Shaping a Modern Ethics

The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism

von Benjamin Bennett

216 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

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 Jürgen 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.

• Themen: Philosophie und Religion Philosophie Themen der Philosophie Ethik und Moralphilosophie
• ISBN: 9781350262317
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 26.08.2021
• Größe: 164 x 232 mm
• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC