Ethics as seen in the sciences of man and society

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Ethics as seen in the sciences of man and society , first published in 1947 in A. Francke AG. Published in Bern , is a book by the German sociologist and economist Leopold von Wiese . He created u. a. a typology of ethics and contrasts individual and social ethics . Its dissolution of the then prevailing antithesis between individual and community is of importance in the history of ideas .

concept

The Ethics completes a series of Leopold von Wiese's writings from, "which are intimately connected"; this includes:

  1. Thoughts on Humanity (1915) (“a warning against the annexation frenzy of those years”);
  2. Homo sum: Thoughts on a comprehensive anthropology (1940);
  3. the ethics of the show, the sciences of man and society .

The Ethics provides in this order, the "third major investigation" represents the "it even deeper into the problem of an anthropological, sociological justified ethics penetrate" wanted.

According to Christian Eckert , von Wiese addressed the following four problems in his ethics :

  1. The "most important task" is "the great difficult question of contradicting collective egoism , which previous ethics had mostly passed by";
  2. von Wiese did not want "to see the scientific task in the field of ethics in the establishment of principles [...] whose absolute validity is to be demanded";
  3. he wanted "to take into account the situations [...] in every demand to be made of people and 'majorities'";
  4. According to the “goal of all ethics” he wanted to “endeavor to reduce the suffering in the world [...]”.

content

general part

In the general part, consisting of eight chapters, he dedicates chapters: 1) the catchphrase “ethics”; 2) a "methodological foundation"; 3) a "foundation of the history of ideas"; 4) a "systematic foundation"; 5) a "demarcation from related perspectives"; 6) "Basic principles of individual ethics with an excursus on pathetic and non-pathetic ethics"; 7) “Basic principles of social ethics ”; and 8) "imperatives".

"Introduction against the divisive catchphrase"

The line of thought in the introduction is to “master the wealth of problems in all ethics by breaking them down into individual and social ethics, exploring each of the two types in isolation, but then working out what they have in common as what is actually essential.” The introduction should “possibilities of Misunderstandings that can be ascribed to the origin of thought and language ”, a danger that is particularly evident in the“ juxtaposition of “ individual and society ” ”.

"To be and ought in personal and social life"

The subtitle of this chapter is “Methodological Foundation”; it is mainly about how “ ethics and sociology can be combined” or whether “social theory should and can be the actual basis of ethics”. Von Wiese states “a partial dependence of the sciences on ought (B) on the sciences of being (A). But does area A also depend on area B? " He developed four questions that he didactically solve:

  1. "Is it correct that the doctrine of the moral requirements for the actions of people in intercourse with one another can remain unrelated to the science of actually lived social relationships?" - Answer: "If the doctrine of the moral ought to act in people in the Intercourse with one another remains unrelated to the science of actually lived social relationships, so it will be devoid of objective truth content. It leads to the fact that their voluntary demands remain unfulfilled or that, if their fulfillment is forced, setbacks, contradictions, confusion occur sooner or later. "
  2. "Should [sociology] transform itself into a doctrine of ought, or should it at least derive its task from ethics, at least let it influence it?"
  3. Conversely, should the doctrine of duty derive the content of its postulates from theoretical sociology, so that this becomes the basis of ethics? "- Answer to 2) and 3):" But what should the connection consist of? The empirical doctrine of the facts of interpersonal life cannot, without giving itself up as research in area A, allow the content of its statements to be dictated by ethics. On the other hand, thirdly, ethics cannot give up its best, idealism of convictions, in favor of relativized research. Sociology, however, should acquire a deep insight into ethics, its will to perfect it, so as not to get stuck in a mere mechanics of movement processes. [...] "
  4. “If questions two and three are answered in the negative, then fourthly the question arises as to a mutual influence of the two sciences (belonging to different areas [A and B]) and finally, fifthly, the question whether there are not deeper-lying parts that are not considered “Influence”, the identification of which, however, contributes to the understanding of the nature of the two areas of thought. ”- Answer:“ One will be able to give the relationship to be advised the name of the mutual influence. It goes ( ad 5 ) beyond a mere demonstration of occasional analogies and purely methodological support. But these too are numerous and effective enough in individual questions. Especially the non-metaphysical moral theory working with the concept of social utility belongs more to explanatory sociology than to idealistic ethics. "

That closes the chapter.

