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Who Counts It as Moral?

Loyalty, Sacrifice, Honour: A Kuçuradi Reading for Young Comrades on the Class of Dominant Morality

Author: Oğuz Demirkapı
Who Counts It as Moral?

Who Counts It as Moral?

A Kuçuradi reading for young comrades on actions counted as moral but not ethical

An assistant did not stay silent when her professor was dismissed from the university, and she wrote a statement. Staying silent was counted as "moral": loyalty, patience, career. Writing was ethical. This piece asks the class of the difference between the two.

Summer 1960. Under a law issued after the 27 May coup, the academics who would be remembered as the "147s" are removed from the university at a stroke. Among them is Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu of Istanbul University's Department of Philosophy. His young assistant, still twenty-four, daughter of a Greek family, knows better than anyone what it means, in the faculty corridors, to be "sensible": to bow the head, to wait for the period to pass, to get on with the new administration. All of these are, by the morality of that day, reasonable, even virtuous, behaviours. The young assistant does none of them; she takes a stand against the dismissals and writes a statement. Years later, when she sits the assistantship exam in the same department again, she will receive a full mark from one professor, a zero from another, an abstention from a third, and be counted "unsuccessful." That assistant's name is Ioanna Kuçuradi. And her whole philosophy is, in a sense, the conceptualisation of what she learned that summer: that an action's being "counted as moral" and its "being ethical" are not the same thing.

Dear Young Comrades,

This piece, too, has a direct occasion. Datça Philosophy and the Marmaris Philosophy Circle (MARFET), with the support of Datça Municipality, are holding a session at 18.00 on Wednesday 30 September at the Datça Democracy House: a talk by Ahmet Nohut titled "Actions Counted as Moral but Not Ethical — Through Ioanna Kuçuradi's Understanding of Ethics".

For us this is the third link in a series. On the occasion of MARFET's Nietzsche talk on 4 September we had read Nietzsche, in The Man Who Wept for the Commune, along the axis of what the enemy saw rightly; on the occasion of the Fromm talk on 18 September we had read Fromm, in From Having to Being: Reading Erich Fromm with Class, as "a comrade, but incomplete." Kuçuradi stands somewhere between the two: neither an enemy nor one of us. A philosopher who opened her own road with her own concepts and did not swerve from her principle in this country's hardest periods. We had already read her, in Reason and Praxis Against the Sophistries of Despair: Rebuilding the World with the Contemporary Antigone, Ioanna Kuçuradi, on the side of reason and praxis against the sophistries of despair. This piece is built on that one, but it focuses on another question.

Three details make this session additionally meaningful.

First, the comrade giving the talk is a graduate of Hacettepe University's Department of Philosophy. The person who founded that department in 1969 and ran it until she retired in 2003 is Kuçuradi herself. So in Datça a student will set out the thought of the founder of her own school; this is a sign that a tradition of thought is living in the provinces, on its own feet.

Second, the date. Kuçuradi was born in Istanbul on 4 October 1936. So four days after the session she will turn ninety. To discuss, while she is still alive, the thought of a philosopher who at ninety still gives interviews, still stands at the head of the Philosophical Society of Turkey, still writes: that is the best form of respect. Not commemoration, discussion.

Third, the place. Datça is the peninsula of ancient Cnidus; the home of Eudoxus, the mathematician-astronomer who studied at Plato's Academy and tried to explain the motions of the sky with geometry. As we wrote while tracing materialist philosophy on the Aegean shores in From Mythos to Praxis: Materialist Philosophy on the Aegean Shores and Humanity's Path to Liberation and while going to Amos, immediately beside Marmaris, in Human Action on the Sheer Slopes of Caria: A Materialist Journey to Amos, thought on these shores was born together with the concrete relations of labour and trade. That an ethics discussion is being held in a place named "Democracy House" should not be counted a coincidence either: the difference between morality and ethics is, in the end, a question of power.

Now let us come to that question.

Why Kuçuradi, why now?

The word "ethics" has never been used so much. Banks' "ethical principles," holdings' "ethics committees," artificial-intelligence companies' "responsible AI" declarations, hospitals' "ethics committees," "values education" in schools... Kuçuradi noticed this inflation long ago. In the interview she gave Cumhuriyet in February 2026 she was saying that the word ethics had become fashionable. The presentation of her 2019 book Ahlak, Etik ve Etikler (Morality, Ethics and Ethicses) opens with the same observation: those who use the word understand very different things by it; different names are given to the same thing, the same name to different things; and this confusion prevents people from seeing the value problems in life.

