Abstract
Ethics in the USSR revived in the middle of the twentieth century after more than twenty years of silence. The impetus for the development of research and teaching in this area was given by the supreme power, which considered ethics as one of the more effective tools of state propaganda, corresponding to the new social realities. But pretty soon, the very logic of research immersion in the subject required ethicists to deepen the philosophical and normative analysis of morality. This ultimately led to the revision of the postulates of orthodox Soviet social science and to the formation of a strict moral theory within its framework. The latter, by the very fact of its appearance, called into question the agenda of moralizing ideologization. The renewal of Soviet ethics proceeded in several directions, but in theoretical perspective, the key one was the turn from understanding morality as a form of ideological superstructure (which was dogmatically asserted in historical materialism), to understanding it as a way of regulating human behavior with specific functional characteristics. Today one can trace that transition by a number of intermediate steps in the interpretation of morality, the reconstruction of which, based on the texts of the 1950s to early 1970s, is of interest not only in the context of the history of ideas, but also in terms of the development of the methodology of ethical research and understanding of how a rigorous moral theory can be formed. Some episodes of the history of Soviet ethics are relevant today as examples of emancipated thought and intellectual opposition to the domination of state ideology.
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As in other languages, in common Russian speech, the words “ethics” and “morality” can be used synonymously or with minor differences, in which the word “ethics” can also denote some kind of rationalization of the normative content of morality. In the Soviet intellectual tradition, especially among philosophers, there was a predominant understanding of ethics as moral philosophy, as a theory, the subject of which is morality— мораль/moral’, or нравственность/nravstvennost’ (similar to the German word Sittlichkeit)—had been established.
Vladimir Lenin, in a polemic with ideological opponents, formulated the “party-partisanship principle” as a requirement, demanded that writers openly take the standpoint of the proletariat when considering any phenomena or events, and that they treat the Communists as the party most consistently expressing that standpoint.
For more information about Drobnitskii’s ethical views, see (Apressyan 2021).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nikolaj Plotnikov for his support and particular recommendations in my work on this article, Philip Grier for helping me with the subtleties of the English language, and both my blind reviewers for valuable comments on the original version of this article.
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Apressyan, R. Moral philosophy in the USSR: key trends of change. Stud East Eur Thought (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09614-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09614-1