An abridged adaptation of a section from “War and Contemporary Challenges to Universal Ethics” by Yevhen Bystrytskyi, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, and Leading Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy of Culture, Ethics and Aesthetics of the H. S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, published in the journal Philosophical Thought, 2025, No. 1.
When war is underway, people try to understand its meaning – both ordinary participants in events and local and international experts. What operates here can be described as an “orientation towards the whole”: it is not enough for a person to know what is happening – they need to understand why it is happening and what makes the sacrifices worthwhile. In the case of the aggressor, people look for the motives behind the attack; for the society defending itself, a corresponding question arises: what are we fighting for?
Sociological surveys provide answers to this question on two levels. There are specific, “everyday” answers: “for our country,” “for our territory,” “for independence,” “for our children’s future,” “for the lives of our families.” Yet research shows that the greatest weight is carried not by these specific things, but by existential motives – those concerning the very existence of the individual and the community as such, rather than particular goods or resources: one’s identity (language, faith, culture), a European future, democracy and the rule of law, and a sense of duty to the state. In other words, people are defending not simply a piece of land, but a way of life and their very belonging to a community – something without which they would cease to be themselves.
Historical heritage plays an important role here – everything passed down from generation to generation: language, cultural memory, and narratives about the nation’s past. When interest in history and microhistory grows within a society, this is no coincidence – this kind of knowledge about the past nourishes patriotism. Patriotism here is understood not as an abstract love of the nation in general, but as respect for its specific, historically formed characteristics, merits, and achievements. A person does not defend the idea of a nation in the abstract, but the community, with its particular history, to which they actually belong.
There is, however, an important difference between how the question “what for?” sounds at the level of society as a whole and how it confronts an individual person. The official public answer is familiar – “for the Motherland, for the nation.” Yet for the individual, the question inevitably becomes sharper, almost “self-interested”: what does the position of defending this whole actually mean for me personally, when for its sake I find myself in the ultimate, borderline situation of choosing between life and death? This is no longer a rhetorical slogan, but a real inner reckoning for each individual.
Closely connected to this is the problem of social justice. Some citizens voluntarily join the military, where death or severe injury is a very real possibility; others legally remain away from the front – for example, because they are exempted from mobilisation due to their employment. The issue here is not the technical details of mobilisation legislation. What matters is the question of justice in its most acute form: at stake is a person’s right to existence, to a life free from restrictions. Even when a legitimate, publicly recognised law determines who must defend the country, every person still retains the possibility of an ultimate personal choice – to serve at the front, remain in the rear, or even leave the country and evade conscription. This directly concerns the problem of freedom – understood here as a person’s right to decide for themselves the extent of their responsibility: whether to be responsible only for themselves personally or for the fate of the entire community.
To illustrate this dilemma, Jean-Paul Sartre comes to mind – the French existentialist philosopher who wrote his major work Being and Nothingness during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. For Sartre, the logic is simple and uncompromising: if a person is mobilised for war, that war becomes “their war” – something for which they bear personal responsibility, even if, formally speaking, they did not ask to be there. Why? Because a person always retains an ultimate possibility of escaping the war – through desertion or even suicide. If they do neither, then they have effectively already made a choice – perhaps because they fear the judgement of those around them (Sartre explicitly speaks of “cowardice in the face of public opinion”), or because they value certain things, such as the respect of loved ones or family honour, more highly than outright refusal to participate in the war. For Sartre, the essential point is that this is a matter of choice rather than some form of external compulsion.
Developing this position further through the commentary of philosopher Axel Honneth, Sartre’s view can be described as follows: an individual’s choice is an act of absolute freedom. At the deepest, most fundamental level, human will is constrained by nothing – neither personal biography, nor socially accepted principles, nor respect for other people. At the moment of existential choice – that is, a choice concerning existence itself, the question of “to be or not to be” – there are, according to Sartre, no ready-made standards or criteria by which a person could justify themselves either to themselves or to others. Instead, the person in a sense creates themselves anew, spontaneously, without relying on anything fixed outside themselves, choosing from among the infinite possibilities offered by human life.
An important objection can be raised against this understanding: a genuinely authentic human choice is in fact always grounded precisely in respect for others and in the need to justify oneself before public opinion – the very things Sartre appears to reject. These “standards” and this “respect for others” constitute the cultural and moral heritage of the shared world to which a person belongs and for which, ultimately, they are prepared to assume responsibility by defending it. It is telling that the word “patriotism” does not appear at all in Sartre’s book – his ethics proved insensitive to questions of moral choice for the sake of the fate of a collective “We,” that is, for the sake of the community rather than merely the individual.
This can be explained by the historical context in which Sartre was writing. In 1940, when he published his work, the French living under occupation were not confronted with the possible disappearance of the French way of life or French culture as an integral whole – the threat concerned individual people and the political order, but not the existence of French civilisation as such. Today, by contrast, a question of comparable scale – the possible disappearance of Europe as a civilisational project – is being raised publicly by the President of France himself, who has said that civilisations are mortal and that choices about the future must be made now. The scale of the threat has therefore changed: what is at stake is no longer simply a political system, but the existence of an entire cultural world.
All of this leads to a distinction between two related but not identical concepts – morality and ethics. Morality is understood here as the sphere concerned with regulating individual decisions and the personal conduct of a particular person – this is what guides Sartre when he speaks of personal choice. Ethics, by contrast, is a broader concept concerned with the social norms of self-government, that is, the rules governing how people live together within a community as a whole rather than merely the individual decisions of particular persons.
The central purpose of both these dimensions is to clarify the normative foundations – the basic rules and guiding principles – on which both the collective life of society and the personal will of the individual should rest in pursuit of the “good life.” Here Aristotle comes to mind. In the Politics, he argued that simply bringing families together for purely economic or defensive purposes does not yet constitute a genuine community – a polis, in the ancient Greek sense, being a self-sufficient political association of citizens. A proper human life is built upon this basic infrastructure but goes beyond it: people deliberate together about moral excellence, about the order of things most important to politics, discuss what constitutes the common good, and decide together how laws should be shaped and applied.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the ancient and modern understandings of the good. For Aristotle, the good life is a standard that is, as it were, embedded in nature itself, independently of the will of any individual: a person discovers this standard rather than inventing it. Beginning with the modern era – and especially radically in Kant’s ethics – something similar is transferred to the human being: the normative order should arise not from nature but from the will and decisions of people themselves, for example through the idea of the social contract, whereby participation in a particular political order requires the individual’s personal consent to it.
Despite this difference, however, both traditions – ancient and modern – are essentially concerned with the same task: determining appropriate norms of human behaviour within a shared life. These may take the form of virtues in Aristotle, the categorical imperative as a universal moral law in Kant, or principles of justice in the later philosopher John Rawls. All these norms are intended to promote not only the personal good and individual happiness of each person. The key proposition is this: personal happiness cannot be realised within a community or society if that community lacks sufficient internal integration and solidarity. Effective cooperation between people is impossible without shared foundations – without a sufficient degree of mutual recognition among members of society. Such mutual recognition, in turn, is impossible without some collective conception of the “good life” or the common good.
It is precisely around the question of the principles on which society should exist or be built in order to achieve this common good that some of today’s most fundamental philosophical debates are taking place – above all between two major currents of contemporary philosophy: liberals and communitarians.
