Siberian Federal University 
- Issue
- Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2023 16 (1)
- Authors
- Prokofʼev, Andrei V.
- Contact information
- Prokofʼev, Andrei V.: RAS Institute of Philosophy Moscow, Russian Federation; address:
- Keywords
- ethics; morality; law; moral sanctions; legal sanctions; purely moral rules; E. Durkheim
- Abstract
The goal of the paper is to reconstruct Emile Durkheim’s view on the peculiarity of moral sanctions and the place of this view in the development of the contemporary theory of moral sanctions. Methodologically, the paper rests upon the supposition that inquiries in the history of ethical thought can and should enrich the theoretical ethics and vice versa. In the initial definition from Rules of Sociological Method, the moral sanction is a ‘widespread (diffuse) repressive sanction, that is to say a condemnation by public opinion». The paper reveals the inner contradiction of this definition: the repressive and diffuse character of sanction is not the same as its being exclusively a matter of public condemnation. E. Durkheim has some reasons to identify them, and they are analyzed in the paper. The paper also establishes how the Durkheimian sociology of morality contributed to the development of the theoretical tradition that equates moral sanctions with the whole range of expressions of public blame except physically restraining or harming a transgressor. In the middle of the XX‑th century Durkheim’s understanding of moral sanctions was criticized for neglecting the state of mind of a transgressor (T. Parsons, O. G. Drobnitskii). Though the paper shows that this problem was, if not eliminated entirely, at least smoothed out in the later works of E. Durkheim
- Pages
- 91–103
- EDN
- QEYNL
- Paper at repository of SibFU
- https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/149741
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).