On Understanding Absolute Values in Law

Introduction. The purpose of the article is to clarify the ontological status of such a categorical bundle as absolute values in the context of modern Russian law and order. Based on this, the main tasks are: to determine the ideological prerequisites for dividing values into absolute and relative; to identify criteria for such a distinction; to analyze the conditions that allow recognizing certain legal values as absolute; to develop a theoretical approach necessary to substantiate absolute values in law. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the activity-based approach is recognized as the most adequate to this task.

Methodology and materials. The main methods used in the proposed study are: activity-based approach; structural and functional analysis; comparative method. Psychologism in understanding values continues to be the most influential in Russian legal philosophy. This is opposed by various objectivist concepts of values, defending their complete or, in any case, significant independence from human consciousness. The opposition of relative and absolute values, among other things, reveals the status of the value foundations of law in their implicit conflict with legal consciousness, since they can be considered either as immanent to it and transforming together with it, or, on the contrary, as its external referents.

Research results and their discussion. No matter how obvious the relativity of the value constructs of legislation, legal doctrine or judicial practice may be, this in itself does not prove that absolute values are absent in law. The existence of absolute legal values, as a general rule, is built on a strictly defined foundation, which is a religious worldview. One and the same legally enshrined value, considered in a secular or religious sense, can have completely different meanings. It is possible to localize those value spheres where potential absoluteness is rooted: it is more or less obvious that this quality is not inherent in social practices, whose relativity from a set of external and internal conditions is too noticeable, as well as psychological experiences, since the absolute is grasped only speculatively, but not emotionally.

Conclusions. Absolute values in official legal discourse are possible only beyond their psychological understanding, since the very attempts to normatively define the concept and composition of values are, in fact, designed to overcome axiological psychologism, which rejects the existence of objective absolute values. The activity-based approach to absolute values, on the one hand, and a moderate version of value relativism, which does not deny the existence of absolute values, but only calls them into question, on the other hand, of course, cannot be synthesized within the framework of a single explanatory model. However, they may well coexist in the philosophy of law as manifestations of its ideological diversity.

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