Maria Ossowska

Works

• 1947Foundations of a Science of Morality

  Outlines a descriptive science of morality distinct from normative ethics: the analysis of moral concepts, psychology and sociology of morals.

• 1956Bourgeois Morality

  Reconstructs the bourgeois ethos – thrift, reliability, work – from Benjamin Franklin and other sources as a historical type of morality.

Position

Ossowska is regarded as the founder of the science of morality in Poland. In the analytic spirit of the Lwów–Warsaw School she separated the normative question of what is right from a descriptive one: what moral concepts mean, which norms groups hold, how they arise and change. Her “Foundations of a Science of Morality” (1947) outlined three branches – an analysis of moral concepts, a psychology and a sociology of morals – and “Motives of Conduct” (1949) criticised attempts to reduce morality to self-interest. Her historical studies reconstruct types of moral ideal: the bourgeois ethos (1956), the knightly ethos and its variants, including the English gentleman (1973), and the moral thought of the English Enlightenment (1966). In “Moral Norms” (1970) she analysed and classified norms. In the bourgeois ethos she discussed the theses of Max Weber and Werner Sombart on the spirit of capitalism and read Benjamin Franklin’s maxims as a largely secular morality of reliability and thrift. Under Stalinism her work was attacked as “bourgeois” and non-Marxist. Her approach influenced Polish sociology and the history of ideas; critics have asked whether a strictly descriptive study of morality can avoid hidden normative choices, a question Ossowska herself discussed in her work on method.

Life & context

Maria Niedźwiecka was born on 16 January 1896 in Warsaw. She studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, mainly with Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Jan Łukasiewicz, and received her doctorate there in 1921. In 1924 she married the sociologist Stanisław Ossowski, with whom she worked closely until his death in 1963. She habilitated in 1932 and taught at the University of Warsaw; during the German occupation she took part in the clandestine university teaching in Warsaw. After the war she was professor in Łódź and from 1948 held the chair of the history and theory of morality at the University of Warsaw. In the Stalinist years of the early 1950s the chair was dissolved and she was barred from teaching; she continued her research and returned to the university after 1956. She was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, lectured abroad, including in the United States, and published several of her books in English. She died in Warsaw on 13 August 1974.

Further main works

• Motives of Conduct (Motywy postępowania, 1949)
• Sociology of Morality (Socjologia moralności, 1963)
• Moral Norms (Normy moralne, 1970)
• The Knightly Ethos and Its Variants (Etos rycerski i jego odmiany, 1973)