The need for discussion of the question of the structure of ethics, its interrelation with other disciplines, methods of ethics research and, finally, ways of achieving a connection between ethical theory and practice has undoubtedly become urgent.

The characteristics of moral consciousness are usually examined jointly with normative and value factors. O. G. Drobnitskii justly considers the leading criterion of moral consciousness to be the normative quality of moral judgments, the distinctive characteristic of which consists, in turn, of the impersonal nature of such judgments, and also of the fact that moral consciousness "does not associate its judgments directly to whatever facts may be at hand" . Without entering into a polemic against these assertions, we should like (...) to proceed to deal with a different aspect of the same question. (shrink)

Good and evil are the most general ethical categories from which we can get our bearings in the fundamental philosophical and normative problems of ethics. In the contemporary scholarly literature the interpretation of the good is multifunctional. Good is regarded as a model of morality, as the most general moral requirement or most general moral evaluation, and finally as a practical norm, i.e., a requirement embodied in moral experience, as a unity of the objective and subjective in moral actions. The (...) history of ethical thought was bound to reach this broad, all-embracing conception of the good, indeed, that was the way it went, mastering the content of the category of the good, bit by bit, focusing attention now on one, now on another of its aspects. Hence the most general explanation of the good as a synonym for morality has not at all been the same throughout the different stages in the history of ethical thought. Good, like evil, and like all other ethical categories, had a different compass and different sets of attributes in diverse ethical systems. One must also consider that until modern times, there had never existed a single categorial term to designate morality as a whole. As O. G. Drobnitskii noted, the words "good and evil," "justice," "virtue," and "manners" were often preferred to the concept "morals"; and moreover, each of these words was used to designate not only the particular phenomena within moral philosophy but the entire domain of morals in general. (shrink)

The proper development of Marxist-Leninist ethics demands thorough analysis of its categories, and clarification of their nature and interconnections. These questions are still inadequately treated in our philosophical literature. The problem of the essence of ethical categories is actually bypassed, yet it is precisely here that one finds many disputes and much that is not clear. This problem requires the solution of questions such as the relationship between existing morality and ethical theory, between actual moral feelings, views and principles on (...) the one hand, and ethical categories on the other. In this article let us focus attention on these questions. (shrink)