This is not an innocent problem of terminology. Whoever benefits from conceptual confusion also benefits from reproducing it. When a company's "ethics code" imposes on the employee duties of loyalty, secrecy and obedience, the code carries the name "ethics," but looked at with Kuçuradi's concepts it is a morality: the sum of the behavioural rules a given institution, at a given time, expects from its members so that its own order may continue. The question we asked in Who Holds the Leash on Artificial Intelligence?, when we discussed the artificial-intelligence companies' "constitutions" and codes of conduct, was exactly this: who holds the leash?

The same holds in the language of the state. When "the family" was again declared a project of national morality, we had asked, in Whose Family Is Safe?, whose family was safe. In this country the word morality is most of the time the name of a disciplinary apparatus.

Here Kuçuradi's distinction gives us a tool. We will also see the limits of the tool, but first let us get to know it.

A life: from the Zappeion to Hacettepe

We will not tell Kuçuradi's life at length; the pieces in the sources do that better than we can. But a few details are needed in order to understand her thought.

She was born in Istanbul as the daughter of a mother from Çorlu and a father from a family of migrants from Chios. Her mother's family had been forced to migrate from Çorlu to Istanbul when she was four. So Kuçuradi did not learn from books what forced migration, being a minority, and "othering" are.

In 1954 she graduated from the Zappeion Greek Girls' High School. A year later, on 6–7 September 1955, houses, shops, churches and schools in Istanbul's Greek neighbourhoods were plundered. We do not know from her own mouth what mark this event left on Kuçuradi's personal life; we will not attribute to her something we do not know. But we can say this: the society around a young philosophy student was, in those years, living the nakedest examples of "actions counted as moral but not ethical." We will return to this below.

In 1959 she finished Istanbul University's Department of Philosophy and became Mengüşoğlu's assistant. The 1960 scene in the opening belongs to these years. In 1965 she took her doctorate with the thesis "The Problem of Man in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche"; between 1965 and 1968 she worked at Atatürk University in Erzurum. In 1969 she founded the philosophy department at Hacettepe. In 1974 she led the founding of what is today the Philosophical Society of Turkey, and she has been the Society's president since 1980. At the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) she was first secretary-general, then president between 1998 and 2003; the first person from Turkey and the first woman elected to that office. Since 1998 she has held the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy and Human Rights; since 2006 she has directed the Human Rights Research and Application Centre at Maltepe University.

She also has a nickname. Her friends, especially the playwrights Güngör Dilmen and Kemal Demirel, call her "the contemporary Antigone": someone who does not spare her word, does not speak unnecessarily, is patient but does not swerve from her principle. The comparison itself is a summary of this piece's subject. Because Antigone's tragedy is precisely the clash of what is "counted as moral" with what is "ethical."

Antigone: the first morality–ethics clash

Let us recall the story. Creon, king of Thebes, forbids the burial of Polynices, who has made war on the city; the body is to be left to the dogs and birds. To obey the king's command, to protect the city's order, not to mourn a "traitor to the fatherland": that, by the city's morality, is the right thing. Polynices' sister Antigone buries her brother and is punished.

Kuçuradi's students and friends recall this scene often. The core of the reading reported in a documentary review published on Bianet is this: if an action done in a human way is at the same time counted a crime, the real crime belongs to the one who made the law that produced the clash.

Young comrades, write this sentence down. Because this sentence is the sentence of the physician who witnessed torture on 12 September and did not stay silent, of the worker who refused to scab, of the engineer who exposed her company's crime, of the assistant who stood by her dismissed professor. And at the same time it leaves a question open: who made that law, why did they make it, whose interest does it protect? Kuçuradi's philosophy is very strong on the first two questions. On the third, our word is needed.

The conceptual kit: morality, moralness, ethics

The core of Kuçuradi's contribution is that she separates words that are mixed together in everyday speech. Let us summarise these distinctions briefly, in our own words.

