Shaping a Modern Ethics: The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism

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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: Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chapter 1 Introduction: Ethics, “Literature,” “the Human,” and Irony Chapter 2 Nietzsche and Rorty: The Ethics of Irony Chapter 3 Kant and Leibniz Chapter 4 Lessing: History, Irony, and Diaspora Chapter 5 Lessing and Freud: Theory, Wisdom, and the Scope of Ethics Chapter 6 Habermas, Rorty, and Machiavelli Chapter 7 Woolf, Bachmann, Wittig: Toward a Feminist Ethics Conclusion Bibliography 9781350122857_txt_index1_ePDF.pdf PERSON Index 9781350122857_txt_index2_ePDF.pdf Subject Index