M.S. Solodkaya,

Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences

MORAL AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY OF A MANAGEMENT SUBJECT

Issues of application of the principle of moral responsibility, understood from the standpoint of utilitarianism, are given even more attention on the pages of special publications on business and management issues than issues of justification. At the same time main problem consists in adequately determining the “benefit” of specific actions. For this purpose, the so-called “profit and cost” (or “benefit and cost”) method is mainly used, which is quantitative, since benefits and costs are determined in monetary terms. However, there are values ​​that are difficult to quantify and monetary calculation. The result is often a disparity in valuations due to the overestimation of measurable and quantifiable factors and the neglect of non-quantifiable values.
A similar phenomenon is observed when comparing values ​​in a time perspective: here there is a tendency to exaggerate the values ​​existing in the present and neglect the values ​​of the future. Accordingly, preference is given to exploiting available resources in the present, and the value of preserving them for the future is not taken into account.
The method of calculating profits and costs is also inadequate from the point of view of the ethical principle of justice. As a rule, profits are appropriated predominantly by the most influential and wealthy part of society, and costs are paid by the labor of the poor and excluded from power.
As we see, business pragmatism, even in matters of applying the principle of moral responsibility, has not created adequate means that allow, according to the statement of philosophical pragmatism, to look to the most distant prospects of the future and ensure a reduction in the number of people suffering as a result of certain actions. James's hopes that the "groans of the wounded" will be heard by those who commit wrong actions and will serve as sufficient grounds for correcting their actions are not confirmed by the practice of life. Only the participation of the “deprived” in organized social and political struggle can lead to the fact that they will one day receive more from the pie of common “benefit”.
In fact, all of the positions presented above on the issue of moral responsibility of managers directly address the issue of the relationship between ethical behavior and acceptable earnings. On this occasion, one can give a whole range of statements: from the fact that ethical behavior reduces income, to the assertion that it increases income, through the recognition of the independence of income from compliance (non-compliance) with ethical standards of behavior. For example, proponents of the first of these positions argue “that in general, managers view morality talk as destructive. More precisely, managers are convinced that morality talk threatens ... organizational effectiveness and ... their reputation as energetic, goal-getting people "(19, p. 76). Opponents no less ardently defend a different thesis. They are convinced that “corporate ethics is the key to the strategy of survival and profitability in an era of fierce competition in the global economy” (20, p. 10).
Such statements allow us to conclude that there may really be no direct connection here, or it is still quite difficult to measure it due to the fact that profit depends on a large number of factors. But what raises virtually no objections is that it is long-term achievements (as opposed to short-term profits) that largely depend on the sustainability of the company’s reputation, which, in turn, is characterized by a certain system of values ​​and adherence to ethical principles in the conduct of business (20, p. 76; 10, p. 20).
Unethical behavior increases the risk of businesses because the outcome is unpredictable. As a result of unethical actions of corporations, America annually loses from 40 to 300 billion dollars. The consequences of unethical corporate behavior are clearly reflected in economic sanctions carried out by the US government. Companies such as Chrysler, General Dynamic, Boston Bank, and General Electric have been subject to large fines for unethical behavior. Tightening legislation and bringing lawsuits is what many see as the best barrier against unethical practices in business.
Of course, current legal systems and traditional ethical values ​​in different countries They draw the line between the legal and moral assessment of certain actions in different ways. For example, the situation in which individuals, thanks to confidential internal information about an impending increase in the price of shares, buy them in advance at a cheaper price, is assessed differently in different countries. In the US and UK, such actions are punishable by law. In Switzerland, for example, these actions are subject only to moral condemnation. This suggests that the expansion and tightening of legislation in the field of violation of certain norms is by no means accepted by everyone as a kind of universal and constructive method of preventing violations of moral and ethical norms. Therefore, even on pragmatic grounds, moral responsibility cannot be replaced by legal and professional responsibility.
In corporations, people operate within a complex organizational structure, and what seems morally unacceptable on a personal level may be acceptable on an extrapersonal level. Growth and complexity social structure lead to her becoming beyond moral control. The gap between the personal and even group level, where processes occur under the control of specific people, and the organizational level, where there is a clash of various forces, many of which remain anonymous and cannot be controlled, is growing. By exerting all kinds of pressure, large firms regulate prices on the market in accordance with their own interests. Thus, strong organized groups in society function at the expense of less organized groups. "Under the conditions modern market a climate of struggle for equality is created, which is based not on justice, but on the relative power of organized groups" (22, p. 14). To achieve their goals, the administration of large companies can establish personal control over their employees in order to ensure that workers correctly fulfill their responsibilities in this case the moral issue is to what extent the pressure economic structure matched to the needs of individuals. This problem does not have an adequate solution from the standpoint of utilitarianism, since its largest representatives did not consider the interaction of subjects within the framework of complex organizational structures. They also assumed that such structures could be understood within the framework of a set of individual, personal, personal interactions. Therefore, their understanding of responsibility could only be applied to individual action and did not extend to other subjects. The presence, for example, of powerful transnational corporations, which many consider to be the only subjects of economic activity, shows the limitations of the traditional utilitarian understanding of responsibility. This gives grounds for today's representatives of business pragmatism to free managers from personal moral responsibility, since they are not subjects of activity. The corporation and the individual are not commensurate with each other. Therefore, the “benefit” of a corporation always significantly “exceeds the “benefit” of individual individuals. Therefore, moral responsibility should be borne not by individual managers, but by the corporation as a whole.
The Aristotelian ethical tradition presupposes the correlation of the ethos of an individual with the polis of citizens and rootedness in it. The process of personality formation unfolds in the context of traditions that the individual, like other people, accepts. Self-identification of an individual bears the stamp of collective identification, thereby the individual’s life activity is included in more general life relationships. From the point of view of the good, a life that is good for the individual affects the general life forms of society. Anyone who wants to clearly imagine his life as a whole, justify vital value decisions and make sure of self-identity, always acts within the horizon of life history, preparing his own existential project.
How can the moral and ethical responsibility of the subject of management be understood based on this ethical tradition? Firstly, here the individual is responsible for the implementation of his life project within the horizon of the usual ethos, responsible to himself. The fact that the source of responsibility here can only be the individual himself is of fundamental importance. He cannot be replaced here by someone else, be it a person or an authority in whom trust is placed. In this case, the individual acquires the distance necessary for reflection in relation to his own life only in the horizon of life forms in which he participates with others and which, for their part, form the context for very different life projects.
Let us consider as an example the activities of financial managers. Aristotle emphasized the difference that exists between the profit obtained from the production of goods and the profit obtained from the transfer of money in interest. At the same time, he pointed out the unproductivity of purely financial profit and, accordingly, for more low level qualifications that financial activities require compared to industrial ones. He considered the origin of money based on money to be unnatural. Jesus drove usurers out of the temple, Islam banned usury. In England, until the 20th century, representatives of the upper classes avoided banking, leaving this area to foreigners and Jews. The Old Testament prohibits Jews from giving money on interest to their fellow tribesmen, but allows them to carry out similar transactions with foreigners. Thus, financial activity in many countries was not considered moral, and the social recognition of those who became rich by lending money remained in question until the present day. But although the practice of finance has traditionally been subject to moral criticism, finance plays a critical role in modern society in the prosperity of the nation. Therefore, there is a need to smooth out the contradiction between the low ethical image of the activities of financial managers and its high social significance, which is noted, for example, by Harvard University professor Amartya Sen (23).