Morality: systems of value judgements

According to Kuçuradi, morality is the system of behavioural norms and value judgements that, in a given society, at a given time, in relations among people, persons are expected to follow, are encouraged to follow, or are forbidden to follow. These systems change from age to age, from society to society, even from person to person in the same society. That is why Kuçuradi speaks less of a singular "morality" than of plural "moralities."

The examples Harun Tepe gives, following Kuçuradi, are instructive: when we call an action "moral", we have sometimes only said that the action conforms to our group's value judgements, such as "virginity is honour" or "one does not smoke in front of one's elders." These judgements may be counted "good" in one place and "bad" in another. The relativity is here, and this relativity is real.

Moralness: universal norms

In a second sense "morality" means, independently of a given community's morality, moralness: norms such as treating people equally as human beings, not torturing, not practising racial discrimination, keeping one's word. These norms rest, directly or indirectly, on "knowledge of the value of the human being." The fine point Kuçuradi draws attention to is this: someone who follows these norms reduces the likelihood of harming the value of the human being, but this is not a guarantee. The norm, when knowledge is lacking, functions as a scarecrow.

Ethics: a field of knowledge

In the third sense, and the one Kuçuradi mainly uses, ethics is a branch of philosophy: a field of knowledge that produces knowledge which can be confirmed or falsified, and that examines the concepts of value, evaluation and meaning, above all the value of the human being. This is a very important claim, and a stand against the fashionable relativism of our age. According to Kuçuradi, not everything said about "good" and "bad" is equally arbitrary; an evaluation can be right or wrong, because an evaluation either rests on knowledge or does not.

Value judgement and evaluation

The practical counterpart of this distinction is the difference between a value judgement and an evaluation. A value judgement is ready-made, learnt by rote: "a woman's place is the home," "the boss is the door that gives bread," "one does not go against the state." An evaluation is made each time: one looks at what, in this situation, this action means for these people's possibilities. In Kuçuradi's eyes every action is singular and unique; to measure it with general value judgements, that is "evaluation by rote," is most of the time a wrong evaluation and leads to the spending of the human being's value.

The gap between the norm and ethical value

And finally, the sentence that directly explains the title of the talk. In a passage quoted from Ahlak, Etik ve Etikler Kuçuradi says: "It is also possible, in a given situation, to act in accordance with a norm and still act in a way that is ethically worthless." Elsewhere in the same book she also says that people can be forced to follow norms, but cannot be forced to act ethically; that this is something a person can learn only on her own account.

We think these two sentences will be the two axes of the session in Datça. We too divide the rest of the piece between these two sentences. We will follow the first to the end; to the second we will have a comradely objection.

"Counted as moral": the secret of the passive voice

The most interesting word in the talk's title is not "moral" but "counted." The passive. This refinement of Turkish hides a question: counted by whom?

An action's being counted as moral is a judgement's having become widespread and settled inside a community. But judgements do not fall from the sky. Which value judgements will become widespread in a society; which will be taught at school, repeated from the pulpit and the screen, which will be counted "shameful" and which "honour": that has to do with who, in that society, owns the means of speaking.

Marx and Engels had said this plainly in The German Ideology: the ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of that age's ruling class; the class that holds the material means of production also controls the means of mental production. Engels takes up the question of morality openly in Anti-Dühring: all moralities hitherto have been, in the last analysis, class moralities; they either justify the rule and interests of the ruling class, or, when the oppressed class grows stronger, they represent the indignation against that rule and the future interests of the oppressed. Engels's emphasis is on a fine point: there is progress in the field of morality as well, but a truly human morality, above the classes, will be possible only in a society in which class antagonisms have not merely been overcome but forgotten in everyday life.

Here we see Kuçuradi and Engels coming together in an interesting way. Both see "morality" as a historical, changing and relative phenomenon. Both think that this relativity is not an endless relativism, that a criterion can be found. The difference is here: Kuçuradi looks for the criterion in knowledge of the value of the human being; Engels asks after the historical conditions of that criterion's realisation. The first shows "what is ethical"; the second shows "why what is ethical does not become widespread and what prevents it." We need both.

Bertolt Brecht had tied this knot, much more crudely but just as accurately, in a scene of The Threepenny Opera (1928): first the belly is filled, then morality comes. This is not to belittle morality. It is a bitter observation of what hunger, insecurity and dependence force people to accept in order to be counted "moral."

