Volumen 7 (2017): Heft 3-4 (December 2017)

The aim of the article is to reconstruct Jan Amos Comenius’ (1592–1670) conception of moral virtues as it is presented in his major work General Consultation on an Improvement of All Things Human (De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica), mainly in its part Pansophia – Mundus Moralis with respect to the role which prudence plays (prudentia) in relation to the other cardinal virtues – fortitude (fortitude), justice (justitia), and temperance (temperantia). Comenius’ conception of virtues is further compared with the traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine formulated prevailingly by Aquinas. In conclusion, it is shown that it is the position of prudence (prudentia), as an intellectual virtue that connects significantly Comenius with the Aristotle-Thomistic tradition in this perspective.

This second part of a two-part series exploring implications of the natural differences between the sexes for the cultural evolution of marriage considers how the institution of marriage might evolve, if Kant’s reasons for defending monogamy are extended and applied to a future culture. After summarizing the philosophical framework for making cross-cultural ethical assessments that was introduced in Part I and then explaining Kant’s portrayal of marriage as an antidote to the objectifying tendencies of sex, I summarize Kant’s reasons for rejecting polygamy and for viewing monogamy as the only ethically acceptable form of marriage. Finally, I argue that if we apply Kantian principles to the real situation of marriage in many modern cultures, and if we wish to maintain a legitimate place for marriage in the future evolution of human culture, then the future evolution of marriage laws must recognize polyfidelity (i.e., plural marriages for both men and women) as being just as legitimate as monogamy.

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz is known primarily as a logician and methodologist. Ethics was a side discipline to his scientific research, which he lectured at Lvov University in the 1930s. Assuming that ethics is a philosophical science, he tried to systematise its contemplations according to the scientific principles developed at the Lvov–Warsaw School of thought. However, in his research he also took into account the philosophical tradition which recognised ethics as one of the chief branches of philosophy. Ajdukiewicz’s submission of ethics to the requirements of logic was related to an attempt to analyse its core concepts. Consequently, an outline of the original ethical concept was developed, but never developed into a system.

The author examines our conflicting attitudes regarding the proper value of human life. While the main issue initially appears to deal with whether or not human life has an intrinsic (or absolute) value, it turns out that a far more important and complex issue concerns the tension between the equal value of every human life and the differences in the quality of one’s life. The author discusses the views of Kant, Schweitzer, Berlin, Scheler, and then Hartmann, in whose views the author recognizes the most important contributions to this puzzle.

The paper aims to highlight the serious methodological issue of contemporary bioethics (especially topics on the subject of animal ethics). In the discourse on the issue of the pain and suffering of animals and in derived questions, a certain form of anthropomorphism is manifested. Ethical applications of empirical research results that are relevant to humans (or humans as an anatomically and physiologically analogous animal species) are preferred. Subsequently, these extrapolations serve as a criterion for judging the qualitative level of the capabilities of all animals. Serious ethical conclusions are drawn from this reduction.

The aim of this article is to explain the key theoretical foundations of business ethics as a social scientific and academic discipline that was established and further developed at the Faculty of Management at Comenius University in Bratislava. The authors of this article refer to this school of thought as the “Bratislava School of Business Ethics” with the intention of pointing out its relative autonomy in research and higher education in the Slovak academic environment.

Indoctrination is a large and important issue in (not only moral) education. It is considered to be one of the capital pedagogical faults. However, the question is, what does it mean to indoctrinate? Educators from the liberal camp of the educational spectrum have had the tendency to criticize the traditional approach as “indoctrinational.” On the other hand, proponents of the traditional approach object that if indoctrination were defined properly then even the liberal approach would not be immune. This raises two fundamental questions that will be the subject of this study: a) what exactly does it mean to indoctrinate? b) is education without indoctrination even possible?