Morality concept. Андрей Тихомиров
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Morality is a rather complex phenomenon. Consideration of various facets of this phenomenon will be carried out throughout the course. Now we will try to give the very first, largely preliminary concept of morality in order to have some initial positions for the analysis of subsequent issues.
In everyday life, and sometimes in journalism, in popular literature, morality is understood as a set of rules, norms of behavior that regulate and direct people's actions. But such a definition reveals the specifics of morality, because law, sanitation requirements, safety regulations, etc. can be characterized in the same way. Therefore, first of all it is necessary to highlight the specifics of moral norms. The peculiarity of morality lies in the fact that its prescriptions are universal, universal in nature and are applicable in a variety of life situations. Almost everywhere where a person lives and acts. The latter cannot be said, for example, about the norms of law, the competence of which does not include a fairly wide range of actions (for example, being late for a lecture, tactlessness, etc.). Secondly, moral norms are based on the authority of public opinion and on the moral beliefs of an individual. It should be noted that there are quite a lot of moral norms: from the simplest, requiring delicate treatment of others to norms, extremely generalized, norms-principles – respect your elders, do not kill, do not steal, etc.
The Essence of morality
It should be emphasized that it is the highest values: goodness, justice, love that fill our daily life with fullness and spirituality, with a special meaning. An individual, with limited aspirations, and even a criminal can be polite. But only the person who measures his actions and thoughts with the highest values is able to lead a full-blooded, highly moral life. What is spirituality, which has been talked about a lot lately? Perhaps this problem was most clearly posed by Christianity, which, as a rule, speaks of a three-part human structure: body, soul and spirit. The soul often "serves" the body, is focused on earthly joys, the joys of communication with nature, other people (soulfulness). The spirit is always directed to God, to the Highest. In a true believer, religious preachers believe, the spirit dominates both the soul and the body. If the arguments of theologians are "translated" into secular language, then spirituality should be understood as a person's desire to correlate his finite existence in time and space with Eternity, to go beyond the boundaries of his being. It is these aspirations that fill moral life with high meaning, and morality itself is taken out of the framework of simplified concepts, and protects it from being reduced to a set of simple rules of behavior.
Morality does not suddenly appear immediately in a "ready-made", modern form. She has gone through a rather long, difficult, one might say, painful path of development from the most primitive norms and ideas to the highest aspirations of modern preachers of holiness, purity. To trace the path of the development of morality, at least in the most general terms, is very important for understanding its essence. But, as it turns out, when solving the problem of the origin of morality, researchers face great difficulties. And this is not accidental, because in this case, an exit to the problem of the essence, or rather the Mystery, of the person himself is inevitable.
Concepts of the origin of morality
But the understanding of the person himself and, consequently, of morality itself depends not only on the achievements of various sciences, but also on the ideological positions of the ethicist himself. And therefore there are quite numerous views on this problem. Let's focus on the most, in our opinion, typical and most common.
First of all, let us consider the religious interpretation of the problem of the origin of morality.
Kant once remarked that the moral law opens up to me a life independent of living nature and even of the whole sensually perceived world. It seems that such ideas have been inherent in people since ancient times, when the rules and norms of communication between people were considered as the establishment of higher beings (spirits, later gods). The latter also encouraged virtuous behavior and punished vices. The fact that this opinion was widely spread is evidenced by the fact that even those whose religiosity was sometimes questioned adhered to it. Thus, the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus (460-370 BC) argued that the gods give people all good things both in ancient times and now. According to him, only those people are kind to the gods who hate injustice. Similar judgments are not difficult to find in many other thinkers of antiquity.
Christian theologians traditionally talk about the divine nature of morality. The individual receives it both in the form of a "natural moral law" (internal law) and in the form of a revealed (external) law. The moral law, as the theologians believe, is something given to us, given though together with our nature, but not by itself. Thus, in the words of the religious philosopher S.L. Frank, any religion is reduced to the consciousness of the cosmic, supernatural significance of the highest values," to the desire to "bring human life closer to the supernatural and absolute beginning" (Pavlovsky N.Yu. Ethics, Moscow, 1999, p. 59).
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