Russellova etička teorija

Considering variety of problems that Bertrand Russell dealt with, very important place have his ethical views despite the fact that they have been dispersed within various papers. Neither Russell nor many of his reviewers would consider problems that this prolific and controversial writer dealt with philosophical. Russell himself considered ethics and social humanistic problematics to belong among philosophical problems much more so starting with the fact that cognitive and evaluative problematics are strictly devided. Russell pointed out that evaluative problematics is what actually separates philosophy from science. As a spokesman for the philosophy which would rely on science he nevertheless tried to prove that essential values cannot be proved. He maintained that there is no place for science proper in the evaluative sphere as well as in the scientifically oriented philosophy. This relationship Russell sees as follows: science establishes truths, ethics deals with values, and philosophy is a kind of science while ethics doesn’t belong there. Though Russell came to these conclusions he still left ethics within the sphere of philosophy but he regards it as essentially separate field with different status from the one that scientifically established philosophy, logic and epystemology have. For the separation of cognitive and evaluative problematic Russell finds the cause in the fact that basic attitudes of ethical philosophy cannot be proved. This is also the case with the most fundamental philosophic-scientific attitudes which Russell himself showed to be unprovable. Fundamental postulates are unprovable in its conscious and evaluative sphere, they have its ontological hypothesis and its gnoseological principles equally essential as are its evaluative principles in the sphere of human experience. Despite the fact that these two cannot be equated they both belong to human consciousness of various sorts and degree of objectivity. Russell’s theory of ethics is not unique. He has in this sphere as well as in other spheres of knowledge changed his points of view. At the beggining he was spokesman for intuitionism and like Moore he maintains that »good« cannot be defined, but it can be intuitively recognized. Afterwards he rebuked his attitude considering that all evaluative expressions were emotional that they had optative rather than indicative character, thus constituting emoti- vistic trend in meta-ethics. His emotivism soon aquired social character since he recognized that in evaluative critical attitudes next to emotions there were also our wishes to be taken into account in order to be accepted in society. Russell avoids relativism in ethics, thus he builds an objective basis for his ethics, and in it he sees the possibility of scientific foundation for ethics.