

Immoralists and sophists who denied the creation of mandatory moral requirements 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 every nation in 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 the science of morality, and Epicurus. They believed that the basis of virtue is the harmony between reason and emotions. In their opinion, it was not given by the gods, which means that it is a tool that allows you to separate good deeds from evil ones.

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

ethical, that is, associated with disposition 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 the virtues in general and in particular, and the object of study is man. It was he who introduced into the rim 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 that they make a person serene and happy with everything.

The Stoics left the deepest trace after Aristotle in the development of ethics. They believed that all the virtues (good and evil) are inherent in a person in the same way as in the surrounding world. The goal of people is to develop in themselves qualities that correlate with good, and to eliminate the evil inclination. The most prominent representatives of the Stoics were Zeno in Greece, Seneca and in 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 a person in the medieval era is the service to God, which was interpreted through the teaching of Christ about love for him.

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

The most famous philosophers of that time are St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. According to the first, the commandments are 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 hell is prepared for the rest. Augustine the Blessed also argued that such a category as evil does not exist in nature. It is performed 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 its connection with a person 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 everything that exists, acting according to its own laws. He believed that in the surrounding world there is no absolute good and evil, 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 finding 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 the moral duty. His first law of morality says: "Act in such a way that you always recognize in yourself and others the rational will not as a means to achieve, but as an end."

The evil inherent in man (selfishness) is the center of all actions and goals. To rise above it, people must show full respect for both their own and other people's 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, the 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 considered from the position of non-multiplication of evil. This side of the ethical perception of the world through the prism of the good was especially well revealed by Leo Tolstoy.

Violence breeds violence and multiplies 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 accuracy as the basic laws of nature, such as gravity.

In our time, many countries have come to understand that the ethics of non-violence 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 to respect any 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 lives by taking someone else's. At the heart of his philosophy is the conscious choice of a person in the direction of protecting life, if the situation allows it, and not thoughtlessly taking it away. Schweitzer considered self-denial, forgiveness and service to people as the main criteria for preventing evil.

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

The concept of morality

Morality (morality) is a socio-cultural phenomenon that forms the fundamental essence of humanity. All activities of people are based on ethical standards recognized in the society in which they live.

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

Ethical and spiritual qualities are brought up from childhood. From theory, due to right actions in relation to others, they become a practical and everyday side of human existence, and their violation is condemned by the public.

Tasks of ethics

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

describes morality from the history of formation in antiquity to the principles and norms inherent in modern society;
characterizes morality from the standpoint of its "proper" and "existing" version;
teaches people the basics, gives knowledge about good and evil, helps to improve themselves when choosing their own understanding of the “right 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 activity of people in numerous spheres of life is very closely connected, therefore the subject of ethics considers and studies its various types:

family ethics deals with the relationship of people in marriage;
business ethics - norms and rules of doing business;
corporate studies relationships in the 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 transplants. As human society continues to evolve, ethics change along with it.

Second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries became a time of severe tests of philosophical doctrines, philosophical and moral principles and social systems themselves for their truth and humanity. On the whole, this epoch became the time of a turning point, which marked the end of the classical and the formation of a new, modern philosophy and ethics. This was expressed in a departure from the basic principles and attitudes characteristic of all classical ethics, or their rethinking in the light of new realities, the emergence of a huge variety of teachings and schools, in changing 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 being and of man himself, capable of consciously reorganizing his life on the basis of rationality, justice and humanity. Everything accidental, inauthentic, unreasonable, unfair, egoistic was considered as temporary characteristics of being, through which, through the progress of science and enlightenment, the development of human consciousness, Mind will make its way.

All classical ethics was permeated with humanistic attitudes, and the differences between currents and schools concerned mainly only the means of substantiating and asserting the ideals of humanism and justice, freedom and human dignity. These ideals were expressed in a categorical form in terms of "human nature", his essence and "appointment" and, ultimately, were of an abstract generalized nature. They, as it were, hung over a separate individual with his uniquely personal fate and random empirical interests, demanding obedience to the rational-universal principle.

In general, it can be said 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 cognition. Individual "renegades" of the historical-philosophical process - skeptics, pessimists, agnostics - only confirmed the general rule with their exclusivity. Morality was conceived as an expression of the true essence of man, his destiny as a rational being.

Further, if in his empirical existence man was far from his vocation, Reason had to discover and formulate the principles of the organization of the world on the basis of humanity, goodness and beauty, and this truth, with its convincing attractiveness, was to inspire people to implement it.

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 subordination of the forces of nature, revealed their complete impotence in the organization 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 for the realization of these claims, or to expose their illusory nature and deliver mankind from vain expectations and hopes.

Least of all, these changes affected Christian ethics, which never focused on the final resolution of the moral problems of man in earthly life, easily fitting the crisis phenomena of human civilization into an apocalyptic vision of this life. The changes that affected religious Christian philosophy, therefore, were expressed, first of all, in the fact that she 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 problems to socio-ethical problems of personality, problems of its moral self-determination.

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

Marxism saw its merit in correctly resolving the issue 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 of material production. With this, Marxism sought to put an end to abstract moralization as a means of changing the world and to move on to understanding morality as a way of spiritual and practical assimilation of reality, the sphere of social consciousness unfolding on the basis of social being.

Morality had to be understood not as a special sphere of the spirit - divine will, the world of ideas, a certain universal Reason - opposed to inert non-spiritual matter, not as an independent area of \u200b\u200bvaluable and proper as opposed to a wretched being, but as a product of social production, the basis of which is the mode of production material wealth.

