The Category of Good Faith in Modern Russian Civil Law

Abstract

The paper considers the main approaches to understanding the essence of the category of good faith in modern civil law of the Russian Federation. The emphasis is placed on the problem of the lack of a unified approach to understanding this category in modern civil law science. The author analyzes the historical course of the development and formation of good faith: it takes its origins from the category of bona fides of Roman private law, which clearly had a moral significance. The conclusion is formulated about the borrowing of such a meaning by the modern category of conscientiousness. Explaining the provisions of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on the category of good faith, the Plenum of the Supreme Court applied a broad interpretation and determined that its key feature is the coordination of its interests with the interests of other subjects of civil turnover. The paper examines the approaches of various scientists to understanding the category in question. Thus, according to E. E. Bogdanova, conscientiousness is a purely moral category and can be assessed only from the standpoint of the rules of morality. E. A. Sukhanov’s approach, on the contrary, considers good faith as the condition of a person who is unaware of facts entailing certain legal consequences and defines this category as «ethically indifferent». The position of I. B. Novitsky, who for the first time divided conscientiousness into objective and subjective categories, is noteworthy. Objective conscientiousness acts as an external measure of civil legal relations, while subjective conscientiousness is a person’s ignorance of circumstances important to the law. The author concludes on the flexibility of the category of good faith due to its ambiguous and ambivalent nature.