DESCRIPTION: Tadeusz Styczeń (1931-2010) was one of the most famous Christian ethicists associated with the Catholic University of Lublin. In his academic work, he dealt with ethics, metaethics, human dignity, and the value of human life. He developed and deepened the personalistic vision of the ethics of love and life. He published three texts in the SPCh. In the article in question, he attempted to identify the main problem of ethics and characterise it epistemologically in order to determine the methodological nature of ethics on this basis. The author of the article shows that the methodological picture of a theory depends mainly on the nature of the question that the theory attempts to answer and justify, and even more so, on which the theory itself is the answer. He then attempts to find a question that is relevant from an ethical point of view, as far as possible independent of historically conditioned moral systems. The author sees it in the questions that people ask spontaneously on the basis of their simple moral experiences. An analysis of these questions shows that they ultimately require an explanatory basis of empirically conditioned morality as an adequate answer. In light of this analysis, ethics ultimately turns out to be a theory that explains moral experience (the metaphysics of morality). Another and subsequent question is whether ethics is possible in this methodological sense. "The picture of ethics that emerges is therefore that of a theory that authoritatively explains the moral reality given directly in the relevant experience, and at the same time appropriately problematised by the relevant question. It is a picture of a theory with theses that are both authoritative and empirical. Such, then, is at least the methodological programme of ethics, from which we must not deviate if we want it to be a theory adequate to the problems arising from the practical needs of life and their theoretical requirements" (p. 52).
TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Introduction. 2. Sources of ethical issues. 3. The dogmatic nature of ethics. 4. The empirical nature of ethics.
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English
Język Polski