Unfortunately, public opinion is quite stable in its critical ethical assessments of the activities of financial managers. Thus, according to a survey conducted in 1986 by the New York Times, 55% of citizens did not consider American financial managers to be honest, while 76% associated the lack of ethics in business with a general decline in moral standards (10, p. 4) .
This situation leads to the fact that businessmen themselves are forced to abandon the position of “hard capitalist ethics”, according to which any actions in business are morally justified if they do not contradict the law. This model is being replaced by another type of model, when managers consider themselves morally responsible both to the people who work with them and to everyone who is affected by their activities.
Following the Aristotelian ethical tradition, we are forced to admit that business is only a model public relations, therefore, it cannot be initially immoral, although its mainspring is personal interest. And although Charles Baudelaire considered commerce a satanic activity, the most vile and base form of egoism, the social significance financial activities currently intends to move away from such an ethically negative assessment of this activity.
From the point of view of many researchers, social progress is associated with the development of democratic forms of management of society, which activate personal interest, making it a catalyst social development. The democratic form of governance turns personal interest into the strongest lever of social dynamics, into what in sociology is commonly called social initiatives. Therefore, business, which is admittedly unusually active in activating self-interest, fulfills its social role in the state. It is a tool for unleashing social initiatives, i.e. instrument of democracy.
Thus, business is an institution that is organic to democracy and firmly connected with it for the reproduction of social initiatives in society, ensuring social dynamics. Therefore, management is not so much an economic or even political (due to its connection with democracy) as a socio-philosophical category.
Functioning in society, business outlines a certain value field, which, by definition, must be subject to ethical assessment: whether business as a whole is “good” or not. From this position, business and managers, as one of its most active representatives, bear a moral responsibility precisely for the maintenance and development of social initiatives that contribute to the strengthening of specific values ​​in the form of the values ​​of democracy, which, and this must be especially emphasized, are politicized.
“The West has long come to the conclusion that the instinct for profit must be restrained ethical standards, but since instinct often takes precedence over conscience, society should in every possible way encourage a highly moral approach to business. However, paradoxically, in recent years it has been the desire to succeed in business that has forced managers to think about the ethical side of things. ...The Levi Strauss company, one of the undisputed leaders among the world's clothing manufacturers, recently stopped investing in the economies of Burma and China due to human rights violations in these countries. Levi Strauss says the decision is motivated by concerns for workers. But maybe they simply realized earlier than others that cheap labor ultimately has a negative impact on the quality of products?" (25).
Let us leave the author’s question here without discussion, although, perhaps, in fact, it was this pragmatic reason that contributed to the adoption of this decision. Let us emphasize something else here - the public justification for this decision appeals specifically to the ethical responsibility of business for its actions. And this already registers a certain shift in mass attitudes towards this problem.
Thus, we can state that, regardless of whether they want it or not, managers (corporations) must bear moral responsibility not only from the position of “benefit”, “purposefulness”, i.e. from the position of utilitarian ethics, but also from the position of “good”, which is characteristic of the Aristotelian ethical tradition, which assumes that, realizing his own existential project, the individual correlates it and subordinates it to some broader social project. Managers now have a moral responsibility to maintain the social dynamics inherent in a democratic form of governance.
Let us now move on to the concept of moral responsibility, based on the principles of Kantian ethics, which served as the foundation for the deontological approach to ethics. The deontological approach gives the concept of duty paramount importance. And although the broad deontological approach presented by such a philosopher as Kant does not separate the concept of duty from the consequences associated with it, at the same time, “purely” deontological teachings leave a “gap” between duty (deontological obligation) and its consequences. From the point of view of the deontological approach, usurious activity is seen as a violation of the norm of considering another human being as the highest value. The deontological approach serves as the basis for recognizing this activity as morally unacceptable.
From the very beginning, the consideration of morality was included in the consideration of the opposites “freedom” and “necessity”. Related to this is the existence of three fundamental concepts of law: natural, moral and civil. Kant viewed the will as a practical reason. He distinguished between the moral law of freedom and the natural law of necessity. For Kant, “imputation” separates a person from a thing: a person can perform actions and be imputed for it, while things cannot be imputed for some action. “Imputement, in the moral sense, is a right by which anyone can claim freedom of action, which can then be regarded as a moral action, since he is subject to the law” (26, p. 28).
One can agree, for example, with Habermas, who believes that actually moral position, in contrast to the pragmatic and ethical one, is characterized precisely by the fact that when resolving the question “What should I do?” the individual changes his egocentric position and begins to relate to the interests of other people, trying to impartially resolve possible conflicts.
From a pragmatic point of view, usurious activity can only be assessed in terms of its possible success. From an ethical point of view, it can be assessed on the basis that everyone follows their own interests and such activities play a role important role in society. From a moral point of view, the question is whether all people would want everyone in a similar position to lend money on interest.
Moral commandments are significant regardless of whether their addressee is able or not to carry out what is considered right. The validity claim associated with moral propositions has binding force. Debt, according to Kantian terminology, is an affection of the will through the claim of moral commandments to significance. And that the reasons which support such a claim to significance do not remain inactive is evident from remorse. Guilt is the most accessible indicator of betrayal of duty.
Thus, only a maxim that can claim universality in the perspective of all whom it concerns can be considered a morally binding norm. Based on this, any subject is responsible for violating (or maintaining) this moral norm. The individual is responsible for not ignoring the autonomous will of the Other, be it the disprivileged classes, the oppressed nations, the domesticated women, or the marginalized. Responsibility understood in this way inevitably requires participation in social movements and political struggle, in the organization of those “forms of communication in which the conditions for the rational collective formation of will take the form of an objective formation” (9, p. 30). Naturally, such responsibility is not dictated by legal, professional, or even ethical standards. Thus, a certain responsibility is a consequence of the existence of moral norms themselves.
Can we demand from the subjects of management some special moral responsibility in this sense, or is such responsibility of a universal nature? On the one hand, moral norms are universal and universal, individuals have equal autonomous will, therefore moral responsibility must be individual and universal. On this basis, many defend the thesis that “only responsible citizens can have a responsible government.” But, on the other hand, such a position is not active. It allows governing subjects to avoid personal moral responsibility on the grounds that the people under their management have not yet become such morally responsible people. Therefore, we, agreeing with McKeown (2, p. 24), believe that this thesis should be reformulated: “Responsible government depends on responsible citizens, but people become responsible only by constantly practicing this.” Such a reformulation reverses the attitude. Not people, guided by some motives, should become responsible, and therefore the government formed from them or managers and subjects of management technical systems will need to be responsible. On the contrary, it is the morally responsible subjects of management who must do everything possible so that people become responsible, constantly practicing this, i.e. acting and receiving moral evaluation of their actions. “There is no moral responsibility until there is a society in which a person is accountable for his actions and in which actions are imputed to the individual” (2, p. 28).
Up to this point, we have been talking about moral and ethical responsibility, based on the provisions of classical ethical theories. Despite their previously noted differences, in many ways characteristic features they are one (27, p. 4). Firstly, everything related to the “non-human” world, that which has the basis of “techne” (with the exception of medicine) - ethically neutral in relation to the subject and object of actions. Those. actions with “non-human” things did not constitute the scope of ethics proper. Secondly, only direct interactions between a person and a person, including with oneself, were subject to ethical assessment. Thus, all traditional ethics were anthropocentric. Thirdly, the essence of a person and his basic characteristics were considered unchanged: a person could not be an object of “techne”. Fourthly, the concepts of “good” and “evil” in judgments about actions were established before the action itself and were not subject to change. Fifthly, traditional ethics dealt with cases that arose between people and were repetitive, typical situations of private and public life.