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, opposed reality from the very beginning and only apparently was derived from it - it was not for nothing that different philosophers derived from the same "human nature" a completely different understanding of his purpose and vocation.

Marxism saw the key to understanding the essence of man not in the way of identifying some abstract general features 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, opposes nature with his material and practical activity, 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 forces".

In this process, a person creates an aggregate objective world of culture, containing in an accumulated form the aggregate comprehensive activity and "essential forces" of mankind, 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 active involvement and development of this universal cultural heritage, which is both a 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 a true socio-historical essence of a person, by joining which a person 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 of social life and the laws of its development, together with the phenomena of consciousness and spiritual life that ensure this process - goals, values, ideals.

Then the moral values, the moral qualities of a person, his virtues and vices will appear not as originally given to him by nature, but as worked out in the process of social development. Natural prerequisites for the emergence of certain needs and abilities, natural factors that affect the nature and content of spiritual processes in a person in the course of the historical process are gradually being 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 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 that proceeds, albeit with the participation of consciously acting individuals, but on the whole, independently 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 but the awareness of being, that is, 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 into its structure, analyzing the forms of activity of social actors.

Through identifying the patterns of development of the mode of production of material goods, the change of socio-economic formations, Marx revealed, as he thought, 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 perceived (reflected and expressed) by morality in its inherent imperative-value form, in the form of developing requirements and values. Their content is historically determined and has an objective character, therefore, it can be revealed not with the help of subjective reflection, but by analyzing the logic of social development.

Thus, ethics gets the opportunity of objective knowledge and substantiation 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 laws of its development and functioning. At the same time, through a comparison and comparison of morality with other types of consciousness and forms of human spiritual experience, ethics is able to identify its specificity, a 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 that it was able to understand and explain the very nature of the errors inherent in them.

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

This fetishism in everyday 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 assertion of the originality and eternity of this state of affairs, its rootedness in the very structure of being, in the imperfection and sinfulness of man himself, as a result of which even the most optimistic enlightenment theories turned out to be powerless utopian projects.

In reality, the eternity of opposition to what is due to being is an illusion, but objectively conditioned. This is the result of an alienated consciousness that is not aware of its own premises and determinants.

Its source is the spontaneous social division of labor and the private property that reinforces it, which split human society, oppose some social groups to 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 privately owned society approves such forms of life activity, the mastery of which presupposes an egoistic attitude towards life. 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 the desire to establish themselves at the expense of others.

Under such conditions, the social essence of a person, breaking through in the sublimely disinterested 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 generally torn off 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 property of being an ideal reproach to the imperfect egoistic life of people, translating real social problems into a plane of moral condemnation, thereby preventing their real resolution.

Therefore, from the point of view of Marxism, philosophical idealism in all manifestations turns out to be identical to the moralizing approach to social life, incapable of actually overcoming the gap between the world of ideal values and reality. No development of education, construction of an ideally reasonable and just society, strengthening of religious faith - none of this is in principle enough 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, the education in a person of fidelity to spiritual values can have an impact on life through individual spiritual self-compulsion, but very limited. In general, moral values, torn off 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 a phenomenon of official morality, which everyone recognizes in words and few people observe in practice.

Only the introduction of social practice into the ethical theory, aimed at transforming social life, 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 fundamentally transforming the system of social relations and thus 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, extremely powerful means were needed to create it, which turned not only idealism upside down, but the whole world: it was recognized that the “weapon of criticism”, which philosophy has traditionally always used, must be decisively replaced by “criticism with a weapon”.

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

The theoretical basis for such a dubious, 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 permissibility and even the necessity of revolutionary violence and dictatorship.

Like primitive cannibals who ate human flesh in full confidence that a stranger is not a person, class morality demanded the destruction of people who did not agree with the historical need to eliminate 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 the enemy, and 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 superfluous to add that both "reactionary" 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 is based on "the struggle for the strengthening and completion of communism."

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

Such a morality was necessary to justify the dictatorship of the revolutionary class, i.e., for a power not bound by any laws, either divine or human, based on open violence, and allegedly necessary for the rational reorganization of social relations and thereby for the transformation of human nature.

It is not surprising that such a conception 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 absolute power over the individual, and he can act relatively independently. But if all the means of production are concentrated in one hand, even if they are representatives of the whole 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 an effective self-developing and self-regulating market production that ensures 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 such a state structure and laws that would protect not some from others and against others, but the interests and rights of an abstract person as an owner in general, even if he had no other property than 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 powerlessness and fear.

Ironically, it was Marx who first, looking back, discovered that the development of capitalism and private property prepared the development of all democratic freedoms, secured the rights and dignity of the abstract human person.

But, peering into the future, he never once thought about the question that if this is so, will not all these values disappear along with the destruction of private property?

It is natural that the practical test of Marxist theory was in Russia - a poor, backward feudal country with centuries-old autocratic-despotic and patriarchal-communal traditions, where private property has never existed for the vast majority of the population, where they have never heard of any rights, except for those that are 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 its 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, an 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 wheels and cogs of the state machine.

The abolition of private property and its replacement by "public", but in reality state, carried out on behalf of historical necessity and in the interests of the oppressed and exploited people, turned into an unprecedented concentration of state power in the hands of the party and state apparatus. This led to even greater oppression and exploitation of man by the state.

The 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 rude 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 property competition and rationalize production, in fact 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 suggestion. Ultimately, such production has created for the bulk of the population a way of life that does not even remotely resemble a civilized level.

The result of such a forced planting of equality and brotherhood, solidarity and collectivism, consciousness and selflessness was the actual equality of all in lack of rights and poverty, complete indifference and even disgust of a person to socially useful work, the public good and collectivist values in general.

