Ethics of Responsibility: on the Issue of the Demarcation of Moral and Legal Forms of Imputation

Abstract

The article problematizes the ethics of responsibility as a relatively recently formed field of moral philosophy: an attempt is made to conceptualize its specificity and significance in modern ethical discourse. Using the example of the ethical teachings of Hans Jonas and the thematically related works of a number of other authors, the idea is substantiated that  the ethics of responsibility represents legal rather than moral responsibility, and in fact ex­trapolates the principles of legal thinking and legal normativity into the field of morality. As a result, the ethics of responsibility leads to a blurring of the boundaries between moral and legal imperatives to the point that the concept of “responsibility” is proposed to be per­ceived as a kind of “surrogate” of morality and law. In contrast to this, a recommendation is made to strictly distinguish the philosophical and ethical-applied understandings of the con­cept of responsibility and the relevant subject areas. Thus, it is argued that in applied studies, the concept of responsibility is wrongly associated with such philosophical categories as morality and freedom, which in classical philosophy are traditionally considered to belong to the supersensible sphere of human experience. Consequently, the article introduces the concept of “objective” responsibility as a philosophical invariant of “subjective” social responsibility. At the same time, it is proposed to correlate moral responsibility with the form of “objective” responsibility, and legal responsibility with the form of “subjective” one. It is substantiated that the ethics of responsibility should be regarded as a manifestation of “subjective” socio-legal, and not “objective” moral responsibility.