Shaping a Modern Ethics

<b>Is there any such thing as a single ethical system to which all human beings could conceivably subscribe?</b> <br/><br/> 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. <br/> <br/>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.<br/> <br/>Must we then simply do without ethics in the sense of a universal ethical method? <br/> <br/>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: <br/> <br/>- The we of irony whose speakers share a strictly preter-verbal knowledge which is concealed in their actual utterances <br/><br/>- 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 <br/><br/>- The we of feminism a separate we from that embracing people who happen to have been born women.