Обоснование морали: уточнение одной из задач этической теории

Abstract

The paper deals with borders between different tasks of the ethical theory such as defining, explaining, justifying morality, and clarifying its normative content. The focus of the study is justification of morality, i.e. developing the argumentation that can persuade a rational agent to accept moral requirements and to carry them out. The justification of morality uses as its premise some universal human needs or traits and establishesthe essential tie between them and theprincipled fulfillment of moral duty. The fact that everyone has these needs or traits should convince a rational moral skeptic to abandon her skepticism. The immediate subjects of the analysis are 1) precedents of the unreflecting confusion of justification and three other tasks of ethics and 2) conscious efforts to make the scientific explanation of morality a basis of justification. The author supposes that definitions of morality and its evolutionary, psychological, sociological explanations, no matter how neat and sophisticated they are, can not provide a ‘grip’ on a rational agent. At the same time, clarifications of the general normative content of morality also can not justify it because they presuppose that this ‘grip’ is already in place. In this regard, such conceptions of justification as ‘evolutionary’, ‘psychological’, ‘sociological’, ‘utilitarian’, and even ‘contractual’ are impossible. The author also shows that efforts of some theoreticians to base their justifications on the fact that human beings are constituted to be altruistic by evolution (R. Richards) or carrying out moral norms has an enormous beneficial effect on society (R. Campbell, A.V. Rasin) are not very successful. The real justuficatory work in these cases is done not by the appeal to biological or sociological facts but by traditional arguments – the benefit of an agent or the self-evidence of intuitions