The Past and the Future in Moral Thinking 3800-PPMM26-S-OG

- Seminar discussions will focus on the relationship between the concept of time and
fundamental ethical categories: guilt, merit, moral responsibility, choice, forgiveness, harm,
conscience, time and duration as the material of personal identity, memory, choice, regret,
shame, the beginning and end of life. Subjective time; the time of events, human time versus
„clock” time.
Classical ethical ideas are deeply connected to the individual, first-person experience of
duration in time, where memories of past events and projects of the future structure our
moral lives. We are responsible in the present for what belongs to the past, we grieve over the
irreversibility of evil committed, we make choices that involve our future, we are tormented
by remorse, we ponder the meaning of life as a whole, and we reflect on immortality.
Individual sessions will address the following issues:
- The structure of human time as a crucial element of moral consciousness
- The construction of moral identity and persistence in the past, present, and future. Memory
as one of the foundations of personal identity. Individual, social, and species memory.
- The subjectivity of human time; time as the reality of first-person human experience. Time
as a narrative, a sequence of what is (morally) significant in our lives.
- Causal responsibility for physical acts - and moral responsibility (taking responsibility and
bearing responsibility)
- Guilt, guilt, shame, remorse (retroactive and prospective conscience)
- Punishment, reparation, forgiveness
- Moral concern and moral hopes for the future: pedagogical and political utopias; concern
for the planet and future generations.