"The history of ethics in an anthropological and sociological perspective"

The subtitle of this chapter is “Foundations of the history of ideas”; it is mainly based on ideas from Max Scheler , Nicolai Hartmann , Gustav Ratzenhofer , Friedrich Jodl and Leonard Nelson .

As Wilhelm Korff writes, made of meadow in the third chapter of "is performing as ethics of social orders social ethics accusations that she was basically nurmehr a reflective form of ' social policy ', which takes ethics the idea of justice and these measures included in an , interpreted in a narrow sense. "

Von Wiese divides the “history of ethics” into: 1) “ Greco - Roman antiquity and Christianity”; 2) “Development up to Kant ”; 3) " Kant and the doctrine of the categorical imperative "; 4) “ Comte and the Positivists ”; and 5) "the modern attempts since Nietzsche ".

"Main types of ethics"

The subtitle of this chapter is “systematic foundation”. Von Wiese counts “all debit demands [...] that cannot be derived from his own or others', individual or social interests.” By “interest” he means “the tendencies of action [...] to gain advantage and avoid disadvantage . "He creates three" pairs of bisections ":

  1. “Ethics of love and duty”;
  2. “Ethics of feeling and reason”; and
  3. "Individual and Social Ethics".

“Our three newspapers are not antitheses . The ethic of love stands neither with the ethics of duty nor the ethics of feeling with the ethics of reason in the relationship of a contradictory opposition. They are not mutually exclusive. One could most easily see such a contradiction between individual and social ethics in a purely conceptual sense. But it contradicts the basic idea of ​​our sociology to regard the individual and the multitudes of people as heterogeneous forces. For a purely logical and computational consideration, "one" and "many" are certainly opposites, thus also the individual and the plural; but a consideration that penetrates into the deeper context of humanity teaches that the view of the antithesis between individual and community that is so prevalent today is wrong. "

- Leopold von Wiese

The last part of the chapter deals with Hans M. Sutermeister 's " skeptical attitude" represented in psychology and worldview , which denies "the target sphere in general, ultimately the importance of the subjective", where the "categories of ethics [...] are dissolved at all "Become:" Instead of the dualism of good and bad , there is the opposition of "harmless" (sympathetic) and "dangerous". "From this epistemologically dead end, Wiese projects his necessary new social ethics.

"Preliminary questions on the problem of the relationship between individual and social ethics"

The subtitle of this chapter is "Delineations from related ways of seeing". While Von Wiese deals in more detail in the fourth chapter with the dichotomies of the “ethics of love and duty” and the “ethics of feeling and reason”, in this chapter he goes into the third dichotomy. He poses "the question of whether the way of looking at individual ethics agrees with the anthropological one, the optics of social ethics with the sociological one", and arrived

“To the result that there is no complete indifference here or there. We saw the difference in the fact that when we contrast the general human with the interpersonal - there in an anthropological, here in a sociological perspective - the contrast is ultimately based on the difference between the permanently same and the changeable, while the two modes of viewing within ethics are individual and multiplicity rather. To avoid inaccuracy we had to make these distinctions; but we continued: “In many investigations, the anthropological look is at least identical with the singular view and the sociological with the plural look. There is "the" person, here "the" people are standing in front of us. »"

- Leopold von Wiese

"Basics of individual ethics with an excursus on pathetic and unpathetic ethics"

This sixth chapter is a critique of individual ethics; it deals with

  1. the “difference between individual and social ethics”;
  2. “Pathetic” and “unpathetic” ethics;
  3. the "problem of accuracy in scientific ethics";
  4. the question of whether “individual ethics has a right to exist alongside social”;
  5. "Ethics and the Desire for Happiness";
  6. "Ethics and the Desire for Freedom"; and
  7. "Future goals of individual ethics".

