Benjamin Bennett

Shaping a Modern Ethics (eBook, ePUB)

The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 216
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Februar 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781350122871
• Artikelnr.: 58392684

Autorenporträt

Benjamin Bennett is Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, and Interim Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Virginia, USA.