Koni as one of the founders of deontology in Russia
Authors: Kodintsev A. Ya. , Rybin D. V. , Shtykova N. N. 
Published: July 2021

The subject of research is the concept of practical ethics by Anatoly F. Koni who was an outstanding Russian lawyer in the late 19th – beginning of 20th centuries. Particular attention is paid to his ethical research in the article. The interest in this area is not accidental. The principles of professional ethics formulated by Koni have become largely a model for Russian lawyers.

The purpose of the article is to identify the stages of the formation of Koni’s ethical theory, its main elements and sources, which made it possible to reconstruct the ideas of the famous lawyer.

As the main research methods the authors applied the problem-chronological approach and the systemic approach, considering Koni's ethics as an emerging theory, which turned into a complete concept in the 1920s. The structure of the ethical concept was outlined by Koni in 1919 in the Program "Ethics of Cohabitation".

The main results, scope of application. It was revealed that for Koni issues of legal ethics were only part of his colossal work on ethics. He has been developing ethical themes since the 1880s. He formed the foundations of the theory, developed the main types of ethics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the idea crystallized in the 1920s. In particular, he formulated the types of ethics: public order, financial, literary, public events, medical, conscience, national, personal behavior, etc. After going through three successive stages in the course of the study Koni developed the foundations of practical ethics, which could serve as a model for creating relations in a new society as he assumed. Koni chose ethics as the object of his scientific research. He made great efforts to develop his deontology, which we will not find any analogues of. He contributed to the philosophy and philosophy of law. He summarized all his works on deontology in the work "Ethics of the Cohabitation", which was prepared in 1927, but have never been published.

Conclusions. Koni not only collected moments of crisis in contemporary ethical manifestations, analyzed the works of the main deontologists, analyzed in detail the types of ethics (some of which he formulated for the first time in science), but also formed a harmonious practical ethics of human personal behavior. At the same time Koni assumed such a development of a sensitive personality that would be able to take into account the smallest men-tal characteristics of other people and behave tactfully as much as possible. He returned to ethical issues in numerous works over and over again whether he wrote about social ills, about psychology, about expertise. He saw the main causes of deformations in the destruction of ethical principles. "Moral perversions" threatened the very existence of the state. He perceived the fall of Russia in 1917 as a logical completion of the disintegration of ethics. Koni saw a future salvation in the revival of Russia. His ethical ideal was Christian in nature in many ways, although Koni himself almost never connected ethics with religion in his works. Here he acted as a Kantian, as a supporter of the categorical imperative.