All statements and maxims of traditional ethics demonstrate their limitations by direct reference to action. “Love others as yourself,” “don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you,” “balance your own benefit with the common benefit,” etc. All these ethical universals were constructed as simultaneous and valid during the period of one’s own human life.
These maxims were not scientific or expert knowledge. On the contrary, they were knowledge that would easily suit all people goodwill. Kant argued that “there is no need for science or philosophy to know what a person must do to be honest and good, or to be wise and virtuous” (26).
The modern situation is fundamentally different from those governed by the norms of old ethics. Modern technology has changed the very nature of human actions, changing their scale, goals and results. Technology has challenged humanity. No ethical doctrine has hitherto had to proceed from global scale human existence, take into account the prospect of the distant future or the problem of the survival of the human race.
The role of power and knowledge in morality was very limited, which, according to the German philosopher Hans Jonas, determines the fact that the concept of responsibility does not play any noticeable role in the system moral standards and philosophical and ethical theories of the past (27, p. 123). Nowadays, knowledge as power and authority has a significant impact on social, political and technical action. Therefore, the role of knowledge in morality must change. Knowledge must correspond to the causal dimension of our action.
Thus, traditional ethical systems must be replaced by a new ethics - ethics of responsibility. In this ethics, “the presence of man in the world must become the first axiom from which all other ideas about obligation can be derived.” human behavior" (27, p. 10). A new imperative, corresponding to new types of human actions and addressed to new types of agents of action, should, according to Jonas, begin like this: “Act so that the consequences of your actions are compatible with the durability of human existence” or, in a negative form, “Act so that the consequences of your actions do not destroy the possibility of such a life in the future” (27, p. 11).
The new imperative clearly states that we can only risk our own lives, but not the lives of humanity, and from this, taking into account the significant dependence of the future on today's technological practice, follows the need to cultivate a certain caution, which has not yet been and is not hallmark of the development and use of modern technology.
It is also obvious that the new imperative is more addressed to public policy than to everyday behavior. The Kantian imperative was addressed to individuals and its condition was simultaneity.
Naturally, the question of the need to build a “future-oriented” ethics was raised long before the publication of Jonas’s work. As we noted earlier, W. James also paid attention to this issue, but he did not see anything other than God that would set such an orientation. Later, the American philosopher Fred Polak categorically stated that “responsibility to the future (for the future) is the most basic and primary condition of human responsibility in the present (for the present). This function is considered as fundamental for human behavior as human behavior" (28, p. 100). He gives anthropological, religious, philosophical and psychological reasons for this, although he notes that "all the great philosophers, from Plato to Plotinus and Augustine, from Kant and Hegel to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger , were primarily philosophers of metaphysical time" (28, p. 104). Polak admits that the main difficulty in constructing such responsibility is related to what image the future has and whether it can be rationally obtained. Here the philosopher takes a very optimistic position (all after all, this is only 1957!) and believes that the successes of the natural and social sciences give reason to believe that we will receive an objective image of the future.
The dynamics of technological progress must inevitably lead to expanded responsibility, since the power and scale of our actions, the power of prediction and the ability to assess the consequences of actions quantitatively and qualitatively (expertise) have increased. But what forces should represent the future in the present? Jonas leaves this question to political philosophy, although he claims that this can in no way be a state (27, p. 22).
What grounds does Jonas see for building an ethic of responsibility? Firstly, this is the already mentioned increase in the predictive capabilities of science, although, by and large, they are still weak, especially if the predictions affect long period time. Naturally, we must take into account the uncertainty of predictions, but knowledge of the probability of what might happen seems heuristically satisfactory for the formulation of ethical principles. Secondly, the inviolability of the subject of evolution, which is an ontological basis, and therefore produces a categorical, rather than hypothetical, imperative.
From the point of view of Jonas's ethics of responsibility, the responsibility of politicians is of particular interest. Of course, the politician is not the creator of history; rather, history acts through him. Therefore, one cannot absolutize his responsibility, but one cannot diminish it either. It is the recognition of the moral responsibility of a politician that allows him to sometimes be above the existing law, as pointed out by W. James, Jonas, and others, but at the same time this should protect them from their own self-abasement.
The responsibility of a political figure does not have a specific object fixed by nature. It is more influenced by causal aspects than by predictive factors. The consequences of individual actions are immeasurably confused in the causal “factory” as a whole, which complicates causal analysis already in the present, and this complexity grows exponentially in the future.
However, in essence, the responsibility of a politician cannot be reduced to what he is formally responsible for (i.e., only to legal and professional responsibility). It must be something more. “The responsibility of a politician means demanding the possibility of politics in the future” (27, p. 118).
Any total responsibility with all its partial tasks and individual actions is, first of all, responsibility for preserving the possibility of responsible action in the future. This is a basic principle that should also apply to the responsibility of politicians.
Let us now highlight the meaning of the structural elements of moral responsibility from the set potential states. Subject responsibility here lies with the individual, although there are attempts to extend it to a group and even a social institution. Most researchers defend individual responsibility, citing the following reasons. Even in the case when the individual action of the subject of management cannot be regarded as the cause of some consequence due to the inclusion of this action in joint activities group or social institution, nevertheless, in this case he bears individual moral responsibility due to his own self-determination as a subject of management. Subject responsibility, following the imperative of responsibility, should be the preservation of the possibility of human existence in the future, which in a variety of potential states corresponds to a greater extent to the consequences of an action, although it does not exclude the result. Institution responsibility can be a transcendental entity (for example, God, as in the ethics of Kant, James, etc.), an ideal subject (“future humanity”), an individual and a group (which is considered simply as a collection of individuals). Time responsibility - infinite, continuous, past, present and future. Space responsibility is not localized.
Summarizing our research, we can conclude that there are sufficient philosophical grounds for introducing moral and ethical responsibility of management subjects. Moral and ethical responsibility will be defined differently and have different meanings depending on from the standpoint of which ethical theory (utilitarian ethics, Aristotelian or Kantian ethics) we consider moral and ethical norms. Since all traditional ethical theories were not essentially “future-oriented,” none of them in their pure form can serve as the foundation for building a new ethics - the ethics of responsibility. However, there is relative validity in using all three strands of ethical theory, each of which adds to the issue of responsibility special meaning: pragmatic, ethical or moral, in accordance with the chosen points of view of expediency (usefulness), goodness and justice.
In a situation where the development of technology has called into question the possibility of human existence in the future, traditional ethics, within which this question was not raised, must be significantly supplemented by the categorical imperative of responsibility, which asserts the primacy of human existence in the future in relation to all other goals.
The assessment of the subject of management from the point of view of responsibility is not limited to the application of deontological or utilitarian grounds to it. A responsible management subject must act with awareness of a broader scale of factors than a man of duty or a man of benefit. Awareness of these factors is impossible without conducting various discourses (both justification and application): pragmatic, ethical and moral. Developing normative content that serves mutual understanding when conducting these discourses using linguistic means, is, according to Habermas, the task of discourse ethics (9, p. 7). But the very holding of such discourses should be an act of moral responsibility of the subjects of management. They “must consciously legitimize ethical issues and discuss relevant problems not only in crisis situations, but also in everyday practice” (29, p. 147).

