A short history of ethics in Slovakia (Editorial)

The history of ethical reasoning in Slovakia^[1] dates back to the beginning of the 16^th century, a period when ethics and morals came to the fore of intellectual and philosophical thinking—owing to the influence of the humanism that prevailed during the Reformation^[2]. This cultural and intellectual climate led to the revival of ancient culture, education, philosophy, and ethics, while a focus on purgation encouraged writers to ponder over the questions traditionally raised in ancient ethics: How should we live? How can we live well or have a proper life?

The humanism and Reformation of the time meant that the emphasis was on developing ancient education and exploring antique wisdom along with Christian piety and virtues. The humanist writers of the time (including those living and working in what is now Slovakia) most frequently devoted their attention to ethical and moral issues of ethics in politics and professional ethics for politicians, i.e. the ethical and moral obligations of leadership and leaders. This was a theme that proved attractive to, for example, Valentin Ecchius, Leonard Stöckel, Martin Rakovský, and Ján Weber; and later Ján Milochovský, Augustín Doležal, Michal Institoris Mošovský, and many others. They were witness to the grossest injustices, cruelty, and brutality carried out by the political or military powers of the time, and consequently they were interested in the question of fair and moral leadership. Like Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example, they believed things could be rectified if the leader’s style of ruling were to be informed by Christian virtues (Gluchman, 2016b). They centred their attention on the leader or ruler and on his conforming to certain requirements when exercising power, so that the well-being of all citizens was paramount. They criticised injustice, mistreatment, tyranny, abuse of power, etc. They sought the humanisation and ethicization of politics and the state administration, since they thought this would guarantee peacefulness and prosperity in the country and the welfare of the people.

Although the ethical reasoning that emerged in Slovakia in the 16th century was not of the standards of renowned European thinkers, many “kept their fingers on the pulse of their times” and described the philosophical, ethical, theological and pedagogical issues in currency. Examples of such thinkers include Leonard Stöckel and Martin Rakovský (Gluchman, 2015, pp. 133-135; Gluchmanová, 2015, pp. 146-147). This was less the case in the 17^th century, since the military events and numerous uprisings, not to mention the forced Re-Catholicisation of the Slovakia, shifted attention onto religious, theological, and clerical issues. One consequence of these writers being isolated from a world audience was that they were able to develop a more distinctive view of European philosophical and ethical thinking. These events and the spread of pietism led to a change in their attitudes to religious, theological, and clerical issues, on one hand, and to ethical and moral issues, on the other. The religious element became stronger in social and political life, and to an even greater extent, in personal life. Ethics and morality had been fully subsumed into religion and theology, either becoming part of them or dissipating within them. Ancient culture, education, philosophy, and ethics were all scorned and condemned. Various religious movements, including pietism, turned their attention away from the humanistic efforts to revive the cult of man of the Ancient World, focusing instead on purgation, a pious life and prayers, whilst rejecting human nature for its sinfulness and vicious, and the body and sensuality for being the work of the devil, etc. (Gluchman, 2013a; 2013b).

In the 16^th century, writers drew on what can be seen as the vague contours of a deistic understanding of the relationship between religion and public morals, or the ethics of the individual. By the 17^th century, however, ethics had become the servant of theology—hence, outside religion there were no morals, just immorality. In the 18^th century, the deistic perception of the relationship between ethics and religion experienced a revival. It was most marked in the writing of Augustín Doležal, who acknowledged man’s endeavours to acquire new knowledge and break down deep-rooted taboos, which caused various difficulties, but still led to man making progress in his attempt to defeat the evil that he himself had created (Gluchman, 2011b). The arrival of the Enlightenment changed the way the relationship between religion and morals on the one hand and theology and ethics on the other. This is not to suggest, however, that in Slovakia during this era, religion or clericalism was fiercely criticised. The relevance of religion in shaping morals was not in any question; nonetheless, one could see the very first attempts to liberate man from supernatural powers and to find justification for a freer existence.

Following the Enlightenment, further developments in ethical thinking took place in Slovakia in the 19^th century; nonetheless, Slovak ethical thinking still lagged behind European philosophical and intellectual progress. The reason for this state of affairs in Slovakia in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries (until the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918) was the lack of an academic institution at which relatively independent philosophical and ethical thinking could develop. During this period, philosophy and ethics were mostly the domain of priests, and partly politicians and lawyers, who frequently addressed moral issues in literary works. In the first half of the 20^th century the first (and also quite noteworthy) attempt to produce a work in this field was probably Martin Rázus’ Argumenty [Arguments, 1932] (Gluchman, 2011a; Rázus, 1993). The first truly philosophical work to deal systematically with philosophical ethics appeared during World War II. It was written by a Russian émigré living in Slovakia, Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky, and was titled Podmienky dokonalého dobra [Conditions of the Perfect Good]. After World War II, Svätopluk Štúr wrote his Rozprava o živote [Treatise on Life] (1946) (Gluchman, 2013a; Komenská, 2012, Losskij, 1944; Štúr, 1946).

