(P/B) POSTMODERN ETHICS

Παρουσίαση

'Postmodern Ethics is a major event in social theory. It is a lucid subversion of many of the pieties of subversion which rule the postmodern imagination. It is a forward- rather than backward-looking book which will generate much debate in the next few years.' Richard Bennett
'Quite the most eloquent anatomist of modernity and postmodernity writing in English.' New Statesman & Society
Has morality reached the end of the line? Are we witnessing the 'demise of the ethical' and the transition to a new era 'beyond duty'? Have ethics, in the postmodern turn, been replaced by aesthetics?
According to many, whether newspaper commentators or academic theorists, postmodern times bring 'emancipation' from moral standards, freedom from duty and disavowal of moral responsibility.
As an antidote to such fashionable pronouncements, Zygmunt Bauman's powerful and persuasive study of the postmodern perspective on ethics is particularly welcome. For Bauman the great issues of ethics have lost none of their topicality: they simply need to be seen, and dealt with, in a wholly new way. Our era, he suggests, may yet prove to represent a dawning, rather than a twilight, for ethics. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Introduction: Morality in Modem and Postmodern Perspective
1. Moral Responsibilities, Ethical Rules
Moral uncertainty
Ethical quandary
Moral judgment expropriated and reclaimed
Postmodernity: morality without ethical code
2. The Elusive Universality
Universalism and its discontents
The re-rooting of the uprooted self
The moral limits of ethical universality
The solitude of the moral subject
3. The Elusive Foundations
Building on distrust
Morality before freedom
The unfounded foundation
The unbearable silence of responsibility
4. The Moral Party of Two
The asymmetry of I-Thou
Aporia of proximity
Morality as caress
Maladies and remedies and more maladies of love
5. Beyond the Moral Party
The earthquake of the Third, or the birth of society
Structure and counter-structure
Out-rationalizing the moral impulse
Out-aesthetizing the moral impulse
The natural history of structure and counter-structure
The postmodern divorce
Exit the nation-state, enter the tribes
6. Social Spaces: Cognitive, Aesthetic, Moral
Knowing the Other, knowing of the Other
The alien next door
The arcane art of mismeeting
The stranger's aporia
Moral spacing: dismantling the cognitive space
The aesthetic space
Togetherness as playground
The managed playground
Moral spacing: dismantling the aesthetic space
No man's land, but one's own
7. Private Morals, Public Risks
Means unbound
Technological dissembly of the moral self
'Risk society': technology's last stand
The snake chewing at its tail
In search of ethical solutions to modernity's problems
8. An Overview: In the End is the Beginning
Moral progress?
The new world disorder, or re-spacing the world
Insecurity and cruelty
Vagabond and tourist: postmodern types
Postmodern wisdom, postmodern impotence
Index