The relevance of the ethical. How is a new ethics possible?

Abstract

The article provides an ethical examination of the conformity of universal moral values to the moral practice of the modern consumer society, represented by the conceptual metaphor “era of emptiness”, reflecting the meaning of crisis/ anomie of the controlling function of basic virtues and ethical rationalism as a way of justifying and translating them. The consumer society is viewed as a stage/form of global capitalism, the defining characteristic of which is militant individual and group egoism, destroying the social community of people, generating ethical dilemmas that reflect the basic conflicts of our time. The need to resolve these conflicts is determined by the implementation of an ethical turn in theory and moral practice, the essence of which is focusing on the emotional-volitional sphere of human life as the basis of moral action. The essential characteristic of the ethical turn is the formation of applied ethics, the penetration of ethical discourse into the methodology of sciences from economics to biology and medicine, into the practice of professional communities and organizations.

The study used a transdisciplinary methodology based on the principles of consistency, evolutionism, historicism, dialectics and general scientific methods. On the basis of the analysis, the directions of development of applied ethics, the possibility of using its tools in situations of moral choice are determined.

References

(in Russian)