Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 4

This article addresses the problem of developing morally significant behavioral models in public consciousness. It is substantiated that the anti-normative trend initiated by postmodernist relativism has become increasingly ineffective at this time of increasing global challenges. The author proposes a memetic approach to ethics: meme-ethics. The importance is noted of establishing universally agreed bases for coexistence and mutual understanding in the process of forming a global ethos. The article reveals the role and significance of rational public discourse in developing a wide consensus on moral issues. The resulting collective reflection creates a discursive legitimization of moral norms with the possibility of giving epistemological legitimacy to a pragmatic basis of morality. Public discourse (including social networking) as a kind of deliberative democracy (participatory democracy) requires the pre-existence of a common basis for discussion shared by participants in the local and global discourse. As such a basis, the author proposes the humanist values and principles enshrined in many of the fundamental documents of the UN and the European Union. A problem remains regarding the level of moral and social maturity of the majority of the participants in public communication, as well as the level of their ethical and humanistic literacy. In this regard, the author emphasizes the importance of the continuing promotion of ethical discourse in the public space by the scientific and philosophical community as a means of socialization, education and cultural emancipation. In the search for new approaches and technologies of the information-communicative influence on the public discourse, this article analyzes a memetic approach. Based on the presented review, the author proposes a new paradigm, meme-ethics, as an innovative method of promoting and disseminating ethical concepts and moral norms in the media and cyberspace. The meme-ethical approach is based on the concept of memes applied to ethics, an ethical meme-plex, where moral principles and values are considered as units of cultural information (replicable concepts) that are being disseminated through communication, imitation and repetition. The author describes the characteristics of meme-ethics as forms of moral philosophy that both present moral ideas and inspire moral feelings. An integrated approach to communications based on this concept will require a variety of tools and technologies (advertising, PR, TV, journalism etc.) to gain the attention of a wide audience, engage them in the moral-ethical sphere of communication, and initiate moral reflection. The author concludes that meme-ethics can become a form of global communication, involving its participants in discursive interaction on the creation of a general moral continuum. The meme-ethical approach can be considered as a new direction of communicatory post neo-positivism, whose main objective is to research questions of the adaptation, transfer and diffusion of ethical and philosophical knowledge to assist in the development of a new global ethos. The results of the conducted research provide a deeper theoretical justification for the application of modern media technologies to the field of ethical education and upbringing. The meme-ethical approach promotes, together with the growth of ethical and philosophical knowledge, the possibility of designing and managing public ethical discourse. The realization of the full potential of this new approach will require an expansion of research in this field.