The paper’s focus is on an age-long philosophical issue: man and power. It is analyzed in the frame of the basic philosophical paradigms: ontological, epistemological, axiological, anthropological and linguistic. From the analysis and comparison of the particular traits of each of these paradigms three approaches to human beings arise: essential, existential and interpretative. The power dominating over people or possessing them has various forms: universal law, God’s will, political order, the nature inside and outside us, etc., the most dangerous of (...) them being those we are unaware of. (shrink)

Nowadays we are increasingly confronted with the fact of plurality. The result of plurality is relativism. Moral relativism is related to cultural plurality (both intercultural and intracultural) and the impossibility of universalising any of the two. Ethical relativism is associated with a plurality of ethical concepts and the impossibility of privileging any of these. “Ethical competence” refers to skills of possessing a particular ethical theory that allows one to navigate through the moral world. Postmodern ethics formulates ethical principles and moral (...) standards that regulate life in a pluralistic society in which relativism prevails. (shrink)