An attempt to overcome idealistic moralization in relation to reality by introducing practice into ethical theory turned into even more utopianism, when the most grandiose and brilliant plans of the classics turned out to be terrible caricatures of the ideals of a worthy 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 conceptions of morality - the socio-historical one, in full accordance with the recognition of practice as the criterion of truth, it is now busy rethinking its premises, content and conclusions.

The naturalistic ethics of the end of the 19th century tried to maintain fidelity to the traditions of scientific character, which, unlike its past varieties, received, as it seemed to its creators, a reliable natural scientific foundation in the form of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Thus, evolutionary ethics had to scientifically overcome the speculative nature of the previous arguments 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 adapting organisms to a changing environment, those of them who managed to acquire useful traits transmitted by inheritance survive and reproduce. Those who failed to adapt perish in the struggle for existence.

This is how natural selection and accumulation of properties and qualities of living organisms valuable for life take place, 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 a person, like all animal organisms, adapts to the environment and his actions are aimed at satisfying his needs, and thereby satisfying the needs of the whole society and its organic evolution.

He represented social evolution as a long and gradual process of adapting 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 whole 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 that which leads to a state of social harmony and solidarity among members of society.

Therefore, any attempt to transform or break social relations was regarded by him as pathological and unnatural, violating the smooth course of natural evolution. No social alchemy, Spencer believed, can turn lead morals into gold. Only time and the natural course of events can reject the anti-social elements incapable of living in this society and the mores they are bearers of. Only in this way is social progress possible.

Kropotkin, on the other hand, believed that the basic law of nature and the main factor in organic evolution is the principle of mutual assistance, which contributes to 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 is born the habit of not doing to others what you do not wish for yourself, which means the 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 a person and his ability to sacrifice himself 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 propositions was a necessary measure aimed at protecting naturalistic evolutionary ethics from ... no, not opponents, but equally consistent supporters of Darwin's teachings. For the weakness of the naturalistic ethics of the past, when man's inclination to good as well as to evil was deduced from the nature of man, also manifested itself 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 evolution of nature, its main content is the "struggle for existence." The whole life of nature, including plants, animals and man, is nothing else, according to Huxley, as a "bloody fight with 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 that is possible, 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 not known where the "ethical process" comes from, which is certainly opposite to the lessons of the evolution of nature and 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. Public life began to be regarded as an arena of struggle for survival of individuals and social groups, where success is achieved by the strongest and most adapted to the laws of natural selection, distinguished by cruelty and cunning.

Thus, the natural character and insurmountability of social inequality, oppression and exploitation, aggression and violence both in public and private life were sanctioned. The artificial weakening of the struggle for existence under the influence of civilization, culture and traditional "philanthropic" morality leads, in their opinion, to the spread of "inferior" and degenerative individuals and entire social groups, which is why all social troubles 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, 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 its content orientation, it almost coincided with the philosophy of life of F. Nietzsche, which marked the final "reassessment 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 originated as a reaction to the unjustified optimism of classical philosophy with its belief in the reasonableness of the world order and the improvement of society. In reality, 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 by no means contributed to complacent illusions about the progress of reason in history. Mankind is afraid of losing these illusions, with which it is easier to live, but faith in the reasonableness of what is happening and its humanistic orientation can only deepen the crisis from which it cannot get out.

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 ruthless mockery, oblivion of the individual and his personal freedom, turning him into a particle of a general process, subject to natural necessity.

They countered the thesis about the regularity and necessity of the arrangement of the world with the assertion that the world is unreasonable, human knowledge is limited, and it is driven by instinctive life aspirations, blind will, fear and despair from the finiteness, meaninglessness and doom of its own existence.

Undoubtedly, the most prominent 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 the result of his creative talent, the bright, imaginative, catchy and aphoristic style of his works, the conscious rejection of the ponderous "scientific" of official philosophy in favor of his "gay science". But to an incomparably greater extent, his influence was due to the content and ideological orientation of his work.

Nietzsche saw his task precisely in waking up humanity, dispelling its illusions, in which it was sinking ever deeper into a state of crisis and degeneration. This required potent means capable of shocking, 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 delusions rooted not even in the weakness of knowledge but above all in human cowardice!

Many times he calls himself "the first immoralist", a real atheist, "antichrist", "world-historical monster", dynamite, designed to blow up the swamp of established ideas.

Nietzsche strives for ordinary ideas of cultural consciousness, for the "values" of civilization and culture - religion, morality, science, to comprehend the true essence of being - the instinctive desire of life for self-affirmation.

Life is understood by him as a disordered and chaotic deployment of the energy of chaos inherent in being, a stream that is not derived from anywhere and directed nowhere, obeying the madness of the orgiastic principle and completely free from any moral characteristics and evaluations. In ancient culture, Nietzsche considered the ecstasy of the god of wine, the daring revelry and fun of Dionysus to be a symbol of such an understanding of life, symbolizing for a person a sense of strength and power, 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 ups and downs in its deployment, the creation and destruction of life forms, the strengthening and weakening of the instinctive desire for self-realization. On the whole, this is a harsh and merciless struggle of 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 in its essence is appropriation, harm, overcoming the alien and weaker, oppression, severity, the forcible imposition of one's own forms, annexation and ... exploitation."

Exploitation, oppression, violence are therefore not 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 live.

A 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 it surpasses other animals in cunning and foresight, in its ingenuity, is immeasurably inferior to them in another respect. He is incapable of living a completely direct instinctive life, obeying its cruel laws, because under the influence of consciousness and its illusory ideas about its "goals" and "destiny" its life instincts weaken, and he himself turns into a failed, sick beast.

