Dimitrie C. Nădejde despre motivația psihologică a formării și funcționării legilor morale ale conduitei individuale și ale ordinii sociale
Dimitrie C. Nădejde on the psychological motivation of forming and functioning of the moral laws of individual behaviour and social order

Summary/Abstract: The study brings forth Dimitrie C. Nădejde’s writings on ethical subjects from the beginning of the 20th century. The author shows Nădejde based his ethics on a field under development at the time: psychology, seen as an indispensable method for the causal explanation of the basis of ethical values. The author also shows that by taking into account all the knowledge psychology provides, Nădejde was con¬vinced one can attenuate the formal and critical, as well as abstract and prescriptive, traits of the categorical imperative. In his view, psychology, applied to the field of morals, is able to relax the rigorousness and rigidity imposed by such an imperative. But he also underlined that morals would have no meaning, no matter how strong the contribution of psychology in restricting the Kant-type rigorousness, if we were to cut down determining morality only to our blind and unbridled impulses. Therefore, in order to construct morals as an independent science, he argues that one needs to join the contribution of logics with psychology because, in its essence, moral conduct as object of ethics also involves moral thinking and sensitivity (which involves explaining moral actions with the help of the notion of psycho-social facts).

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