Counted as moral but not ethical: the everyday morality of class

Now let us do what the title promises and look at concrete actions. In the table below, the left-hand column has behaviours widely counted in Turkey today as "moral," "right," even "virtuous"; the right-hand column has what we see when we look at these behaviours with Kuçuradi's question ("does this action protect the human being's value and possibilities, or spend them?") and with our question ("for whose benefit has this value judgement become widespread?").

Counted as moralLooked at with ethical knowledge and with class
Attachment to one's work: Unpaid overtime, not taking leave, going to work while ill is "devotion"The worker's health and right to rest, that is her possibilities as a human being, are being spent; unpaid labour under the name of "devotion" is transferred into the boss's till
Loyalty to the boss: "You do not betray the door from which you eat bread"; not speaking outside about a workplace accident, a fraud, a theft of wagesLoyalty here is the name of silence. It is not the door that gives bread, it is labour; the wealth behind that door has been accumulated from the labour of those who stayed silent
Scabbing: "I am doing my job, I harm no one"; not joining the strike and carrying on working is "responsibility"An action that cuts off one's comrades' search for their rights is selling shared human honour for one's own short-term security; it is becoming a voluntary instrument of the employer's "divide and rule" strategy
Woman's sacrifice: Taking on housework, the care of children and the elderly without pay is "the sanctity of motherhood"The woman's time, education, productivity, that is her human possibilities, are being spent; the cost of society's reproduction is taken off the backs of the state and of capital and dumped unpaid into the home
Putting a child to work early: "Let them have a trade," "let them learn to get their bread from a stone"The child's possibilities of play, education, development are being spent; cheap and uncomplaining labour is being legitimised under the names of "apprenticeship" and "vocational training"
Philanthropy: The rich helping the poor is "generosity," the recipient's gratitude is "fidelity"What ought to be demanded as a right is offered as a favour; the property relation that produces poverty stays invisible, the giving hand is exalted, the receiving hand is diminished
Paying one's debt: Paying the credit-card debt, the interest, the late fee at whatever cost is "honour"The debt relation is presented as a moral obligation and the order that produces the debt is whitewashed; the fact that wages do not suffice is rewritten as the individual's "extravagance"
Obedience to the state: Not speaking out against torture, dismissals, lock-ups "for the survival of the state" is "patriotism"Concrete people's honour is spent for an abstract "survival"; Kuçuradi's own generation paid the price of this morality in 1960 and again in 1980
Platform compliance: The courier's, the self-employed worker's accepting every job in order to keep the app score is "professionalism"The disciplinary norms of algorithmic management are internalised as "work morality"; the machine does the supervising, the platform takes the profit, the worker carries the risk
The corporate "ethics code": Not leaking internal correspondence, protecting "reputation"A morality that protects an institution's own order is presented under the name "ethics"; disclosure in the public interest can be punished as an "ethics violation"

The same mechanism is at work in every row of this table: a value judgement keeps a property relation going, and it does so through the conscience of those who pay the cost of that relation. Dominant morality's greatest success is to make force unnecessary. The police do not wait at the door; the human being disciplines herself in order to be "moral."

What Kuçuradi calls "evaluation by rote" is exactly this. But we take one step further: the rote does not form by itself. There is a school that makes it be learnt by rote, a screen that repeats it, a pulpit that approves it. And the owners of these apparatuses are not independent of the content of the rote.

Two naked examples from history

When it is a matter of "actions counted as moral but not ethical," two examples from this country's recent history are especially instructive; both are events lived directly by the community Kuçuradi came from.

The 1942 Wealth Tax. This tax, issued in the years of the Second World War, was in official discourse a call to "national sacrifice." In practice, however, non-Muslim merchants and tradespeople were taxed many times more heavily than their Muslim colleagues; those who could not pay had their goods sold and were themselves sent to labour camps at Aşkale. Behind the morality of "sacrifice for the fatherland" there was a transfer of capital from one ethno-religious group to another, largely to the newly sprouting "national bourgeoisie." The language of the morality was national; its content was of class.

6–7 September 1955. Crowds, stirred up by the false report that a bomb had been thrown at Atatürk's birthplace in Thessaloniki, plundered the homes, shops and places of worship of Greek, Armenian and Jewish citizens in Istanbul. Most of the plunderers believed they were acting that night from a "national feeling"; that is, in their own eyes they were moral. After the events, Istanbul's economic and demographic map changed lastingly; the question of whose property passed to whom was always drowned inside that night's "emotional" narrative.

