Ethics And Morality In The Postmodern View

The ethics of postmodernity is an important question in Bauman's framework of modernity and postmodernity. He started with the view of postmodernity,traced back to the history of modern ethics' formulation and it's theory support; and took the Holocaust an special example to show the internal contradictions of modern ethics and it's terrible result;Bauman revealed the theoretic and practical inevitability of modern ethics' predicament throught criticizing the modern rationalism and universalism. Following the prevalent of irrationalism and plurality in post-modernity, the ethics turn it's direction from heteronomous ethics to individual morality. This turn not only showed the crisis of postmordern ethics,but also indicated the return of morality's real meaning-morality couldn't be achieved by heteronomous ethics regulation, it's an duty for the other in the original scene when people encounter as "face".So postmodernity is a time to destroy morality ,and also a time to recovery it.The paper take the ethics as an special narrate of Bauman's modernity and postmodernity framework, stress the application of the modernity and postmodernity theory in his ethics and take it as the academic background and theoretical foundation. Specifically, the paper has four parts.The first part is introduction.The second part is modernity's defect and ethics' predicament.Firstly,the paper reveals the internal defect of modernity-the result of universal ration is the controlling of society and nature and individual losing their freedom and independence .through the analysis of modernity and postmodernity in the contex of Bauman's postmodernity. Then under this background, the Holocaust offered an special example for modern ethics' predicament,thepaper analyzed the elective public affinity between modernity and the Holocaust from modern gardening ambition,order pursuing, bureaucracy and moral neutrality,these uncorvered the prologue of ethics' recollect. At last,the paper summarized that as the center of modern ethics, ration and universality caused the predicament: Excessive depending on ration leads to ethics' heteronomy, sedulously persuing universality leads to the losing of individual's moral ability.The third part is the possibility of postmodern and morality's return. Fristly the paper revealed the feather of postmodern:unration and pluralism, through analyzing Bauman's post-modernity and the possible post-modern society. Then under this background the paper described the crisis of postmodern ethics and the turning from ethics to morality,revealed that the individual morality and polynary selection were the mew face of postmodern morality. At last,the paper research the question to reconstruct the postmodern morality in the foundation of the dialectical analysis of individual morality:the postmodern recognition of morality and the return of morality of "for others".The forth part is analysis and criticize .This part mainly clarified the center question of Bauman's postmodern ethics-ethics and morality;analyzed the possibility of morality's reconstruction by individual morality and indicated the challenge from the uncertainty of individual ,the inharmony of plural culture and the colonolization of the life-world .Sum up all of these,the paper extracted the task that post-modern must face: freedom and responsibility. At last,the paper treated of the attempts to reconstruct the post-modern morality inclouding A.MacIntyre's Virtue theory and J.Habermas'communicative ration and give myselfves expectation.