The importance of substantial ethical issues. Is the diagnosis made by Tadeusz Styczeń correct?
The importance of substantial ethical issues. Is the diagnosis made by Tadeusz Styczeń correct?

Summary/Abstract: The author of the article reflects on what contemporary ethics could inherit from its long history. He investigates the question of the validity of Tadeusz Styczeń's claim that what we need is not a combination of ethics, but rather a multilateral approach to moral issues. Styczeń addressed a very important issue, namely he observed that nowadays contemporary ethics is very often wrongly juxtaposed with traditional ethics (whatever the latter refers to), because authors writing on the subject either miss the substantial issues raised by ethicists and confine themselves to meta-ethical considerations, or make attempts to "scientify" ethics, ipso facto reducing it to psychology or sociology of morality. He thus distinguished three approaches to the criterion of assigning value to human deeds, i.e. metaphysical, epistemological and linguistic, which the author of the article attempts to present to the reader. T. Styczeń believed that the above-mentioned approaches to assessing the moral value of an act are mutually complementary and there is no need to limit ethical considerations to only one method. It is necessary to use at least three. Further on in the article, the author briefly presents the way this is accomplished. Finally, the author wonders why Styczeń omitted the contractualism approach, advocated by such thinkers as Rawls, Habermas or Apel, to name but a few. It seems most probable that he considered it unnecessary as morality cannot be reduced to something that is of communal character. It has an individual dimension. It is also aimed at the ultimate goal. Moreover, justification of the value of a human act through reference to the social contract model may be only hypothetical, but not categorical in nature, as has been rightly – in the author’s opinion – pointed out by E. Tugendhat.

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