Original scientific paper
Andrija Dorotić's Ethics
Damir Barbarić
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Centar za povijesne znanosi, Odjel za povijest filozofije, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The systematics of Doxotić's ethics is founded on a thesis on the existence of the law of nature (lex naturae) which as eternal and fixed law is strictly distinguished from positive, i.e. freely established law. The existence of the law of nature enables a distinction between good and evil that is necessary to the constitution .of ethics as a whole: good is what conforms to the law (legi consentaneum) and evil is all that does not conform to it. The following essential steps in founding Dorotić's ethics are: first the thesis that evil, perceived formally, consists - as opposed to good - .only in the negative, in a lack, a dearth, an absence of physical entity (entitas). The second thesis is that that there are no indifferent (indifferentes) human acts. And finally, as the third, the assertion that the object of natural fortune is the Good, though not a finite, but an infinite, i.e. the ultimate.
It is clear that Dorotić, otherwise prepared, elsewhere in his philosophic work, to greet the more recent and less dogmatic philosophic points of view of his age (examples for this can be found particularly in his physical and cognitional theoretical observations), remains completely in agreement in the field of ethics with the spirit and letter of strict scholastic ethics, with its essentially conservative basic impulse. In any case, ethics as presented is an exceptionally systematically though-out and constructed whole, ideationally superior, with its evident and purely executed foundation in theology on the one hand and ontology on the other, to many other partial and reductive, »autonomus« ellaborations on ethics.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
87812
URI
Publication date:
3.12.1984.
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