Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME OUT OF POSTMODERNISM?... 243
claims of the ethical systems of modernity in that they attempt
to substitute “heteronomous ethical duty” for “autonomous
moral responsibility.” All such attempts to universalize, he
maintains, are inherently depersonalizing in that they reduce
the human individual to an interchangeable entity (47) and
thereby deny or curtail “individual moral discretion.”
Over against this unacceptable attempt to control human
behaviour through imposed ethical codes, Bauman proposes a
concept of morality as “moral condition” and “moral impulse”.
This condition begins where ethics ends. To be universalizable,
that is to be expressable in terms of rules, morality would have
to be “calculable” in the sense that it would involve purpose (54),
reciprocity (56) and contractuality (58). Following Levinas, Bauman
conceives of morality as being intrinsically uncodifiable because
the moral subject is not interchangeable (the moral “we”
is not the plural of “I”). The moral subject must respond to the
Other not on the basis of rules formulated elsewhere but as a
unique and irreplaceable individual prompted by his or here
own moral impulse (86) which is of a thoroughly personal nature
(60). The obligations of the moral subject are addressed “to
me and to me only”(51) and my moral responsibility is not universalizable.
A moral relationship is thus essentially asymmetrical
and non-reciprocal, at least at the outset. In fact, the test of
moral authenticity is the genuinely autonomous nature of any
moral act: if it has been decided by others, or if it is calculated
and reasoned, then it is not really a moral act at all (123).
Morality, unlike ethics, Bauman argues, is inherently and
profoundly ambivalent (42) and cannot be contained in the neat
categories of modernist ethical thought. It is not the product of
any code, it is not subject to being guided by rules, it is not
founded on anything but itself, it is not a calculation or a purpose,
but rather a spontaneous, pristine, brute fact. It does not
alter the messiness and ambivalence of everyday life (78), but
can nonetheless be discerned as a stubbornly perduring reality.
It is only by replacing the modernist obsession with foundations
and universals with the humble stone of moral impulse that we
can rightly understand morality. Consequently morality is the
realm of “perpetual and irreparable anomie” which defies all social
regulation of an ethical kind.
Despite these sweeping claims, Bauman insists that he does