Enlightenment period ethics

Enlightenment period: Ethics
B. Spinoza: “Ethics”
– a happiness in acknowledgement of God and Nature;
- 2 sciences: psychology and physics;
- Knowledge is a source of harmony

Enlightenment period: Ethics
J.-J. Rousseau:
- science and ethics: enemies.
- Giving up the civilization = happiness;
- An art to live

Enlightenment period: Ethics
Voltaire, Montesquieu (France)
E. Kant (Germany): imperatives
G. F. Hegel: irrelativeness of morality

E. Kant: Ethics
2 types of human acts: moral and legal;
Example: saving a drowning person: legal and moral ways;
A moral act is often an act against your interests;
Theory of a duty: a duty is not a boring obligation, but it is an act of freedom, or a free will. Moral act is an act against natural egoism.

E. Kant: Ethics
Moral laws should be applied equally to everyone, regardless of his physical, social, other features.
There are many reasons to justify bad acts, but there are now reasons for committing a good act, - it is done by duty.
1. Act as if your will could become a legal basis for everyone; (categorical imperative)
2. A man should always be an aim, not the mean. (is not, unfortunately, a law of history)

E. Kant: Ethics
“ 2 things please and surprise my soul: that is a sky full of stars, and the moral law inside a man, that makes him free.” – E. Kant.
A man should live as if he is free.

G.F. Hegel: Ethics
A bourgeois society can form a moral point of view;
3 stages of development: law - Rome; morality – medieval centuries; conscience - modern bourgeois society;
Work: “Philosophy of Law”:
Abstract law;
Morality;
Conscience.

G.F. Hegel: Ethics
Relative approach to the good and bad acts;
For Hegel it is unacceptable to commit “fiat justitia pereat mundus” (“Apply the law even if the world dies”;

S. Kierkegaard: a misery of life and existentialism
A. Shopenhouer: a school of pessimism
S. Kierkegaard: a desperation of life and existentialism
“Desires or Duties”: 3 stages of life: aesthetical, ethical and religious;
“Christ is the Way”