Issue #40

Abstract: The paper presents the most important ideas for R. G. Apressyan’s* (* Declared a foreign agent by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation) ethical theory in their interconnection and dynamics. The key here is the concept of morality, in which he emphasised the priority importance of normative and substantive aspects. R. G. Apressyan showed that the normative content of morality is set by three fundamental normative forms: the Talion, the Golden Rule, and the Commandment of Love, between which there is no gap, on the contrary, they complement each other. Considering the Talion as a specifically moral (rather than domoral) rule, whose essence is to limit and repress evil, is truly innovative, as is the very idea of normative continuity of all three rules. Their complementarity is attributed by Apressyan to historical and genetic interdependence, which he has confirmed on the basis of his own method of “conceptual explication of rudimentary normative content”. For R. G. Apressyan, the rehabilitation of Talion was the starting point for a rethinking of moral absolutism and its diverse critique. The study of the sources of moral imperativeness led R. G. Apressyan to the conviction of heterogeneity, inner complexity of the phenomenon of morality as its special feature. It is only by taking this feature into account, R. G. Apressyan argues, that an adequate integral comprehension of morality, covering different aspects of diverse moral experience, is possible.