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

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

According to Nietzsche, the decay and degradation of European culture is due to its cornerstone foundations - the Christian morality of philanthropy, the exorbitant ambitions of reason and science, which “deduce” from historical necessity the ideas of social equality, democracy, socialism and, in general, the ideals of the optimal organization of society on the basis 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-decomposition.

It was in the values of Christian morality, the ideals of reason and science that Nietzsche discerned a "fraud of a higher order," which he tirelessly denounced all 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 miserable bearers of the weakened will to live. It is therefore permeated with hatred and aversion to a healthy life, masked by the belief 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 the present life, its sickness and weariness, so that Christianity itself lives by drugging 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 true, the deeper the ideals of self-denial, self-sacrifice, mercy and love for one's neighbor spread.

Such traditional philanthropic 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 spread it to its enslavers, inventing God for this.

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

Nietzsche very subtly plays with the main provisions of Christian morality, revealing its hypocritical and deceitful nature. "Whoever humbles himself wants to be exalted," he corrects Christ's sermon.

He deciphers the demand of selflessness and selflessness, "do not seek profit" as a moral fig leaf for expressing impotence - I no longer know how to find my own benefit.

Unbearable for a weak will consciousness: "I'm 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 because of one's own weakness, because any meaning is better than complete meaninglessness. Dispassion is only the spiritual castration of man, and by undermining the root of human passions, one can only destroy life itself.

Compassion and love for one's neighbor is only the reverse side of painful self-hatred, for these and other virtues are clearly harmful to their owner. They are obviously useful and therefore hypocritically praised precisely by its competitors, who seek to bind their owner with their help. Therefore, concludes Nietzsche, "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.

Essential in morality is, according to Nietzsche, one thing - 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, but for strong and independent people, representing the dominant race, all this becomes superfluous. Nevertheless, they can use this extra means of their dominance over the herd in order to better force it into obedience, without becoming themselves prisoners of poor morality.

For along with this wretched morality, which requires a person to be sacrificed 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 for a reassessment of "eternal values", the rejection of the morality of slaves and the restoration of the rights of life.

This is available only to rulers, strong and "free minds", holders of an invincible will, owning their own measure of values and appointing themselves a measure of respect and contempt for others. They are true aristocrats of the spirit, who do not seek unanimity with others, retain the "pathos of distance" and the habit of "looking down". They retain independence from the dogmas of ordinary morality, are free from its fetters and are disgusted by all moral chatter about duty, selflessness, holiness, because they themselves lay down their own laws.

This "master morality" is the morality of strength and selfishness, which "is the most essential property of a noble soul", by which Nietzsche understood the unshakable belief that a being "like us" must naturally obey and sacrifice himself to other beings.

This morality also has certain duties, but only in relation to their own kind and equals, - in relation to beings of a lower rank, "one can act according to one's discretion ... being on the other side of good and evil." "In every act of a higher man," Nietzsche contemptuously throws in the direction of the average man in the street, "your moral law is violated a hundredfold."

Nietzsche easily and ingeniously deals with the problem of "free will", which plagued the previous ethics. Every will is a manifestation of the instincts of life, and in this sense it is neither free nor rational. We need to talk not about free and not free will, but about a strong will that rules and commands and takes responsibility, and a weak will that only obeys and fulfills. The first is free to the extent that it is strong, and the second is not free in the same sense.

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

Nietzsche dealt with the "scientific" humanism of socialists and democrats from the same positions. "Fanatics of the brotherhood," as he called them, just like Christian morality, ignore the laws of nature, seeking 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 mankind, because a person always develops in struggle and rivalry, and inequality and exploitation are a necessary condition for life.

In the morality of a socialist society, the will of God is replaced by the social benefit derived from history and the common good, which is guarded by the state. At the same time, the interests of the individual mean nothing, why Nietzsche considers socialism as the younger brother of despotism, in which the state seeks to turn a person from an individual into an organ of the collective. A person, of course, tries to resist this, and then state terrorism becomes an obligatory means of planting loyal feelings, consciousness and humility of 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 egalitarian policy, leveling everyone, of course, at the lowest level, as a result of which the democratic form of government is, according to Nietzsche, a form of grinding 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 mankind" 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 means for achieving 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 that do not depend on a person, alienated from him and suppress him, and 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 inner relationship of his "new order" with totalitarian social systems.

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

Dissatisfaction with the state of ethics against the background of the successes of the natural and exact sciences, the development of scientific methodology based on the description, systematization of facts, the setting of 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 the status of scientificity.

The desire to overcome the "bad pluralism" of ethical theories, stemming from the speculative nature of philosophical reasoning about human behavior, about its aspirations and values, its "essence" and from forgetting the basic principles of a truly scientific methodology, led ethics to the transformation from "practical philosophy" into metaethics .

This name meant that ethics began to be regarded as a metatheory, that is, a theory about a theory about why and how ethical theories are built and why they are not able to come to 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 with the general principles of science were understood.

Metaethics was based on the methodology of neopositivism, which seeks to cleanse philosophy of metaphysical speculations 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 deduced from human nature, the will of God, absolute ideas, or even mystical historical necessity, with corresponding practical, i.e. normative, conclusions, however, it strongly objected to these theories claiming to 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 attributing truth to them and demanding their fulfillment.

On this path, it practically removed itself from the 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 definite answers to questions about how to live, what to do, what is the meaning of human life, not realizing that scientific answers to them, common to all and the only true, from the point of view of metaethics does not exist.

