Postmodern Ethics

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.

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).

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

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials