Relationship of the Categories of "Guilt" and "Unconscientiousness" in Russian Civil Law
The last decade was marked by a large-scale introduction of the categories of “conscientiousness” and “unconscientiousness” into the Russian legal system. Previously used only in institutions for the acquisition and protection of property rights, where conscientiousness was understood as ignorance of certain circumstances of the receipt of a thing in the illegal possession of a person (“did not know and should not have known”, was in a state of so-called “apologetic error”), the category acquired the character of the basic principle of civil legislation, in the form of a general requirement addressed to the subjects of all civil legal relations: to act conscientiously in the establishment, implementation and protection of the entity overt civil rights and in the performance of civil obligations (Clause 3 of Article 1 of the Civil Code). In particular, from the position of conscientiousness, it was suggested to assess the behavior of the offender in a protective relationship. This innovation gave rise to the problem of competition of unconscientiousness with such a condition of civil liability as the guilt of the offender. The solution to this problem is seen in the identification of the true meaning of the category of “conscientiousness” as a requirement: it is an objective criterion for assessing a person's behavior as “right”, approved by law, and unconscientiousness is seen as violating the “moral spirit”, the meaning of laws, and not their letter, “wrong”, not approved by law. The presumption of conscientiousness, enshrined in Article 10 of the Civil Code, means the assumption of “correctness” of the person's behavior in terms of morality. The presumption of guilt, enshrined in Article 401 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, means that if the person's moral behavior is proven to be “wrong”, it is considered guilty until the opposite is proven.