These two examples matter so that young comrades see this: an "action counted as moral but not ethical" is not only an individual weakness, a person's wrong evaluation. Sometimes a whole social section, in an organised way, stirred from above, feeling itself in the right, spends the value of the human being. And behind this spending a property most often changes hands.

We had seen the same mechanism in 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup: the morality of "an end to anarchy" did its work at the same time as the closing of unions, the banning of strikes and the suppression of wages. Morality was speaking; capital was winning.

From the other side: counted as immoral but ethical

The title also has a mirror, and Kuçuradi's thought throws light on that mirror too. Throughout history many actions branded by dominant morality as "immoral," "disrespectful," "traitorous," "divisive" were actions that protected the value of the human being, even exalted it.

Workers' organising in the nineteenth century was counted as "an attack on property." The strike was long told as "betraying the door from which one eats bread"; it is still told that way. Women's demand for the vote was met as "destroying the home." Ruhi Su's songs were banned from the radio; we had told, in The Melodious Heart: Telling Ruhi Su to Young Comrades, what this country saw fit to do to him. Soldiers and technicians who exposed the state's war crimes were declared "traitors." And in 1960 a young assistant who stood by her dismissed professor received a zero from one examiner.

The lesson that follows is this: dominant morality's brand of "immoral" is most often a sign that the limit of the dominant order has been touched. This does not mean that everyone branded is in the right; as Kuçuradi insistently reminds us, every action must be evaluated one by one, with knowledge. But the brand itself is not evidence. When you hear that a worker, a student, a physician has been declared "immoral," your first question should be "what did they do?"; your second, "whose interest does this brand serve?"

What Kuçuradi saw, what she did not

As we did in the Fromm piece, let us draw up a balance sheet here too. We apply here the principle we set out in From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class: neither saint nor villain; neither consecration nor smearing. Kuçuradi is a great philosopher; that is exactly why she must be argued with. The table below is not a conviction; it is the summary of a comradely reading.

What Kuçuradi sawWhat needs to be added from the standpoint of class
Morality is a system of value judgements that change by place and time; when morality and ethics are confused, value problems become invisibleWhich of these value judgements become widespread has to do with the ownership of the means of production and of speech; the confusion is not a coincidence, it is most often the result of an interest
Ethics is a field of knowledge; what is said about "good" and "bad" is not equally arbitrary; one must not surrender to postmodern relativismWe agree entirely. Ethical knowledge also has historical conditions: without knowing the relations that systematically spend the human being's value, we cannot know the way to protect that value either
Every action is singular and unique; evaluation by rote spends human valueIt must be added that the rote is not without a subject: school, media, the religious institution and the workplace are apparatuses that produce and reproduce the rote
The human being is valuable because she is a being who produces value; to protect this value her possibilities must be developedThe question of who can develop those possibilities, whose time, knowledge, health is spent for someone else's profit, is the question of the property relation
People can be forced to follow norms but cannot be forced to act ethically; this is something a person will learn on her own accountTrue, but incomplete: ethical action, even if it begins individually, is most often learnt collectively. The strike tent, the union meeting, the solidarity network are schools in which people learn together the things they cannot learn "on their own account"
Human rights must be derived from knowledge of the value of the human being; the duties of states and institutions must be determined according to this knowledgeRights were never in history given by correct knowledge alone; the eight-hour working day, the right to a union, universal suffrage were won by paying their prices. Knowledge is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one

We want to dwell a little more on these last two rows, because this may be the most fruitful place in the Datça discussion.

"On one's own account," or together?

Kuçuradi's sentence on ethical action's not being forceable states a deep truth: you cannot make anyone honest by force, brave by force, solidaristic by force. A norm can be imposed; a virtue cannot. This is a strong objection to every kind of authoritarian "moral education" project, and we share this objection.

But this sentence, read alone, carries the risk of shutting ethics into the individual's inner world. Yet people most often learn ethical action not alone but together with others, inside a struggle. A worker who refuses to scab most often does so not because she has read a book of ethics, but because she wants to be able to look her comrade in the face. Solidarity is the collective form of ethical knowledge. Organisation is a knowledge apparatus that enables a person to see the things she cannot see on her own. We said the same thing when we recounted Fromm's questionnaire on Weimar workers: character is not an individual preference, it is a product of social relations; what will change it is again a social action.