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Moral freedom is a characteristic of an action performed:

- not by force, but by choice;

– with knowledge and understanding of objective limitations;

– on the basis of the correct (proper) choice of good and deviation from evil.

Human freedom finds himself starting with freedom of choice. The problem of freedom of choice was posed by Aristotle. He distinguished actions into involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary actions- these are those that are carried out by ignorance, coercion.

Aristotle believed that arbitrary actions There are two types: intentional and unintentional. Deliberate actions are committed by choice, deliberately. By conscious actions are only those who come from desire, but are carried out with taking into account the focus on the highest moral values ​​and methods and means adequate to them. Only this kind of action is associated with the realization of moral freedom. Unintentional actions, although based on a person’s desire, are committed out of ignorance of what results the action will bring, what means will be required (from a moral point of view) to accomplish it.

Human freedom presupposes (along with free will) also the limitation of one’s own self-will, recognition of the rights of other people, observance of justice in relation to them, and promotion of their welfare. In other words, in morality, the freedom of one person is always limited by the freedom of another.

Human freedom as right and proper carries within itself a real moral value, which determines what decisions are made and what actions are taken. Moral freedom is positive freedom, which does not allow one to indulge in temptations, not to sin (in the Christian understanding), which affirms the possibility of personal development, the ability to make choices based on the distinction between good and evil.

Freedom presupposes human responsibility. To behave responsibly means to be able to actively act from your place, to act according to the logic of events. Responsibility is the relationship of a person’s dependence on something (someone) in making decisions and choosing means of activity. Responsibility comes with a sense of responsibility. Important conditions for the formation of moral responsibility are:

– the presence of responsibility for those actions that are performed according to his free will;

– the presence of a person’s sanity, awareness of what is happening (mentally ill people are recognized as insane);

– the influence of external circumstances on the result of an action (under a totalitarian regime, the opportunities for moral responsibility of the individual become minimal, since the state takes responsibility for the life of society and its members).

To whom is a person responsible?

1. In front of other people. We live among people, and therefore we answer to them: to relatives and friends, colleagues and compatriots, to the human race.

2. Before God, your own conscience. In Christianity, the image of Jesus Christ was given a universal scale of responsibility: a responsible lifestyle also means trust in divine mercy.

Another important question is: what is a person responsible for?

1. Religious thought adheres to the idea that people should be responsible for the state of their souls, that is, for their thoughts and feelings.

2. Legal responsibility presupposes responsibility for actions.

3. Moral responsibility is broader than legal. It comes from the integrity of the individual, the unity of his mental and behavioral sides. Is a person responsible for the consequences of his actions? This issue currently occupies one of the most significant places in professional ethics. Are science and scientists, in particular, responsible for the negative social and human consequences of scientific and technological progress? If responsible, then to what extent? Starting from Nuremberg trials(1947), the issue of the moral responsibility of scientists is regulated by strict restrictions on conducting medical experiments on humans, on maintaining and strengthening trust in science.

Security questions

1. In social interaction, another person may give your words and actions a different meaning than you believe. Is the person personally responsible for this?

2. Are the following statements true?

a person is responsible for the immediate consequences of his behavior, and is not “responsible for everything.”

no one is responsible for everything, it is enough to be responsible for what you can influence.

You cannot be responsible for others, as this turns them into “tin soldiers.”

