Survival among the remnants' : sociology and ethical revision

Abstract

This thesis explores the way in which questions of morality and ethics have been articulated in debates around modernity and postmodemity. Questions about ethics are significant for sociological inquiry that appreciates the extent to which the present is marked by a number of predominant complex and contradictory forms of change. These changes spell the demise of the absolute assurances and guarantees of old. Foremost in this discussion are the decline of the once widely accepted metanarratives and the disappearance of universality-claiming truths. This decline is accompanied by the rising pluralisation of authority and an increasing proliferation of choices to be made by individuals. As well as mediating the constitution of the ethical subject, shifts in forms of intellectual communication and self-understanding have also affected the status and meaning of Ethics (as a proper name) and ethical-political practices in the contemporary context. Set against the backdrop of the modem antithesis of ethics and reason, and motivated by attempts to better think how we should live, contemporary social and cultural theory has begun to address the general problem of identity and new ways of thinking about sociality in relation to the constitution of the ethical subject. Three separate discourses, which provide springboards from which to address the socalled postmodern ethical (re)tum, are interrogated as responses to the western present. Carol Gilligan's feminist ethics of care offer an alternative to the marginalisation of women as ethical subjects in orthodox moral philosophy; Michel Foucault's poststructuralist account of the "death of man" reconsiders the ethical subject in view of a retrospective analysis of Antiquity ethics; and Zygmunt Bauman's specific articulation of postmodern ethics posit a recognition of the primacy of alterity over identity. Finally, the position is taken that inherited sociological epistemology and practice seems to be unable to address, or effectively deal with, questions of identity that are presently confronting us, and that accounts of the constitution of the ethical subject "outside" the orthodox sociological discursive configuration may offer invaluable food for thought.