On the Specifics of the Justification of Morality in Russian Philosophical Tradition

Abstract

Some historians of Russian philosophical thought, relying on the fact that it focuses on moral issues, argue that the problem of justification of morality is as significant, as independent and as thoroughly developed in the Russian philosophical tradition as in Western ethics. Mean­while, an analysis of the main trends and most famous doctrines of Russian religious ethics of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that justification of morality is present in them only implicitly, not as a solution of a separate theoretical problem. In this regard, the relevance of the analysis of Russian ethical-philosophical thought is to identify and reveal the reasons for this situation, as well as to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the op­tion of defending the moral good, which does not separate the problem of justification of morality from the philosophical search for the foundations of life. The purpose of the article also includes checking the hypothesis that the synthetic discursive strategy used by the leading representatives of the Russian philosophical tradition, relying simultaneously on rational and irrational (super-rational) grounds, provides a more complete moral development of a person than attempts to initiate his transformation on a purely religious basis or to use only rational arguments to prove to the moral skeptic the necessity of transformation into a moral person. Of greatest research interest in this context is Leo Tolstoy’s concept of “reasonable faith”.