3. E. Fromm argued that many people try to evade responsibility. Do you agree with this statement?

4. Is it possible to agree that a person is responsible, first of all, to himself?

Truth and lies

Truth is one of the highest moral values. By truth we mean:

- an exemplary order of social relations that must be followed so that harmony reigns between people. In this meaning, truth coincides with the concept of justice. (“We must live by the truth,” “the truth will prevail.”) To live by the truth means to be guided by moral principles, to live according to conscience;

– correspondence of our ideas to the objective state of affairs. In this meaning, truth and truth coincide. One who follows the truth does not lie or deceive, but is a truthful person. Only honest, truthful attitude towards other people strengthens interpersonal communication. In communication between people, truth is expressed in openness, honesty, trust, promotes mutual assistance, responsiveness;

- an expression of human dignity. He who respects himself is never a low liar. This is why being accused of lying is perceived as an attack on honor.

Within certain limits everyone has their own truth(based on practical interest, human needs), this distinguishes it from the truth. Private truth the truth of other people is opposed. Truth connects people and makes them capable of communication. However, this requires accept the "general truth"" This is achieved by recognizing the values ​​of other people, their rights, opinions, readiness for agreement and compromise.

Truth is opposed to lies(deception). It is used to achieve by non-moral means:

– professional and other success;

– practical benefits (material benefits);

- to justify irresponsibility.

Responsibility is the awareness of compliance (or non-compliance with moral standards of a person’s actions, as well as the results and consequences of his actions. It is morally responsible behavior that gives a person the right to have freedom.

A person's moral responsibility depends on:

His capacity;

Ability to understand and correctly interpret requirements;

The influence of external circumstances on the result of actions.

In addition, a moral response means responsible behavior towards other people: respect for the personality of another person, helping people, etc.

A sense of responsibility exists in two forms - positive (a sense of significance, influence on what is happening) and negative (uncertainty in the ability to achieve positive results).

Irresponsible behavior is actions taken without considering their consequences. This behavior is associated with inadequate self-esteem, indifference, selfishness, etc.

Moral responsibility suggests the following. conditions:

Freedom of action (an act committed by a person not of his own free will does not imply responsibility for it);

Intentionality of the act (unintentionality of the act mitigates responsibility, but does not exclude it completely);

A person’s ability to be aware of what is happening, the ability to voluntarily stop an action leading to negative consequences. (Mentally ill people are considered insane. From a legal point of view, artificially induced insanity (alcohol, drugs) aggravates the guilt.)

During historical development people community, the level of personal freedom increases, as well as the level of a person’s moral responsibility for himself and for his family. In this regard, the philosopher E. Fromm argued that many people are burdened by this responsibility and try to evade it (sometimes unconsciously). He identified mechanisms that allow a person to relinquish freedom and responsibility at the social level:

Totalitarian regime (the leader takes responsibility for the life of society and its members);

- “automating conformism” (uncritical acceptance of other people’s opinions, transformation of society’s opinions into one’s own).

Good and evil.

The central category of morality is good. Good is the highest moral value; doing good is the main regulator of moral behavior. The opposite of good is evil. It is anti-value, that is, something incompatible with moral behavior. Good and evil are not “equal” principles. Evil is “secondary” in relation to good: it is only the “other side” of good, a deviation from it. It is no coincidence that in Christianity and Islam God (good) is omnipotent, and the devil (evil) is only capable of tempting individual people to violate the commandments of God.

The concepts of good and evil underlie the ethical assessment of human behavior. Considering any human act to be “kind” or “good”, we give it a positive moral assessment, and considering it “evil” or “bad” - a negative one.

Considering human behavior from an ethical point of view, one can notice that many behavioral acts are morally neutral, that is, they deserve neither positive nor negative moral evaluation. In fact, washing and dressing, eating, reading, walking, going to the theater - all these are activities that in themselves are neither moral nor immoral. Only those actions that, firstly, are committed intentionally and, secondly, have social significance, that is, directly or indirectly affect the interests of other people, create or destroy some values, receive a “non-zero” moral assessment. Such actions are called deeds. Buying bread is not an act, but if a person shares bread with a starving person or takes it away from a suffering person, these are actions (receiving a moral assessment with a plus or minus).

Good is the concept of morality, opposite to the concept of evil, meaning an intentional, disinterested and sincere desire for the implementation of good, useful action, for example, helping one’s neighbor, as well as to a stranger or even the animal and plant world. In the everyday sense, this term refers to everything that is received from people. positive assessment, or associated with happiness, joy, love. IN religious sense Good - characterization of phenomena from the point of view of their correspondence to God's providence

Evil is the concept of morality, the opposite of the concept of good, meaning the intentional, deliberate, conscious infliction of harm, damage, or suffering on someone. In the everyday sense, evil refers to everything that receives a negative assessment from people, or is condemned by them from any side (that is, contrary to the rules of morality). In this sense, both lies and ugliness fit the concept of evil. The question of the predominance of evil or good in the world in everyday terms is the subject of dispute between pessimists and optimists.

Conscience and Duty.

Conscience is sometimes called the other side of duty. Conscience is a self-evaluating feeling, experience, one of the oldest intimate and personal regulators of human behavior.

Conscience is a category of ethics that characterizes a person’s ability to exercise moral self-control, internal self-esteem from the standpoint of compliance of his behavior with moral requirements, to independently formulate moral tasks for himself and demand that he fulfill them.

Conscience is a person’s subjective awareness of his duty and responsibility to society and other people, acting as a duty and responsibility to himself.

The sense of conscience protects a person from the bad, the vicious, stimulates nobility, responsibility - people often appeal to their own conscience and to the conscience of others, evaluate themselves and others, using the concepts of “clear conscience”, “bad conscience”, “asleep conscience”, “conscientious” person", "unscrupulous", "remorse", etc.

The role of conscience is especially important when a person is faced with a moral choice, and external control from public opinion is either excluded or difficult.

Duty is a moral task that a person formulates for himself on the basis of moral requirements addressed to everyone. This is a personal task for a specific person in a specific situation.

Debt can be social: patriotic, military, doctor’s duty, judge’s duty, investigator’s duty, etc. Personal debt: parental, filial, conjugal, comradely, etc.

3.1. Moral and ethical responsibility from the point of view of religious ethics.

Religious ethical theories postulated a “divine given” and the immutability of moral norms. Initially representatives of Western religious ethics the concept of “responsibility” was attributed to the religious experience of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, where it meant the ability of people to heed or reject the word of God. In this interpretation, quite often mentioned in liturgical practice, the concept of “responsibility” “obviously did not play any noticeable role” 2 (142, 108).

