Panels
Panel: Philosophy, ethics, moral
Cycle: CONTEMPORARY SERBIAN PHILOSOPHERS
Speakers: Jovan Babic, philosopher and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy on Belgrade
The position of ethics in philosophy resembles the position of moral in the world. As it sometimes seems that ethics is superfluous or insignificant in philosophy, it sometimes feels like morality is powerless and even nonexistent in the real world. (Ethics is the theory of morality. Moral is the reality that ethics researches in theory.). Still, one of the most difficult topics philosophy is confronted with is the idea of freedom.
This same freedom opens possibilities for good or evil elements in life. Life, as a process of setting and attempting to realize goals, contains good and evil in two basic forms: the amoral value of happiness and wellbeing in the inventory of realized achievements, and moral values that require all values to pass the test of universal respect, a test which is difficult, demanding and seemingly pretentious.
It is first of all demanding in the field of the serious and responsible approach towards facts and the difficulty of achieving precise terms and term distinction. This is sometimes an unrealizable network of terms, and a chaotic and indeterminable nature of goals that people set. This is why in the process o moral analysis and grading, we need not only elements of science, but also good philosophy.
Jovan Babic (1951) is professor of Ethics at the Faculty of Philosophy on Belgrade and a visiting professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. He is the author of the books Kant i Scheler (Kant and Scheler) (1986) and Moral i nase vreme (Moral and our Times) (1998, 2. edition. 2005). He wrote numerous articles and studies for domestic and foreign magazines. He is the organizer of a series of conferences of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series which exists since 1997, and the editor of the “Primenjena etika” (Applied Ethics) published by Sluzbeni glasnik Srbije.
