THE CONFLICT OF VALUES AND THE VALUE OF CONFLICT IN N. HARTMANN’S ETHICS

Cording to Hartmann, ‘the old ethics' related the concept of conflict to contradictions that arise between ‘values' and ‘anti-values.' This approach to moral values is associated with the problem of normative philosophical ethics. This article shows that Hartman privileged other types of conflicts of values that are more important for the existence of morality. Hartman notes that most of the various values can be reduced to a certain harmony of values. But there are values that are so contradictory in content that in specific situations they are fundamentally mutually exclusive. In such cases, it is not a conflict between the moral and immoral (value and anti-value), but between the moral and moral. In addition, there are conflicts that arise in the process of learning values. Each new conflict in life confronts a person with the need to make a moral decision and thus leads her to the comprehension of new values. Hartman believes that neither the particular man nor mankind has a conscious goal of learning values, but the whole history of mankind constitutes the process of discovery of moral values — be it within the limits of historical existence, or within the limits of a personal moral worldview. The article substantiates the idea that Hartmann's moral philosophy of formulates a fundamentally new notion for the history of ethics — namely, the notion of the conflict of values having a positive role to play in ethics.