The author of the commentary argues that both the provocation that introduced the bogus therapy as a new therapeutic procedure in the popular magazine, and the commented article are based on false assumptions, namely: (a) that social practice must have a scientific background; (b) that any activity that is not based on scientific premises is immoral; (c) that the goal of scientists is to expose the missing theoretical premises of social practice. The provocation, despite the good intentions of the author, was conducted in a way which goes against its goal, that is, increasing the intellectual and moral vigilance of academic psychologists.
Transformation of the social responsibility is observed nowadays all over the world. The deficiency of responsibility exists in Ukraine that entails a number of serious social consequences. The responsibility is at the border of the individual and social sphere, that is why it is of a dual-character; it possesses properties of the social and individual. The task of the present-day science is the study of the mechanisms of forming and increasing the social responsibility. It is important to explore and describe the consequences following from the special mechanism of display of responsibility and irresponsibility. Sociological, theoretical and empirical researches of responsibility/irresponsibility poses a problem of understanding the source, essence, and its special manifestations in different situations of the social life. Responsibility can be considered as one of determinants of the social activity and daily practice. The forming process of the reflexion levels in respect of responsibility is important. Specific emotional experience of the responsibility is in its social conditionality. The presence of responsibility as a moral motive of social action testifies to high level of moral consciousness and person's socialization. Among all variety of kinds of responsibility, valuable responsibility most closely corresponds to moral responsibility, i.e. to such responsibility which is actualized by a complex of moral requirements.
It is taken for granted that in a pluralistic social structure normative ethics loses its basic authority. As a witness to this moral degradation J.-P. Sartre formulated the concept of general moral responsibility. A quarter of a century after Max Weber who had defined an ethics of responsibility restricted, however, to politically or economically leading persons only, Sartre widened the scope of responsibility to include everyone. Each person, he believed, was responsible for her whole life and the world around her. Today this sounds like a classic modern conception, when compared with the ethics of Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Lévinas. In fact, it is difficult to see a direct contact between the latter two and Sartre's philosophy. But in his interview granted to Benny Lévy 'L'Espoir maintenant' Sartre came close to the position that after the demise of the belief in progress the only hope remaining must centre on ethics. Subsequently he came to believe that he had failed in constructing a credible general ethics. But it is altogether uncertain that in fact he failed. More probably before his death he tended to neglect what he defended in 'L'Etre et le Néant' where he already arrived at a position of ethical responsibility that surpasses all other ethical proposals of the past decades.
One of the John Locke´s most controversial claims is that we should not be held responsible for the deeds of which we genuinely have no recollection as performed. We are only responsible for the acts of which we are conscious. The reason behind is the assertion that the personal identity equals the identity of consciousness. This concept of person is the background of Locke´s claim that the immaterial substance (IS) is irrelevant for personal identity. I argue, that if we had only a very unclear idea of IS and could not give any clear explanation of the relationship between IS and a person, the excluding of IS from the identity discourse would be highly dubious. Further, I argue that the memory criterion of the personal identity is problematic for many reasons, and that the missing continuity of memories between lives is compatible with the idea of justice and practical concerns.
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