Since the mid-twentieth century, both Catholic and Protestant religious leaders have begun to pay increasing attention to the topic of responsibility. This is eloquently evidenced by the materials of the Second Vatican Council, where one of the cornerstone themes was proclaimed the increased responsibility of individuals and human communities, caused by the growth of human power 3, and the first meeting of the World Council of Churches, where the traditional order to love to God and neighbor was replaced by a call be responsible before God and your neighbors 4.

In the Catholic interpretation of responsibility, the subjects of public administration appear special subjects moral responsibility, because in a “responsible society” they are responsible for the fulfillment of people’s duties to God and for their well-being.

The expansion of the scope of management practice, the increase in power and the increase in the scale of the consequences of management influences on the part of the state necessarily led to the fact that religious philosophers and theological moralists were forced to turn to theoretical justifications for the concept of “responsibility” in new socio-historical conditions. The most significant here are the works of M. Buber 5, K. Barth 6, R. Niebuhr 7.

3.2. Moral and ethical responsibility from the point of view of philosophical ethics.

Let us now turn to the study of the moral and ethical responsibility of management subjects from the point of view of philosophical ethics. All “discussions on moral theory are determined by the demarcation of three points of view: the argument is developed from Aristotelian, Kantian or utilitarian positions. All other theories can be characterized as attempts to synthesize these three approaches” 1.

Differences in approaches to the introduction and justification of moral and ethical norms will be determined by the position from which - expediency, goodness or justice - actions and actions will be assessed. The article by author 2 reveals the concept of a moral norm from the positions of expediency (utilitarian ethics), good (Aristotelian ethics) and justice (deontological ethics).

3.2.1. Moral and ethical responsibility from the point of view of utilitarian ethics.

Since the concept of benefit (good) in utilitarian ethics is associated only with the result, and moral norms have the character of a relative obligation, then the subjects of management can bear moral and ethical responsibility only for the result certain actions, based, for example, on a “profit and cost” analysis specially developed for this purpose. They do not bear any moral or ethical responsibility for preventing harm to anyone or for promoting certain goods and services over others. They are only responsible for rational choice of funds to achieve certain goals. The question of goals remains outside the scope of ethical responsibility here. Even for Max Weber, who put forward the idea of ​​rational responsibility in his book Politics as a Vocation, responsibility ultimately remains hostage to irrational goals.

The first representatives of utilitarianism to raise the problem of responsibility should be recognized as J.S. Mill and A. Hamilton. Both of them practically did not distinguish between the terms “responsibility” and “following the law” (accountability). The difference in their views on responsibility was as follows. Hamilton gave primary importance to institutional factors in responsibility, considering in fact responsibility only within the framework of law and fixed rules. Mill expands this narrow understanding of responsibility as punishment on the part of subjects external to the individual, pointing out that external punishment is not yet responsibility. Responsibility for him is, first of all, an internal characteristic of the subject, a kind of internal punishment or self-punishment of the individual, which corresponds to their awareness of the legitimacy of external punishment.

Further development of the concept of responsibility within the framework of utilitarian ethics was undertaken by representatives of pragmatism. The American pragmatist philosopher William James in his book “Pragmatism” tries to expand the scope of the definition of responsibility through punishment, explaining adherence to this position by the fact that people have not yet freed themselves from the old, legally and theologically generated, exclusive interest in crime, sin and punishment. James argues that the true reasons for the recognition of free will and responsibility are actually pragmatic in nature and "have nothing to do with the miserable power to punish which played such a role in the former debates on this question" 1 .

From the point of view of philosophical pragmatism, subjects of public administration act morally responsible if they act in a practical manner . At the same time, pragmatism requires coordinating as many needs as possible, which means that when making a decision, a compromise should be structured in such a way as to minimize the number of complaints.

James denies the fruitfulness of the traditional way of considering responsibility in terms of “attribution” and “following the law” and calls for a pragmatic approach to this issue. He associates responsibility with violation of the norm. Violation of a norm in itself cannot be considered “evil.” Moreover, improvement (good) is always associated with a violation of the norm. Therefore, it is the concept of responsibility, freed from the traditional shackles of “punishment” for breaking the norm, that gives the individual the opportunity to live a higher ethical life. Each real ethical problem is unique; for it there cannot exist in the past adequate rules within the framework of which it can be resolved, therefore, to resolve it, new norms must be created, which are always a violation of existing norms. It is responsibility that frees people from the paralyzing fear of “punishment,” providing them with moral grounds for the right to take risks in situations where the total amount of “good” can be increased by deviating from existing norms.

Thus, the concept of responsibility removes for James the tension between “following the law” and “free will,” which, like everything from a pragmatist point of view, cannot be absolute. The relationship between them cannot be specified a priori; it is always determined in accordance with each specific case, based on pragmatic grounds. The connection between "necessity" and "free will" is characterized by measure of responsibility subject of activity.

Current legal systems and traditional ethical values ​​in different countries draw the line between the legal and moral assessment of certain actions in different ways. For example, the situation where individual government officials, thanks to confidential internal information about an upcoming increase in the price of shares, buy them in advance at a cheaper price, receives different assessments in different countries. In the US and UK, such actions are punishable by law. In Switzerland, for example, these actions are subject only to moral condemnation. This suggests that the expansion and tightening of legislation in the field of violation of certain norms is by no means accepted by everyone as a kind of universal and constructive method of preventing violations of moral and ethical norms. Therefore, even on pragmatic grounds, moral responsibility cannot be replaced by legal responsibility.

In government, people operate within a complex organizational structure, and what seems morally unacceptable at a personal level may be acceptable at an extrapersonal level. The growth and complexity of the social structure leads to the fact that it becomes beyond moral control. The gap between the personal and even group level, where processes occur under the control of specific people, and the organizational level, where there is a clash of various forces, many of which remain anonymous and cannot be controlled, is growing.

Strong organized groups in society function at the expense of less organized groups. To achieve its goals, the administration of government bodies can establish personal control over its employees in order to ensure that employees correctly perform their duties.

The moral issue here is the extent to which the pressures of the organizational structure are combined with the needs of individuals. This problem does not have an adequate solution from the standpoint of utilitarianism, since its largest representatives did not consider the interaction of subjects within the framework of complex organizational structures. They also assumed that such structures could be understood within the framework of a set of individual, personal, personal interactions. Therefore, their understanding of responsibility could only be applied to individual action and did not extend to other subjects.

