Postmodern Ethics

by Bauman, Zygmunt

• ISBN13: 9780631186939
• ISBN10: 063118693X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-12-08
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

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 actually represent a dawning, rather than a twilight, for ethics.

Author Biography

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Socilogy at the University of Leeds. He is known worldwide for his recent work in the social theory of medernity and postmodernity, in books such as Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust, and Modernity and Ambivalence. He is also the author of Thinking Sociology (Blackwell, 1990).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective	1	(15)
Moral Responsibilities, Ethical Rules	16	(21)
Moral uncertainty
Ethical quandary
Moral judgement expropriated and reclaimed
Postmodernity: morality without ethical code
The Elusive Universality	37	(25)
Universalism and its discontents
The re-rooting of the uprooted self
The moral limits of ethical universality
The solitude of the moral subject
The Elusive Foundations	62	(20)
Building on distrust
Morality before freedom
The unfounded foundation
The unbearable silence of responsibility
The Moral Party of Two	82	(28)
The asymmetry of 1-Thou
Aporia of proximity
Morality as caress
Maladies and remedies and more maladies of love
Beyond the Moral Party	110	(35)
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
Social Spaces: Cognitive, Aesthetic, Moral	145	(41)
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
Private Morals, Public Risks	186	(37)
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
An Overview: In the End is the Beginning	223	(28)
Moral progress?
The new world disorder, or re-spacing the world
Insecurity and cruelty
Vagabond and tourist: postmodern types
Postmodern wisdom, postmodern impotence
Index	251