Moral Sanctions in the Ethics of O.G. Drobnitskii

Abstract

The paper reconstructs O.G. Drobnitskii’s view on moral sanctions and fits it into the history of studying this phenomenon in ethics, sociology and anthropology. The description of moral sanction proposed by O.G. Drobnitskii generally coincides with the tradition of its un­derstanding that links it with public condemnation of a transgressor. In his first analysis of the problem, in The Short Dictionary of Ethics, he defines moral sanction as a spiritual im­pact on a transgressor that does not affect her real position and material interest. Here moral sanction consists in censure. In his monograph The Concept of Morality: Historical-Critical Essay, he further develops this idea and proposes the conception of the be-polar character of moral sanction: the first pole is external (the public condemnation itself), and the second pole is internal (the acceptance of the condemnation by a transgressor and her feelings of shame, repentance, and remorse). This is what makes morality different from custom which rests upon the sheer ‘emotional-volitional pressure’. So the ‘ideal character’ of moral sanc­tion reveals itself not only in the absence of physical coercion but in the proper ‘subjective attitude [of a transgressor] to herself’. The second tradition of understanding of moral sanc­tions includes among them the very self-condemnation of a transgressor and her negative emotions of self-appraisal. Drobnitskii got closer to this tradition in a few fragments of his dissertational thesis.