Background
Drobnitskii, Oleg Grigor’evich was born on January 18, 1933 in Mytishchi, USSR -.
Drobnitskii, Oleg Grigor’evich was born on January 18, 1933 in Mytishchi, USSR -.
Moscow University and the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
During his short career Drobnitskii came to be regarded as one of the most learned and original contributors to the establishment of ethics—a held once dismissed as ‘bourgeois' by doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists—as a legitimate discipline within Soviet philosophy. His writings ranged from abstract metaethical reflections to historical and critical studies, practical considerations of the role of morality as a regulator of behaviour, and the first Russian-language dictionary of ethics. In an enterprise reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Drobnitskii attempted to base ethical theory on an examination of the logical structure of moral consciousness, within which he finds conceptual levels corresponding to stages in the historical evolution of ethical thinking. His influential articles on moral consciousness, published in journals over the years from 1968 until his death, are reprinted in the posthumously Published Problemy nravstvennosti [Problems of Morality]. His developed theory combines a Kantian, deontological interpretation of individual moral obligation with a teleological view of the ultimate justification of ethical standards. In accordance with Marxist principles, such justification can only be grounded historically, Drobnitskii argues. Relying on the conception of an ‘deal human essence as described by Marx, he contends that objective laws of history establish communism as the fulfilment of the true interests °f humanity and thus as the social embodiment of fhe highest moral values.