The History of Ethics

Recapitulating the most prominent Euro-Atlantic ethical concepts from Classical Antiquity to the postmodern era, the chapter emphasises the actual social and political conditionality of the respective moral philosophy doctrines, which had been mostly rationalist and normative until the late modern period of history. It attempts to show the frailty of the abstract objectivist ethical theses once they have been counterpoised by phenomenological analysis and postmodern linguistic deconstruction; explicating, in addition, some analogies of phenomenologist, existentialist and postmodern ethical views with non-objectivist, processual Buddhist thinking. It hints on some reflexions of the subjectivist philosophies in psychotherapy and newly emerging, postmodern, moral dilemmas. The last section of the chapter belongs to the most important exponents of Czech moral philosophy, portrayed in the historical frame from the Czech Reformation of the fifteenth century CE, through the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, to the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in 1989. This basic review of Czech moral philosophy insinuates some paradoxes of Czech and Czechoslovak ethical attitudes ranging from eccentric heroism to opportunist hyper-conformism, which will be more profoundly discussed in Chapter 9.