The presence, for example, of powerful transnational corporations, which many consider to be the only subjects of economic activity, shows the limitations of the traditional utilitarian understanding of responsibility. This gives grounds for today's representatives of business pragmatism to exempt civil servants from personal moral responsibility, since they are not subjects of activity. The branched and multi-level structure of government bodies and the individual are not commensurate with each other. Therefore, the “benefit” of the organization always significantly exceeds the “benefit” of individuals. Therefore, moral responsibility should be borne not by individual civil servants, but by government bodies as a whole.

3.2.2. Moral and ethical responsibility in public administration from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics.

Let us reveal the content of the moral and ethical responsibility of subjects of public administration from the standpoint of Aristotelian ethics. Firstly, here the individual is responsible for the implementation of his life project within the horizon of the usual ethos, responsible to himself. The fact that the source of responsibility here can only be the individual himself is of fundamental importance. He cannot be replaced here by someone else, be it a person or an authority in whom trust is placed. In this case, the individual acquires the distance necessary for reflection in relation to his own life only in the horizon of life forms in which he participates with others and which, for their part, form the context for very different life projects.

Regardless of whether they want it or not, subjects of management must bear moral responsibility not only from the position of “benefit”, “purposefulness”, i.e. from the position of utilitarian ethics, but also from the position of “good”, which is characteristic of the Aristotelian ethical tradition. The Aristotelian position assumes that, realizing his own existential project, the individual correlates it and subordinates it to some broader social project. Currently, government entities are responsible for moral responsibility for maintaining social dynamics,characteristic of a democratic form of government.

3.2.3. Moral and ethical responsibility in public administration from the perspective of Kantian ethics.

Let us reveal the content of moral responsibility based on the principles of Kantian ethics, which served as the foundation for the deontological approach in ethics. The deontological approach gives the concept of duty paramount importance. And although the broad deontological approach presented by such a philosopher as Kant does not separate the concept of duty from the consequences associated with it, at the same time, “purely” deontological teachings leave a “gap” between duty (deontological obligation) and its consequences.

From the very beginning, the consideration of morality was included in the consideration of the opposites “freedom” and “necessity”. Related to this is the existence of three fundamental concepts of law: natural, moral and civil. Kant distinguished between the moral law of freedom and the natural law of necessity. For Kant, “imputation” separates a person from a thing: a person can perform actions and be imputed for it, while things cannot be imputed for some action. “Imposition, in the moral sense, is a right by which anyone can claim freedom of action, which can then be regarded as a moral action, since he is subject to the law” 1.

One can agree, for example, with Habermas, who believes that actually moral position, in contrast to the pragmatic and ethical, is characterized precisely by the fact that the individual changes his egocentric position and begins to relate to the interests of other people, trying to impartially resolve possible conflicts.

Only a maxim that can claim universality in the perspective of all whom it concerns can be considered a morally binding norm. Based on this, any subject is responsible for violating (or maintaining) this moral norm. The individual is responsible for not ignoring the autonomous will of the Other, be it the disprivileged classes, the oppressed nations, the enslaved women in domestic labor, or the marginalized. Responsibility understood in this way inevitably requires participation in social movements and political struggle, in the organization of those “forms of communication in which the conditions for the rational collective formation of will take the form of an objective formation” 2. Naturally, such responsibility is not dictated by legal, professional, or even ethical standards. Thus, a certain responsibility is a consequence of the existence of moral norms themselves.

Can we demand from subjects of public administration some special moral responsibility in this sense, or is such responsibility of a universal nature?

On the one hand, moral norms are universal and universal, individuals have equal autonomous will, therefore moral responsibility must be individual and universal. On this basis, many defend the thesis that “only responsible citizens can have a responsible government.”

But, on the other hand, such a position is not active. It allows government actors to avoid personal moral responsibility on the grounds that the people under their control have not yet become such morally responsible people. Therefore, we, agreeing with McKeown 3, believe that this thesis should be reformulated: “Responsible government depends on responsible citizens, but people become responsible only by constantly practicing it.” Such a reformulation reverses the attitude. It is not people who, guided by some motives, should become responsible, and therefore the government formed from them will necessarily be responsible. On the contrary, it is the morally responsible subjects of management who must do everything possible so that people become responsible, constantly practicing this, i.e. acting and receiving moral evaluation of their actions.

3.2.4. Moral and ethical responsibility in public administration with ethics of responsibility.

Up to this point, we have been talking about the moral and ethical responsibility of subjects of public administration, based on the provisions of classical ethical theories. Despite their previously noted differences, they are the same in many characteristic features 1 . Firstly, everything related to the “non-human” world, that which has the basis of “techne” (with the exception of medicine) - ethically neutral in relation to the subject and object of actions. Those. actions with “non-human” things did not constitute the scope of ethics proper. Secondly, only direct interactions between a person and a person, including with oneself, were subject to ethical assessment. Thus, all traditional ethics were anthropocentric. Thirdly, the essence of man and his basic characteristics were considered unchanged: a person could not be an object of “techne”. Fourth, the concepts of “good” and “evil” in judgments about actions were established before the action itself and were not subject to change . Fifthly, traditional ethics dealt with cases that arose between people and were repetitive, typical situations of private and public life.

All statements and maxims of traditional ethics were constructed as simultaneous and valid during the period of one’s own human life. These maxims were not scientific or expert knowledge. On the contrary, they were knowledge that would easily suit all people of good will. Kant argued that "there is no need for science or philosophy to know what a person must do to be honest and good, or to be wise and virtuous."

The modern situation is fundamentally different from those governed by the norms of old ethics. Modern technology has changed the very nature of human actions, changing their scale, goals and results. Technology has challenged humanity. No ethical doctrine to date has had to start from the global scale of human existence, take into account the prospect of the distant future or the problem of the survival of the human race.

Traditional ethical systems must be replaced by a new ethics - ethics of responsibility. In this ethics, “the presence of man in the world should become the first axiom from which all other ideas about the obligatory nature of human behavior can be derived” 1 . A new imperative, corresponding to new types of human actions and addressed to new types of agents of action, should, according to Jonas, should sound like this: “Act so that the consequences of your actions do not destroy the possibility of such a life in the future” 2.

The new imperative makes it abundantly clear that we can only risk our own lives, not the lives of humanity. From this, taking into account the significant dependence of the future on today's technological practice, it follows that it is necessary to cultivate a certain caution, which until now has not been and is not a distinctive feature of the development and use of modern technology, the control of which should be exercised by the government and public administration bodies.