Knowledge and power

Kuçuradi's whole effort rests on the belief that the spread of correct knowledge will lead people to make fewer wrong evaluations, and therefore that the value of the human being will be spent less. This is the noblest heritage of the Enlightenment, and we claim this heritage. As we also said in Objective Reality in the Theory of Knowledge and the Power to Transform the World, without correct knowledge there is no correct action.

But knowledge itself is also a matter of property. Which knowledge will be produced, which will be taught in schools, which will circulate on screens, is today under the control of a handful of companies and of the state apparatus. Kuçuradi herself must have seen this danger; the title given to one of her interviews shows it: "I am afraid human rights has already become a dangerous concept." A concept's becoming dangerous is its being used for other purposes; countries bombed in the name of "human rights," juntas set up in the name of "democracy" are the concrete forms of this danger. The seizure of the concept is the seizure of knowledge. And the subject of the seizure is always a class.

Marx had shown the limit of bourgeois rights at exactly this point in On the Jewish Question: the equal rights of the abstract citizen do not touch the inequality of the concrete human being inside property relations. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme he had also written that equal right, when applied to people in unequal conditions, reproduces inequality. Kuçuradi's understanding of human rights is an understanding that tries to go beyond bourgeois law, that places the value of the human being at the centre; that is why we respect it. But so long as it is not said openly that the greatest obstacle in front of that value's realisation is property relations, that understanding too carries the risk of remaining a well-intentioned piece of advice.

Today: as "ethics" becomes a company

In her February 2026 interview Kuçuradi was also speaking about artificial intelligence, and the sentence chosen as the interview's title was this: "We should fear ourselves, not artificial intelligence." She had also said earlier that we live in an age in which robots are being humanised and human beings robotised.

We agree with this observation, but with a question: who is "ourselves"? The managers of a few monopolies that develop, train, sell artificial intelligence and profit from it, and the millions of people who have produced those models' training data for free, are not parts of the same "we." As we said when discussing the seizure of the general intellect in Karaburun at Twenty: The Map of Labor, the Algorithm of Capital, what must be feared is not the machine but the ownership of the machine. The Machine Is New, the Chain Is Old.

And it is precisely these companies that have today become the greatest producers of "ethics." Every large artificial-intelligence company has a document of "ethical principles," a "responsible AI" team, a "constitution." Looked at with Kuçuradi's concepts these are not ethical knowledge, they are what she calls "ethicses": professional and institutional codes, behavioural norms that one is expected to follow while remaining inside a given order. As we saw in "We Stopped Them All": A Monopoly's Grammar of Self-Absolution when we examined an artificial-intelligence monopoly's language of self-absolution, these documents most often regulate not what the monopoly does, but how it will narrate what it does.

A company ethics board cannot question the company's reason for existing, that is profit. An "ethics" built around something it cannot question is, in Kuçuradi's language, a morality. In our language it is the morality of capital.

To young comrades: an exercise in thinking

Some of the young comrades who read this piece will be in Datça on the evening of 30 September; most will not. In both cases the suggestions below may be of use.

Ask the four questions together

At Knowledge Commons we approach every subject with three questions: In whose hands? Under whose control? For whose benefit? After reading Kuçuradi we suggest adding one more question to this trio: By whom is it counted "right"? Every time you hear a behaviour told as "moral," ask these four questions one after another. Most of the time the answer will take you to the property relation behind that behaviour.

Turn the value judgement into an evaluation

For a week, note the ready-made value judgements you hear in your workplace, at your school, in your family: "This is a family firm," "Don't ask too many questions," "One does not go against the teacher," "Girls don't do things like that." Then test each of them with Kuçuradi's question: when this judgement is followed, which human being's which possibility is, concretely, being developed, which is being spent? And with our question: when this judgement becomes widespread, who wins?

