Колективни идентичности и морална рефлексия
Collective Identities and Moral Reflection

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates the question about the possibility of justifying universal framework for individual moral judgment and action against the background of moral pluralism. The text is based on two theses: first that moral pluralism is a basic theoretical fact, and consequently any viable unifying framework could not be presupposed, but only constructed from the available moral resources; and second, that if there are some universally shared values worldwide, their universality is not based on rational reflection, and therefore could not be used in a rationally justified frame- work. Borrowing Bernard Williams’s example of saving one out of two people in a burning house, I argue that implementing the supposedly universal value of life in our moral reflection and action, we are at the same time rejecting its universality. Another approach to grounding moral reflection, which accounts better for moral conditionality, is that of collective identities. But it does not help much with interpreting pluralism, since the com- munity values monopolize individual moral reflection. I conclude that to approach the problem of pluralism more appropriately, we need a kind of ‘deep pluralism’ (William Connolly), incorporating more flexible pattern of the ‘us-them’ relation in our moral judgment, which allows complex moral reflexion.

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