Naturally, the question of the need to build a “future-oriented” ethics was raised long before the publication of Jonas’s work. As we noted earlier, W. James also paid attention to this issue, but he did not see anything other than God that would set such an orientation. Later, the American philosopher Fred Polak categorically stated that “responsibility to the future (for the future) is the most basic and primary condition of a person’s responsibility in the present (for the present). This function is seen as fundamental to human behavior precisely as human behavior" 3. Polak gives anthropological, religious, philosophical and psychological reasons for this, although he notes that “all the great philosophers, from Plato to Plotinus and Augustine, from Kant and Hegel to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, were primarily philosophers of metaphysical time” 4. Polak recognizes that the main difficulty in constructing such responsibility has to do with what image the future has and whether it can be rationally obtained. Here the philosopher takes a very optimistic position (after all, this is only 1957!) and believes that the successes of the natural and social sciences give reason to believe that we will receive an objective image of the future.

The question of what forces should represent the future in the present still remains open. Jonas addresses this question to political philosophy, although he argues that it can in no way be a state 5 .

From the point of view of Jonas's ethics of responsibility, the responsibility of politicians is of particular interest. Of course, the politician is not the creator of history; rather, history acts through him. Therefore, one cannot absolutize his responsibility, but one cannot diminish it either. It is the recognition of the moral responsibility of a politician that allows politicians to sometimes be above the existing law, as W. James, Jonas, and others pointed out. Recognition of the moral responsibility of politicians and representatives of the state executive branch at the same time should protect them from their own self-deprecation.

The responsibility of a political figure does not have a specific object fixed by nature. It is more influenced by causal aspects than by predictive factors. The consequences of individual actions are immensely confused in the causal “factory” as a whole, which complicates causal analysis already in the present, and this complexity grows exponentially in the future.

However, in essence, the responsibility of a politician cannot be reduced to what he is formally responsible for (i.e., only to legal and professional responsibility). It must be something more. “Politician responsibility means demanding the possibility of politics in the future” 1 .

Let us now highlight the significance of the structural elements of moral responsibility. Subject responsibility here lies with the individual, although there are attempts to extend it to a group and even a social institution. Most researchers defend individual responsibility, citing the following reasons. Even in the case when the individual action of a subject of public administration cannot be regarded as the cause of a certain consequence due to the inclusion of this action in the joint activities of a group or social institution, nevertheless, in this case, he bears individual moral responsibility due to his own self-determination as a subject public administration. Subject responsibility, following the imperative of responsibility, should be the preservation of the possibility of human existence in the future, which corresponds to a greater extent to the consequences of the action, although it does not exclude the result. Institution responsibility can be a transcendental entity (for example, God, as in the ethics of Kant, James, etc.), an ideal subject (“future humanity”), an individual and a group (which is considered simply as a collection of individuals). Time responsibility – infinite, continuous, past, present and future. Space responsibility is not localized.

Resume.

Summarizing our research, we can conclude that there are sufficient philosophical grounds for introducing moral and ethical responsibility of subjects of public administration. Moral and ethical responsibility will be defined differently and have different meanings depending on from the standpoint of which ethical theory (utilitarian ethics, Aristotelian or Kantian ethics) we consider moral and ethical norms. Since all traditional ethical theories were not essentially “future-oriented,” not one of them in its pure form can serve as the foundation for building a new ethics - the ethics of responsibility. However, there is relative validity in using all three areas of ethical theory, each of which gives the problem of responsibility a special meaning: pragmatic, ethical or moral, in accordance with the selected points of view of expediency (utility), goodness and justice.

In a situation where the development of technology has called into question the possibility of human existence in the future, traditional ethics, within which this question was not raised, must be significantly supplemented by the categorical imperative of responsibility, which asserts the primacy of human existence in the future in relation to all other goals.

The assessment of a subject of public administration from the point of view of responsibility is not limited to the application of deontological or utilitarian grounds to it. A responsible subject of public administration must act with an awareness of a broader scale of factors than a man of duty or a man of benefit. Awareness of these factors is impossible without conducting various discourses (both justification and application): pragmatic, ethical and moral. The development of normative content that serves mutual understanding when conducting these discourses using linguistic means is, according to Habermas, the task of discourse ethics 1 . But the very holding of such discourses should be an act of moral responsibility of subjects of public administration. They “must consciously go to legitimize ethical issues and discuss relevant problems not only in crisis situations, but also in everyday practice” 2.

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Freedom is manifested in the choice of direction and methods of activity. In freedom of choice, a person manifests himself as an individual - independent and creative. Different ethical teachings give their own definitions of freedom:

Moral activity reflects a combination of objective conditions and subjective components of moral consciousness.

Personality and moral responsibility

The moral responsibility of an individual is directly related to the specifics of the implementation of moral freedom. The right to have freedom is given by the morally responsible behavior of a person in society.

Moral responsibility expresses the ability of an individual to independently regulate their activities and be responsible for their actions and their consequences. This type has had weight at all times, but in conditions of transformation of society and in crisis conditions, moral responsibility has acquired special significance for each person and for society as a whole.

What is moral responsibility?

Hans Jonas, in his already mentioned book “The Principle of Responsibility” (see § 3.1), energetically insisted on rethinking the foundations of ethics. In his opinion, ethics should not be perceived as a denial of other ethical systems, in particular the Kantian one; it should be regarded as giving them completeness. Unlike other authors who view responsibility as an attitude or value, Jonas presented the principle of responsibility as the basis of ethics.

Moral responsibility

- expression of the individual’s ability to cope with his activities, actions and actions on his own. At all times this type of responsibility had great value, but in times of crisis and in conditions of transformation of society, moral responsibility for each person acquired a special meaning.

Moral plays an important role in all spheres of personality - cultural, political, economic, family.

Moral choice and moral responsibility

Another fundamental limitation on the scope of what is subject to moral assessment is associated with the following circumstance: ethics is only interested in situations where a person has a real and free choice- to act in one, another or third way, or not to act at all. (In such cases, they sometimes talk about voluntary actions or deeds.) Therefore, an act committed by a person under duress, when, say, against my will, I am forced to do something that I myself would not want to do, such an act cannot be considered good or evil, moral or immoral - it simply has no ethical dimension.

Moral responsibility

MORAL RESPONSIBILITY - individuals for their behavior from a moral point of view, as well as the responsibility of social communities (family, clan, clan, party, institution, state, etc.) for the customs and moral relations existing in them. Along with the institutional administrative and legal N.O. is the main non-institutional regulator of relationships between people, groups, between individuals and society, and between various social structures.