On the Positive Meaning of Negative Ethics (In Response and Gratitude to Professor Ma Yinmao)

Abstract

The article was written in response and gratutude to Chinese Professor Ma Yin­mao in connection with his article ‘On the Academician Abdusalam A. Gu­seynov’s “negative ethics” and its borders’. It consists of three parts. In the first part, the author examines the question of why negative ethics is at the same time the beginning of a positive moral program of human activity. Proceeding from the belief that philosophy is an ethical project and an act is its first principle, he shows that the path of man as a living rational individual to being lies through denial. The act is deployed in two opposite directions: as a fact, it goes into the individual and is in the zone of his exclusive responsibility, and by its content it is included in the social being, its rationally organized cultural space. The con­tradictory integrity of the act is considered in the context of the concept of non-al­ibi in being introduced by M.M. Bakhtin. The second part is devoted to two main arguments against an expansive understanding of negative ethics. The first is that it does not take into account the existence of people with pure moral intentions. According to the second, the positive normative content of public morality falls out of the field of negative ethics. The third part discusses the moral paradoxes that the consciousness of one’s own moral imperfection is an indicator of one’s perfection and that good deeds should be done in secret.