The beginning of metaethics is associated with the work of J. Moore, who is credited with exposing the "naturalistic error" of all previous ethics, which caused its scientific failure.

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 about 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 it. 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 every step on the way 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, goodness 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 through an indication of a supersensible reality not given in sensory experience.

Varieties of naturalistic ethics are the ethics of hedonism, utilitarianism, evolutionism, and all others that derive the value and obligatoriness of the good from the natural manifestations of man, which can be revealed by 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 describe the structure of the "world of ideas", "self-deployment of the absolute idea" or even reveal in no experience a given mystical " historical necessity" that can neither be seen nor felt. Moore himself did not bring his reasoning to such conclusions, but they inevitably followed from his concept.

It is clear that metaphysical ethics in no way can claim to be scientific, because it relies primarily on the heated imagination of its creators, which does not allow any experimental verification. However, Moore's thought is deeper. He believes that even if there were experimental means of cognition of superexperimental reality, metaphysical ethics would only share the fate of naturalistic ethics, which falls into the notorious "naturalistic error", which defines good by pointing to some phenomena and properties of reality that a person appreciates, why strives, but which are not at all good in themselves.

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

It is obvious that the good defined in this way is increasingly beginning to resemble that anecdotal good, about which it was said in one epitaph: "Here lies a man who experienced an irresistible craving for good, especially for someone else!"

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 is no need to talk about morality anymore, 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 good, because health characterizes only the normal and energetic state of the organism, but not the direction of its activity. And far from everything that is normal is good, so there are times 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 for goodness from the development of nature, identifying it with the "intensification of life", "the spread of life in breadth and depth", "improvement of 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 effects, and "whether they are good or evil, this theory does not pretend to judge this."

In all attempts to deduce the content of the concept of goodness from the properties of nature, Moore mercilessly reveals the illegal and unconscious endowing of nature with the value content inherent in consciousness, and then supposedly deriving this content with the help of observation and experience.

But then where does this concept of good in consciousness come from, 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 is impossible to define it scientifically, by pointing to something other than good itself, by identifying it with something else that defines good: pleasure, enjoyment, benefit, health, wealth, preservation and strengthening of life, - all this can underlie both good and evil (selfishness, evil will).

Therefore, Moore is forced to admit that good is indefinable by 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 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, because intuition is the same for all people, and the second leaves a person with the 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 for subjectivism, relativism and even irrationalism in the understanding of moral values.

The appearance of Moore was symbolic, because it marked the emergence of a new type of philosopher - not a moralist accuser, but a sober, rational analyst, free from all sorts of prejudices, from the pressure of the authorities of religion, public opinion, even from pseudoscientific considerations. Such a thinker relies only on common sense and logic, and at the same time leaves a person room for value self-determination, without imposing final conclusions on anyone. Under the conditions of the unfolding ideological onslaught on a person, such a philosophy left the intellectual with a rational mindset the possibility of a critical attitude towards the values being imposed and the 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, becomes the only task of ethics striving to be scientific.

Emotivism, in its analysis of moral judgments, came to the conclusion that they do not say 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, proved, or refuted.

Their functions are the expression of the emotions and attitudes of the speaker and the influence on the emotions of others. All moral judgments in general can be represented, according to emotivism, as irrational reactions to a situation. They lack internal structure and can even be folded, replaced by gesture, intonation, or just facial expressions.

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 moral and immoral.

Such odious conclusions and the inability to substantiate the universal validity of moral values served as an 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 are unprovable 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 "Lectures on Ethics".

The purpose of his reasoning is to clarify the characteristics of "good" and in general what is important, valuable, what "makes life worthwhile." In language, people use value or imperative judgments to express this content. What is behind these judgments, whether they have an objective content that can be fixed, compared with the actual state of things and thereby find out their truth or falsity - this is the task for analysis.

First of all, one 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." Saying only the first half, we seem to imply the second.

But is it possible to establish the factual truth of a value judgment, i.e., by reformulating it in such a way that it affirms or denies something? What can be verified, verified by purely empirical means without unnecessary discussions and appeals to God, world reason, "the course of history"? It turns out that in one sense it is possible, but in another it is impossible.

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

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

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

All these characteristics, revealing 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 path, meaning a certain goal - the path will be correct with respect to this goal, which can be verified.

It turns out that "every judgment of relative value is simply a judgment of facts, 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 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 regard to a certain specific goal, which has empirical characteristics and allows for experimental verification.

Instead of the judgments "good tennis player" or "good runner", which evaluate certain qualities in relation to a specific goal, here they say "good person", not meaning a specific goal, but, as it were, appealing to the absolute ideal of a person that does not exist in the empirical world and which, precisely for this reason, admits all sorts of arbitrary speculative interpretations.

The correct path in the ethical, absolute sense means nothing more than the proposition "absolutely correct path", i.e. one that, seeing which, everyone would either follow it, or feel shame if they did not.

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

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 have no such meaning and mean going beyond the boundaries of a language that has a natural meaning.

The conclusion that Wittgenstein draws is fully consistent with neo-positivist philosophy: "Ethics, since it stems from the desire to say something about the original meaning of life, about the absolute good and absolutely valuable, cannot be a science ... But it is nevertheless 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 outside 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 in a scientific way in principle, because such is their nature; they can be accepted or rejected, but it is impossible to determine their truth and preference for one over another.

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

It expressed the point of view of liberal individualism, striving from a rational-critical position to preserve its independence in worldview 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 the scientific solution of moral problems and turned into a theoretical substantiation of subjectivism and relativism in morality. Since morality is the sphere of the mystical and inexpressible, there are no objective criteria for good and evil, and everyone can live as he pleases.

