Shaping a Modern Ethics: The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism
Professor Benjamin Bennett (University of Virginia, USA)
Shaping a Modern Ethics: The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism
Professor Benjamin Bennett (University of Virginia, USA)
Is there any such thing as a
single ethical system to which all human beings could conceivably
subscribe?
The short answer is no; and
most people, being tolerant, would probably agree with this answer. Yet most people, precisely in being
tolerant, also subscribe to an idea of human rights which presupposes just
such a universal ethics.
This basic question of ethics
is similarly treacherous when approached on a higher technical level. Specialists have long recognized that
Kant’s categorical imperative is neither theoretically nor practically
tenable. But efforts to revive and
repair the Kantian project-including especially the monumental work of Jurgen
Habermas-have all themselves been theoretically questionable, while
developing a complexity that makes them impractical.
Must we then simply do without
ethics in the sense of a universal ethical method?
By way
of a close study of literary and philosophical texts, from Freud to
Machiavelli, Benjamin Bennett shows why the failure of a universal or propositional
ethics is indeed unavoidable. He uncovers a modern non-propositional ethics
that cannot be grasped in a single theoretical move but can only be approached as a collection of
instances of a modern ethical we , three key examples of which Bennett
explores in this book:
- The we of irony, whose
speakers share a strictly preter-verbal knowledge which is concealed in
their actual utterances
- The insistent exclusive
we of a group that has neither its own physical locality nor even a
clear intellectual identity, comparable to the we of Jews in the
diaspora
- The we of feminism, a
separate we from that embracing people who happen to have been born
women.
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