Abstract

The article is an attempt to indicate the presence of the ethics of civic virtues in Polish ethics, both old and modern, which is worth in-depth attention. Problems of civic morality have constantly accompanied ethics and morality in Poland since the Renaissance. Its content was usually a reflection of critical reflection on the defects of civic morality, especially of the nobility, and over time of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time it was normatively constructive as historical and political changes and the scope of civil society expanded, formulating “the ideal of the citizen in a democratic system”. The author of the article selects from the history of Polish ethics the most important figures who address the issue of virtue ethics, showing its constant presence in history, using the prism of civic ethos as a key element for the ethics of public life. It was difficult to prove the existence of a specialized section of civic ethics, but the normative civic ethos can be reconstructed from the perspective of the ethics of virtue and social ethics in a broader sense. From the historical perspective, this ethos appears both as a certain set of practices, which was only outlined in the context of the article, and as an ordered product of normative thought.