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The situation did not change significantly after the communist coup in 1948. But the governmental, political, ideological and social changes halted the productive era of philosophy and ethics until 1989 at the very earliest. The negative consequences of the absence of development in thinking in philosophy and ethics were still apparent even at the end of the 1990s. However, not even the very limited work performed in this area during the second half of the 20^th century can be considered homogenous. In the first phase, lasting approximately up to the beginning of the 1960s, philosophy and ethics in Slovakia barely evolved at all, with the exception of Sirácky’s work Kultúra a mravnost [Culture and Morality] (Sirácky, 1949) and a few articles published in philosophical journals. In this phase, in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia as a whole, ethics and philosophy was dominated by a process of indoctrination through the translation of works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and contemporary Soviet authors. Philosophy and ethics in Slovakia (and Czechoslovakia) was clearly reduced to a role akin to that of a pupil learning the basics of “scientific Marxist-Leninist philosophy and ethics” via Soviet authors.

The first more significant attempts at developing a philosophical ethics in Slovakia only began at the beginning of the 1960s thanks to the work of Jiřín Kánsky, a Czech philosopher at Comenius University in Bratislava, and Martin Marušiak, a Slovak philosopher at Charles University in Prague. After the Prague Spring in 1968, the development of philosophy and ethics was again hampered, until the slow and rather shy revival in exploring and developing ethics started in the late 1970s, and the beginning of the 1980s with the work of Barbara Hlavová, Andrej Sirácky, Ján Vajda, Juraj Cger and others. In any case, the point that should be stressed is that throughout the entire communist period, only Marxist and Marxist-Leninist approaches to philosophy and ethics were developed. Although differences can be discerned in the individual phases of development, they cannot be seen to represent the continual development of philosophy and ethics, and explorations of morality in Slovakia. One exception is Marián Váross who worked independently of the official structures and so his reflections on philosophy and ethics were not completely influenced by the spirit of the age and the official line. On the contrary, they were in direct opposition to Marxist philosophy and ethics and its exploration of morality.

With the exception of the 1960s, research in philosophical ethics in Slovakia has not focused on the issue of true morality, despite individual authors having characterized ethics as a ‘science about morality’. In the majority of cases morality just became an empty concept used by authors according to need, especially to formulate the socialist or communist moral ideals of a classless society that would solve all the moral problems of humankind and individuals. If one supposes that the philosophical discipline of ethics should be concerned with exploring what is and what ought to be, then the philosophy and ethics carried out in Slovakia during communism, fell heavily on the side of ought. Philosophy and ethics became a tool of indoctrination, an ideological, political and worldview struggle to reinforce and consolidate the political power of the government and party elites. Throughout the communist era in Slovakia and the former Czechoslovakia there was a lack of any real interest in objectively exploring the morality of the age. An ideological, political and worldview approach to these questions was preferred, which meant that socialist morality was idealized, while wishes overrode reality and individual moral problems were trivialized or completely ignored (Gluchman, 2008).

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The present issue of the journal Human Affairs: Postdisciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences Quarterly presents the latest outcomes of scholarly research conducted by academic staff at the Institute of Ethics and Bioethics, and PhD students affiliated to the institute. The research concerns the history of ethics, ethical theories and applied ethics. The first two papers focus on the history of ethical thinking in Slovakia and abroad. The paper by Viera Bilasová looks at the process whereby a particular ethos was formed and “matured” in Slovakia in the context of the values, principles and norms of the European ethos. The presence of this ethos, including its sources and forms, can be considered in the Slovak historical context to be a moral phenomenon and an integral part of human existence, encoded in the moral values held by individuals and society.

Marián Palenčár discusses Gabriel Marcel’s views on human dignity and 1) shows that the theme of dignity in Marcel’s work is not merely accidental; 2) draws attention to how topical Marcel’s way of understanding of human dignity is for philosophy and ethics today, and that it is anchored in human finiteness and thus also in its fragility, vulnerability and mortality.

Research on issues in philosophical ethics is explored in the paper by Vasil Gluchman. He argues that one should accept that dignity is a concept used to describe an aggregate of values and qualities attributed to a person or thing that is deserving of respect and esteem. The primary value that indicates the right to have dignity is life. The degree of dignity accorded to a particular life form depends on its place on the evolutionary scale. Human beings are the highest life form, so they possess the highest degree of dignity.

Katarína Komenská’s paper, the initial paper in the section on applied and professional ethics, looks at moral motivation in humanitarian action. She holds that individuals involved in humanitarian work are driven by strong motivations which sources can be identified in their moral standpoints. Humanitarian ethics shows us that it is important to renew the debate on the role of moral motivation in ethical decision-making. Moral motivation is the basis for and reaffirms the commitment to the moral course of the actions. Komenská critically examines sources of moral motivation, namely partiality, popular ethics, the value declaration, and the moral obligation as understood according to the ethics of social consequences.

Lukáš Švaňa deals with the general philosophical and ethical implications of transhumanism and human enhancement techniques. He looks at the implementation of these ideas in the military sector. He contrasts various standpoints and views on transhumanism and the associated benefits and risks of using newly acquired scientific knowledge to improve and alter human nature on the basis that humans have natural deficiencies.

The main aim of Ján Kalajtzidis’ paper is to analyse consumption through the lens of the ethics of social consequences. Consumption, seen as a consequence of the triumph of the market and of consumerism, is a determining factor in today’s society. The central part of the paper introduces the issue of justice, which is closely connected to many issues related to consumerism as an excessive form of consumption.

I am convinced that all the articles in this issue will contribute to developing ethics (as part of the history of ethics, philosophical ethics, and applied and professional ethics) as a discipline that can analyse and provide responses to the issues of the day. I hope that this special issue of Human Affairs: Postdisciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences Quarterly has met these objectives.