Read Kuçuradi from herself

The talk is a door, the book is the road. To begin we recommend Kuçuradi's Uludağ Talks (short and clear talks on the concepts of freedom, morality and culture), İnsan ve Değerleri (The Human Being and Their Values), Etik (Ethics) and the 2019 Ahlak, Etik ve Etikler. Her work on Nietzsche also offers an interesting ground of comparison for those who have read The Man Who Wept for the Commune: Kuçuradi reads Nietzsche not as a philosophy of aristocracy but as a source of the question of the value of the human being. Thinking about where her Nietzsche reading and ours part ways is a good exercise.

Apply the ethics of discussion to ourselves as well

Kuçuradi's distinction must be applied not only to the rulers' morality but also to the relations among ourselves. The left movement too has its own "moralities": unquestioned authorities, slogans learnt by rote, value judgements such as "do not criticise one of our own." We had taken up exactly this problem in our book Criticizing as Comrades, Advancing Together and in For a Left That Does Not Fear Criticism: Our New Book Is Out: to criticise a thought is not an attack; a thought exempted from criticism turns into rote. A movement that does not see the "counted as moral but not ethical" behaviours in its own ranks cannot criticise the rulers' morality in a convincing way either.

Ask questions at the session

For those who can go to Datça, we suggest a few questions that we think may enrich the discussion after the talk. You do not have to ask them as they stand; transform them in your own words, with your own curiosity:

  • What determines which value judgements will become widespread in a society? Should ethical knowledge also examine the conditions of this becoming-widespread?
  • If we accept that ethical action cannot be forced, how can people's learning ethical action together, inside a solidarity, be thought?
  • Where do companies' "ethics codes" fall in Kuçuradi's distinction: ethics, morality, or "ethicses"?
  • How does Kuçuradi's concept of "the value of the human being" stand in relation to the concept of the value of labour?

It is more important to put the question itself than to wait for answers. The most valuable product of a philosophy session is most often the question that remains in people's minds as they leave the hall.

Evaluate the session itself as well

Finally, look also at the form of the session. As we wrote in 'Event Organizing and Comradeship' Guide Is Out, taking care is an ethical matter. That a local philosophy circle can speak of Kuçuradi in a peninsula town is possible through the unpaid labour of those who organise that circle. To see that labour, to take part, to contribute, is the most concrete application of the ethics this piece proposes.

Dear Young Comrades,

The strongest side of Kuçuradi's philosophy is that it reminds us that the sentence "everyone does it this way" is not a reason. An action's being widespread, approved, applauded, even legal, does not show that it protects the value of the human being. In 1960 hundreds who stayed silent were counted "moral"; an assistant who wrote a statement acted ethically.

The only thing we add to this philosophy is a question: who counts what is "counted as moral"? Without asking this question, Kuçuradi's distinction can turn into a correct but lonely sage's voice. When we ask this question, the distinction turns into a tool of struggle: it teaches us to look behind everything that is told as "loyalty" in the workplace, "sacrifice" in the home, "patriotism" in the street, "responsibility" on the screen.

Antigone was alone when she buried her brother. Today, young people who see in whose interest the laws that produced that clash were written do not have to remain alone. Ethics is learnt on one's own account; but it is defended together.

So if you go to the Datça Democracy House on the evening of Wednesday 30 September, hold Kuçuradi with both hands: in one hand her careful distinction, in the other our question. And do not forget that the best birthday gift to that contemporary Antigone, who four days later will turn ninety, is not to learn her concepts by rote, but to keep thinking with them.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.

The event

Actions Counted as Moral but Not Ethical — Through Ioanna Kuçuradi's Understanding of Ethics

Talk: Ahmet Nohut (graduate of Hacettepe University, Department of Philosophy)

Wednesday 30 September 2026, 18.00

Datça Democracy House

Organised by: Datça Philosophy and the Marmaris Philosophy Circle (MARFET), with the support of Datça Municipality

Related pieces

This piece is a link in the series under the blog's #philosophy tag.

The local philosophy-circles series

Method and knowledge

Morality, family, state

Artificial intelligence and "ethics"

The Aegean and local philosophy

Guides

Sources

Kuçuradi's works and concepts

Life and interviews

Marxist classics

The Kuçuradi quotations in this piece are taken from secondary sources; the references to Marx and Engels are given in summary. Because we have no source for Kuçuradi's personal testimony on the events of 6–7 September 1955, those events are mentioned in the text only as the social background of the period.

Tags:#artificialintelligence#reality#morality#ethics#philosophy#ioanna#kucuradi#class#marfet#humanrights

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