Such a conclusion, although never made by "analyst" philosophers, nevertheless inevitably followed from their theoretical ideas.

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

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

In this regard, metaethics 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 finally discredit the mind and the ability of man and society to conscious improvement.

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

All this contributed to the growth of irrationalist tendencies in philosophy, laid down by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, continued in Freud's psychological concept of man and in the philosophy of existentialism. At the same time, one should not understand the matter in such a way that most philosophers of the 20th century. were mystics who despised rational logic and methodology of knowledge.

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

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

Thus, the onslaught of ethical irrationalism in the XX century. was a natural reaction to the failures of the mind - the "truly scientific" Marxist ethics with its class essence of morality, the "scientific naturalism" of evolutionary ethics leading to social Darwinist conclusions, the conscious self-restraint of metaethics in matters of the scientific substantiation of humanistic ideas. In addition to these concepts, varieties of theories of "reasonable egoism" 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, were widely used.

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

This is already a kind of "new irrationalism" in ethics, which consists not only in the rejection of rational, scientific methodology or the limitation of the ability of the mind in the cognition and justification of morality, and often not even in this 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 being and draws strength and content from the depths of the irrational. With such an 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 unsolvable tasks 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 based on 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, motives and experiences of man, revealing the content of contradictions and conflicts in man himself and his collision with reality.

Using the methods of scientific psychological analysis, he was able to demonstrate with experimental certainty that the conscious motives of a person represent a secondary rationalization of deeper motives over which the person himself has no power 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.

Unlike metaphysical philosophers with their understanding of the conditionality 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 manifestations of neuroses, phobias, perversions, faced with the hidden meaning of slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue, dreams, with the facts of weakening painful symptoms as a result of analytical conversations with patients experiencing a kind of catharsis, purification from speaking, relieving internal stress, he came to an interesting conclusion. Freud concluded that in the human psyche there is an unconscious energy force that presses 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 performs the absurd, and therefore unmotivated actions suggested to him, followed by an attempt to rationally motivate them.

In this way, Freud came to the discovery in human nature of an energy unconscious principle that has an irrational character 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 character of the unconscious by the dominance in psychic energy of the passionate instinctive striving of life for immediate satisfaction, which does not take into account 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 unites the human psyche with the animal psyche, points to the unity of organic life and the animal nature in man. Its content is the desire for self-preservation inherent in all living things - individual and generic.

Both of these desires find their full expression in the sexual instinct, in which the desire for procreation and the strongest 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 deliverance from suffering caused by the tension of undischarged mental energy.

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

But how does the conscious emerge from the unconscious?

It does not arise where vital aspirations find their satisfaction at the initial level of the psyche of a living being, where instinct finds ways of direct 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, colliding with reality, the psychic energy of the unconscious cannot be discharged outside and turns inside the psyche, begins to look for workarounds that compensate for the impossibility of immediate satisfaction.

It is precisely 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 to complicate the mental and real activity of a person. From the energy of the unconscious, forced to look for roundabout ways to satisfaction, 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 is born.

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

Denoting the unconscious by the term "it", and the conscious - "I", Freud considers the first to be the true source of all mental and spiritual life, and the second - 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, as it were, to combine the innate energy of unconscious instinctive aspirations with reality, which does not allow their uncontrolled revelry. It adapts a person's personality to reality, seeking to suppress unconscious instinctive aspirations and inclinations that make a person incapable of life 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 displace, delay the manifestation of the unconscious, which is the true master of a person’s 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 delayed in time, but more reliable and less risky ways to satisfy the latter.

However, in the event of a complete inability to find satisfaction for unconscious instincts, either due to an unfavorable reality or due to a weakening of the "I", the unconscious can throw off all covers and break through in the 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 the substitution of the goals of activity.

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

It is sublimation, that is, the unconscious repression and substitution of sexual instincts, the substitution of the goal of their aspirations and the direction of their strength and energy to non-sexual objects, that lies at the basis of human cultural activity, which forms the whole variety of everyday life.

At the same time, society, seeking to limit the destructive forces contained in the unconscious and strengthen the consciousness of the "I", develops in its development the 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", his modification in the form of "super-I".

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.

In Freud, the superego turns out to be both the result of the sublimation of the unconscious and its further premise. It is generated by the struggle of consciousness with unconscious drives and switching their energy to cultural activities, but it also subjugates and binds a person more and more, imposing on him the 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, as, in fact, the whole civilization and culture, with which society seeks to protect itself from the rampant elements of the unconscious.

Culture, religion, morality grow out of 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 public "super-I", does not come down to expanding the scope of freedom and responsibility of a person, his creative possibilities, but to suppressing himself, his natural desires and aspirations.

The result of such repression is a repressive culture and morality and an oppressed, unhappy individual. As long as a person is alive, he is not able to free himself from the pressure on him of the unconscious, insistently demanding 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, deceit, slander. Human nature remains, according to Freud, selfish and anti-social, and every person in the depths of his soul is an opponent of the culture and morality that restrain him.

However, the presence in a person of the consciousness of "I" and "super-I" helps him to restrain his instincts, displace and block the energy of the unconscious, which, finding no way out and discharge, is concentrated in his subconscious and can at any moment break through with explosions of supposedly causeless aggression and violence. , neuroses, psychoses or sexual perversions.

Man is constantly under pressure from the indomitable force of the unconscious and the force of individual and social consciousness that seeks to restrain it. He feels like a hostage to these forces that are not subject to him and control his fate, and in any case turns out to be unhappy. If instincts win, a person turns out to be a criminal, and if they can be suppressed, a neurotic and psychopath, moving away from unbearable and tearing pressure into an illness.

