Person and Morality

The chapter starts from an observation that nowadays there is a serious problem with universal morality, including the formulation of universal moral norms. It seems that, for various reasons, morality has been relegated either to a purely subjective personal realm or to the domain of politics and social pragmatics. In the chapter, it is argued that there are rational resources to claim that we are not doomed to such scenarios. As an example, the personalism developed by Karol Wojtyła is briefly presented. Here, the way of understanding the person is essentially associated with morality: the latter is a vital sphere of becoming a person on the level of the personal subject. Thus, morality is not something elusive, subjectivist, or merely contextual; it is an objective realm that is indispensable for the person as such and subsequently verified by how she tends to and attains her fulfillment. In the personalism of Karol Wojtyła, we have serious reasons to claim that morality has objective foundations, and moral norms — such as the personal norm or the persona est affirmanda propter se ipsam norm — are signs that cannot be easily relativized.