Physiological mechanisms of moral education: based on the materials of A.A. Ukhtomsky’s report “THe dominant as a factor of behavior”

Relevance. Based on an analysis of the transcript of A.A. Ukhtomsky’s report “The Dominant as a Factor of Behavior” (1927) and his correspondence with the student E.I. Bronstein-Shur, the article reconstructs the doctrine of the physiological mechanisms underlying the education of moral behavior. The authors demonstrate that this report was the first consistent natural-scientific substantiation of morality in the history of science, wherein ethics is derived not from abstract philosophical categories but from objective laws governing the functioning of the central nervous system. In his report to students, and the following day in a personal letter to a student of Leningrad State University (LSU), A.A. Ukhtomsky explains that the dominant focus of excitation determines the vector of behavior and, like any dominant, obeys physiological laws (inertia, summation, irradiation, lability). Consequently, this dominant can be shaped through upbringing and self-education – and then, in a situation of moral choice, it is precisely this dominant that will determine the choice of behavior.

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