Postmodern Ethics

This revealing book offers a postmodern view on the moral actions. It's not possible to be a person wrapped up happily in her own egoism, because the nature and destiny of the Self are inseparable from the unconditioned and unlimited responsibility for the Other, according to the thought of Levinas, who provides Bauman with the foundation for his th theorization of the postmodern ethics. Moral impulses are innate and the individual, not the society, is their only guardian. In the time of the postmodern the individual discovers an authentic moral condition and measures himself with the autonomy - and the loneliness - of his moral choices. Bauman severely criticizes modernity ( the Enlightenment) for constructing an utilitarian ethics based on the idea of an universal code of rational rules and on the moral unreliability of the individual. The moral condition of the individuals, in the postmodern time, is marked, on the contrary, by a sort of ambivalence, not-rationality, uncertainty and not- universality. The reader, and the moral actor, will be deeply moved by this book about the "morality without an ethical code'. Thisbook does not provide any answer to the moral dilemmas but invites us to consider that the only way to ensure the morality of our choices is to suspect that our Self is never moral enough.

In this imposing work, Bauman gives a readable account of the situation of ethics in today's world. First, he explains the central arguments around ethics in "modernity" before turning to how these are transformed now in "postmodern" thought. These are not easy issues to address, but Bauman does a pretty good job in bringing it into language that most people will be able to understand, while not watering down the thoughts of postmodern ethicists such as E. Levinas, whose work Bauman admires. Since Levinas is so difficult to read and understand, I think that this book can serve as a useful introduction to his thought, the conditions surrounding it, and the thought of other such thinkers.Bauman's work is of course informed by his own work and thinking on these subjects, and readers should also look to his book "Liquid Modernity" in which he presents his views. I only give this book 4 stars, however, because it remains difficult reading - it could have been slightly more well written.