Relatively normal behavior is 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 the instincts. This is a precarious balance that requires mental tension, 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, discarding the conventions of consciousness and culture, cross all barriers and freely realize their desires, or use the achievements of civilization and culture, constantly bumping into restrictions and prohibitions, feeling depressed, unfree and unhappy. .

Freud pessimistically assessed the possibility of resolving this contradiction of unconscious instinctive aspirations and demands of social organization and rationality, favorable for man and mankind. Sometimes he expressed opinions about the rejection of 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 that he created, through which it is possible to penetrate into the depths of spiritual life, to realize the dangers contained in it.

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

The 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, to demonstrate the dangers arising from it and the possibilities to avoid them, if any.

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

Freud's teaching therefore had the effect of an exploding bomb, largely predetermining the direction 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 its 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 a person, the relationship of a person to social institutions and values began to be used for a grand offensive against this repressive culture and morality and consciousness that oppresses the inner impulses of a person.

In the name of the emancipation and liberation of man, the assertion of individual freedom, self-determination and dignity of an individual, his right to happiness, literature, art, science fell upon 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 get rid of 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 the optimal balance between the unconscious and the requirements 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 most of the cultural figures standing on the positions of Freudianism, the goal 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 prejudice that interferes with life, the deliverance from which allegedly 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, confirms the widest revelry 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 in himself to resist the rampant 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 now overwhelming entire regions, even in the most developed countries?

So far, this question does not have an unambiguous answer, on which the future fate of mankind depends.

Another, without exaggeration, great variety of ethical irrationalism, which had a huge impact on the development of Western culture in the 20th century, was the philosophy of existentialism (existence). Existentialism came up with 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 entities" 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 being, which was based on 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 considered man as a thing among things, sought to impose his schemes on him and subordinate him to his metaphysical constructions.

The 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, being from due.

Such an "essential" interpretation of a person inevitably deprived him of self-determination, freedom and dignity and caused rejection and rejection of all philosophical programs for the reorganization of society and man.

These programs initially turned out to be stillborn not even because cognition turned out to be incapable of comprehending the metaphysics of being and man, but because it always dealt with the "inauthentic" existence of man, while the "genuine" being of man remained elusive for him.

Therefore, it was necessary to turn over the old humanism so that man himself became the basis of metaphysics, the understanding of being as the being 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 is at the same time the 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", that which "is not itself". A person is doomed to feel "drawn into a situation" against his desires and will, and to feel lonely and abandoned in these circumstances not chosen by him, where no one can remove from him the doom to live and act in conditions beyond his control.

Therefore, his position in the world is characterized by uncertainty, a sense of homelessness and disorientation, defenselessness in the face of circumstances. He experiences fear, longing, anxiety, nausea - experiences that are 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 an accidental coincidence, but a manifestation of the essence of human destiny, which appears before one in an accident, catastrophe, betrayal, betrayal, and before the other - in ruin, loss of a loved one, in everyday failures, disappointments, or in front of everyone - in historical cataclysms and disasters. Not a single person can live life without experiencing the feeling when the ground is slipping from under their feet, when there is nothing to rely on and nothing to hope for, when you need to make a decision yourself in a situation of uncertainty, lack of a sign or clue. After all, even their presence does not relieve a person from the need to interpret their meaning and make a decision himself.

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

For man is the only being in the world whose existence precedes the essence, the cause, that which determines it. A person first exists, appears, acts, and only then is he defined, that is, he receives characteristics and definitions. Therefore, human reality is not a "fact", "event", some kind of "solid substance", having 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 fissure, a gap that exists in the lumen 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, striving for the future belong to the structure of his existence. In fact, only death slams the doors, presenting a person as a complete being, having received its completeness and certainty, and therefore, has acquired essence. Therefore, any attempt at an essential interpretation of man, which was what the old humanism was engaged in, is "the burial of us during our lifetime" (Sartre).

It is this openness to the future, inner 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, its authentic existence".

And if determinism dominates in the world of things and objects, 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 causes and factors acting on 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 with objective reasons.

Man is not free from freedom, he is in fact "condemned to be free." Condemned, because he did not create himself initially, and yet 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 the majority of people who have realized their loneliness and abandonment, the lack of any support or reference point in the face of the unknown future, that is, true existence, turns out to be an unbearable burden. After all, freedom requires independence and courage from a person, it implies responsibility for a choice that gives 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 anxiety, which 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, of uncertainty, uncertainty and responsibility due to the dissolution of one's own existence in the "way of existence of others", "in the vain everyday life" of social life.

This is a sphere of impersonal-anonymous existence, where everyone lives not as a unique personality, but "like everyone else", as an averaged and massized unit, whose existence is given, and behavior is scheduled and regulated.

This is the world of social organization, rationality and expediency, where a person takes on a social role and turns into a cog in a machine, an object of mechanical forces acting on him. Therefore, here he does not experience painful uncertainty for his choice and is relieved of responsibility. Here everyone is destined for his role, rules of conduct, vital 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 according to other people's rules, thinks with other people's thoughts and experiences other people's desires, finding in the rejection of their own "self" stability and certainty, liberation from feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

This situation is constantly aggravated due to scientific and technological progress, concentration and socialization of production and all human life. The progress of science and technology unleashed a "devilish onslaught on human existence" (Heidegger), so that the most important feature of recent times has become the striving of man to "where in the name of freedom they liberate from freedom" (Jaspers). However, an attempt to escape from one's freedom and responsibility turns out to be an exacerbation of torment for a person from the loss of his 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, "existent being, dissolved in a preoccupied world, is not itself," existential being turns into inauthentic existence only at the cost of its death.

Heidegger himself associated the return of man to existence with such a hieroglyph of freedom as physical death, the most "fundamental generalization of being." 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, they realize the real value of all social life and its values.

The pathos of existentialism is 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 reorganization of life. For him, it is obvious that any identification of oneself with others - a collective, a class, a party, a nation - although it gives temporary oblivion, the illusion of calmness 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 one's loneliness and abandonment, freedom and responsibility, the meaninglessness and tragedy of one's own existence, gain strength and courage to live and act in the most unfavorable situations of hopelessness and hopelessness.

Existentialism does not get tired 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 preserve your 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 a 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 desires and hopes for a successful outcome of his undertakings, he will fail and fall into despair, because the course of life is not in his power.

It does not depend on a person what situations he can get into, but it entirely depends on him how he will get out of them - breaking down and giving up his self, self-respect and dignity, or preserving the greatness of spirit and dignity even at the cost of physical death. To do this, you only need what is in his power, to arm himself with the consciousness of the inevitability of the tragedy of human existence and the readiness to maintain 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 a man can be destroyed, he can never be defeated as long as he resists. Any resistance, struggle is an internal victory even in the very defeat.

And if cynicism, amoralism, lack of spirituality and greedy prudence grow out of disappointments in morality, humanistic ideals, the possibilities of the mind, then moral stamina turns out to be possible only at the cost of giving up meaningless hopes, from the initial consciousness of the complete hopelessness of any actions and the desire to stand spiritually, to preserve oneself morally.

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

In its most extreme forms, existentialism did not leave a person 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 do not want to be an executioner, then there is nothing left but to consciously always take the side of the victims!

The softer varieties of this teaching left the individual free 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 either society, or the state, or religion, ignoring hypocritical public morality with its calls to serve the good of society, the fatherland, progress, not complaining about fate and not counting on anyone's help. At the same time, this is always a person who has preserved in his soul purity, inner honesty, loyalty to his moral values, the most important of which is human dignity.

He is capable of selfless friendship, love as the only types of spiritual communication, with the help of which one can overcome one's own loneliness and closeness and, as it were, feel the soul of another person, support him in this dangerous world. At the same time, the existential hero is always internally ready for the fact that at any moment everything will end, for parting, for the loss of the most precious thing, 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, it is only thanks to it that one can fill the existence with objective content and meaning, feel one's life is necessary for someone.

And the resolution of this contradiction is in an attempt to learn to live and love with a constant consciousness of fragility, finiteness, insecurity of everything that a person loves, with a 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 initial 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 reliance on at least something, accompanied by moral decline, the spread of lack of spirituality, moral lack of principle and irresponsibility.

However, the fundamentally anti-social position of existentialism does not allow it to find and substantiate objective substantive criteria for a moral position, and it remains on the positions of formalism, subjectivism and ethical relativism.

The only criterion of human dignity here is formal fidelity to one's own ideals, inner sincerity and readiness to act freely and responsibly, without focusing on anything external, objective.

Action without hope of success, readiness for failure, of course, demonstrate the fundamental steadfastness and disinterestedness 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 as on the moral effect. However, the absolutization of this aspect of a person's moral practice deprives him 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 background of the rapid development of science gave rise in the 20th century. a revival of interest in naturalistic concepts of man and morality. If earlier it mainly relied on the data of biology and psychology, now evolutionary ethics seeks to use modern achievements in 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 lies in the idea of rejecting the supernatural and irrational source of moral values, in an effort to find their objective content in "human nature", which is still interpreted in the spirit of reductionism - reducing purely human properties and qualities to natural phenomena, explaining 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 the methods of the natural sciences, especially psychology, physiology, molecular biology, and genetics, to understand social phenomena. It is characteristic of him to identify biological values with moral ones and to clearly exaggerate the role of the natural sciences. It is brought to the point of recognizing the possibility of their influence on the moral nature of a person, 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 such different, as well as contradictory, theories of "human nature" grow.

So, K. Garnet, K. Lamont, A. Edel, T. Clements develop the ideas of humanistic naturalism, seeing in biology only 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 biological concepts of morality by including social factors of "a good human life", "healthy lifestyle" in scientific analysis, but they do not go beyond recognizing the positive or negative influence of social factors on the immutable "human nature", they do not reveal the laws of social development as the true substance of moral life.

Others, first of all, the well-known ethologist K. Lorenz, as well as R. Ardrey, develop social Darwinist motives from the same methodological grounds, insisting on the innate human "endogenous aggressive instincts" and explaining social contradictions and clashes with the original aggressiveness of human nature, inherited them from animals.

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

Indeed, if the humanistic supporters of the creation of the ethics of genetic control seek to help a person become better than his genetic heredity or brain disorders allow him, by influencing these physiological mechanisms of his behavior in order to correct and improve them, then why is this approach not extended 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 embarked on this path, one can gradually extend this "treatment" to an ever increasing number of people whose behavior "does not correspond" to the norms and who, although they are not yet "violators", can clearly become them, because "they do not behave like that". "," they don't dress like that", "they don't talk 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 aim of complete submission, 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, therefore, 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 origins of the moral and immoral behavior of a person in his corporeality and naturalness, he actually removes responsibility for them from social reality, which is the true source of the entire moral life of a person.

The entire history of ethics shows that no matter how differently one interprets morality, it is always understood as something that is beyond the actions of natural factors, that rises above naturalness.

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

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

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