An Issue of Universality in the Soviet Ethics of the 1960s to the 1970s

Abstract

The article deals with the starting and most important stage in discussions of an issue of moral universality in the Soviet philosophy of the 1960s to the early 1970s, studied on a selective number of authors – A.F. Shishkin, Ya.A. Milner-Irinin, S.A. Pozdnyakova, A.A. Guseynov, and O.G. Drobnitskiĭ. The problem of universality was expressed by them in different no­tions – from “simple norms of morality and justice” and “all-human elements of morality” to “common normativity” and “universality of moral requirement”. Beyond this conceptual dy­namics is a shift in philosophical orientations and outlook attitudes, the ways of understanding morality and ultimately the paradigms of philosophical and normative ethics. Beginning with Kant, universality in morality was understood, generally speaking, as a characteristic of judg­ments, decisions, and reasons of actions in regard to their correspondence to certain normative and/or communicative standards. From this point of view, universality strictly speaking is not identical to ubiquitousness or common acceptance of judgments, decisions, and reasons of ac­tion. This meaning of universality was not been taken into account by proponents of “class” approach to understanding of social and spiritual phenomena, the approach based on ideolo­gical or normative dogmas. It was not always taken into account by proponents of a scholarly approach either in their study of morality based on a theoretical understanding of the nature of morality and its role in human and social life. The most advanced and conceptually contextual­ized consideration of the issue of universality was given by Drobnitskiĭ, who regarded univer­sality as one of the most important characteristics of moral requirement. The principle of equality is a normative correlate of so understood universality. Universality also characterizes moral judgments, whose moral adequacy is verified through the procedure of universalization. Drobnitskiĭ tried to explain these different and not always interconnected aspects of universal­ity by appealing to certain ‘general laws of history’. and thus offered a historicist basis of morality. His inherent historicism in the justification of morality testifies to the incompleteness of the process of paradigm change in ethics that started in the 1960s.