“At the time of writing this chapter, I was unfamiliar with W. Macneille Dixon's Gifford Lectures, which he gave at the University of Glasgow from 1935–1937 . A few months later I found some thoughts in them most happily formulated in individual sentences that seem to be very related to some of [my] statements. "

- Leopold von Wiese

"Basics of Social Ethics"

“In order to clarify the essence of social ethics in its basic features”, von Wiese goes into the first half of the chapter (Sections I-IX) “on the peculiarity of what we call the social ”; in the second part he tries to create "a historical overview of [the development of social ethics]". The sections of the first half are divided as follows: Von Wiese gives himself "an account of the fact that interpersonal (or social) issues are also of influence in [social ethics] "; he tries to answer the doubt "whether there is a social morality alongside personal ethics "; he works out the questions of whether "there are ethical demands on people for their behavior towards social structures" and whether "there are such demands on the social structures themselves"; he answers "one after the other the basic sociological question about the relationship between individual human beings and society [...] and about the western social structures"; he relates “the systems of moral value to social structures” and emphasizes “the decisive importance of collective egoism”; The result is a “consideration of the moral demands that can be made of the social structures themselves”; "[A] finally [he tried] to summarize the results of the investigation into the nature of social ethics in eight theses".

"Imperatives"

While von Wiese tried in the two previous chapters “to present the individual sphere of ethics separately from that of their social sphere”, he would like to give a “synthesis of both” here in order to conclude the “general part” of his book. The experiment leads to "three relativizations":

  1. “The uniform principle of the good dissolves in its application and specification into a number of directions”;
  2. “Social ethics is an ethics of a weaker degree influenced by politics and economics”; and
  3. "The aim of all ethics is not the implementation of an abstract idea as it fills the social structures, but an advancing ennoblement of the human being".

Special part

In the special part, consisting of chapters nine to eighteen, he dedicates chapters: 9) to his “definition of the task”; 10) a "optics and method of comparing the social being and ethical target areas"; 11) the terms "distance, seeking and fleeing"; 12) the "addiction"; 13) the "economic, political and legal systems from a socio-ethical perspective"; 14) the “ethics of social processes”; 15) the “ethics of behavior towards the social structures of the masses and groups”; 16) " Corporate Ethics "; 17) the terms “state, race, culture and people” and 18) an “ epilogue ”.

Reception (selection)

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Christian Eckert : Leopold von Wiese: A pioneer for strictly scientific procedures in sociology . In: Karl Gustav Specht (Hrsg.): Sociological research in our time: A collection, Leopold von Wiese on his 75th birthday . Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne / Opladen 1951, OCLC 163239424 , p. 340-342 . See also: Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Horst Knospe (Hrsg.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon . tape 1 . Transaction Publishers, 1980, ISBN 1-4128-2647-0 , pp. 498 .
  2. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Thoughts on humanity . Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1915, OCLC 4338177 .
  3. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Homo sum: thoughts on a summarizing anthropology . Gustav Fischer Verlag, Jena 1940, OCLC 14728911 .
  4. ↑ Von Wiese posed these problems himself; in: Ethics as viewed in the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, pp. 5-6.
  5. ^ A b Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 23.
  6. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 25.
  7. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 40.
  8. ↑ a b c d Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 32.
  9. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 27.
  10. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, pp. 31–32.
  11. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 31.
  12. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 42.
  13. ^ A b Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 43.
  14. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 45.
  15. ^ Wilhelm Korff : Fundamentals of a future social ethics . In: Ferdinand Reisinger (Ed.): Being human in society: Christian foundations and perspectives . OLV-Buchverlag, Linz 1983, ISBN 3-85214-390-X , p. 80–81 ( epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de [PDF; accessed on January 24, 2013]). With reference to: Leopold von Wiese: Ethics as seen in the sciences of man and society . Francke Verlag, Bern / Berlin 1960, p. 72 .
  16. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 50.
  17. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 77.
  18. ↑ a b c d e f Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the way of looking at the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 111.
  19. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 94.
  20. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, pp. 102-109.
  21. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 103.
  22. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 137.
  23. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 175.
  24. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 176.
  25. ^ A b c Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, pp. 238-239.
  26. ↑ Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of humans and of society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 241.
  27. ^ A b Leopold von Wiese: Ethics in the view of the sciences of man and society. Francke, Bern 1947, p. 266.