Abstract
The author examines the motives for the behaviour and actions of Dr. Skreta, the main character of Kundera’s novel The Farewell Waltz. The starting point of the novel was the social and political situation in totalitarian Czechoslovakia at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. He compares it to the situation in the developed western world and comes to a realization that there were many similarities in medicine; however, there were significant differences with regard to external factors. The health care system in western democratic societies were placed in contrast with Czechoslovakia, where a doctor’s activities and the system of health care were subordinated to the political, ideological, and social intentions of totalitarian power. In this context, the author has come to the conclusion that Dr. Skreta’s motives for acting arose from his moral responsibility for the country’s future. Dr. Skreta waged a latent personal “moral war” against the totalitarian regime. This was also reflected in his opposition to the preferred morality of socialist health care professionals. Part of this was his eugenics project. According to the author, in the context of ethics of social consequences, Dr. Skreta was a responsible moral agent seeking a better future not only for the country and its people, but his personal selfish interests.
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Notes
Milan Kundera finished writing the book either in 1971 or 1972, i.e. in the course of his life in the then Czechoslovakia; it was, however, published for the very first time in French in Paris in 1976. Some English translations call it The Farewell Party (Kundera 1976/1977), others The Farewell Waltz, both titles denoting the same book.
The first English editions changed his name to Bartleff (Kundera 1976/1977).
I follow the ethics of social consequences, according to which a moral agent is “every human being who is able to identify and comprehend the existing moral status of society and is capable of conscious and voluntary activities, for which he/she can bear moral responsibility” (Gluchmanová 2013, 157). Ján Kalajtzidis adds, “Moral responsibility in ethics of social consequences is understood as the ability of an agent to take account for his/her actions or omissions. This competence is interconnected with the possibility to praise or blame him/her (reward or punish him/her). However, this understanding is not sufficient enough; additionally, the agent must be able not only to bear something (to take account), but also able to act. On the one hand, the responsibility is understood as the ability to bear, on the other as the ability to act. It is important to acknowledge this aspect of responsibility; as a facility to assign duties to an agent. The agent must be able to act on behalf of something. If the agent is not capable of acting on behalf of something, it is impossible to refer to him/her as responsible and therefore as an agent; there is no purpose in assigning duties to somebody who is unable to be accountable for them. In this sense, responsibility is understood as an integral and central attribute of moral agency” (Kalajtzidis 2018, 215). In relation to the human dignity of a moral agent, Katarína Komenská pays attention to the consequences of his actions (Komenská 2018, 204).
Bacchini’s article was originally published in Czech in 2009 and in a slightly expanded form in English in 2012. I use the article from 2012 to present his views.
In 1958, a government body was appointed in Great Britain, which, in the Feversham Report came to the conclusion that artificial insemination using a donor is ethically and morally abominable. In its conclusion, the report recommended considering such an action a criminal offence (Henig 2006).
The principles of biomedical ethics (including the principle of patient’s autonomy) were formulated by Tom M. Beauchamp and James F. Childress as late as 1978–1979 (Beauchamp and Childress 2009).
By “moral war” I do not mean the axiological but descriptive meaning of this term, which relates to issues of morality in general.
Allen Buchanan also claimed that medical paternalism was a dominant model in the doctor-patient relationship in the USA at the turn of 1960s and 1970s (Buchanan 1978).
Following the very inspiring suggestion of one of the reviewers of this article, it would be highly interesting to comprehensively examine Skreta’s actions from the point of view of the ethics of social consequences. However, the scope of this article does not allow this research to be carried out, so I take this suggestion as a challenge to analyse Skreta’s actions from the point of view of the ethics of social consequences in the next article.
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Gluchman, V. Knowledge and morality in Kundera’s novel The Farewell Waltz. Stud East Eur Thought 73, 391–406 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09386-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09386-y