Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME OUT OF POSTMODERNISM?... 255
rationalism, but a radical divergence on the role than reason
should play in morality. If John Paul II disagrees with some of
the excesses of modernity he is even more dubious about the
kind of scepticism which leads to a total distrust of reason.
Hence the irony of those passages in which the Pontiff of the
Catholic Church exhorts philosophers to take courage and have
confidence in the key resource of their science.
The second tenet in which Bauman’s vision was articulated
reads “Spontaneous moral impulse is the only source of morality”.
Here the divergence with Fides et ratio becomes categorical and
diametrical in that what Bauman is proposing negates the possibility
of ethics as understood in the encyclical. As we have
seen, the Catholic vision of morality hinges on an acknowledgement
of the truth and a realization of one’s autonomy by obedience
to the truth about what is good. The two central themes in
Bauman’s position which deny this possibility are his disassociation
of morality and ethics and the idea of moral ambivalence.
In his account of morality Bauman ascribes a kind of messianic
role to “postmodern ethics” in that it saves and liberates
people from the strictures of the ethics of modernity. The agenda
here is again set by modernism, most obviously by the efforts
of natural law theorists to establish the foundations of morality
in nature or in history and by Kant’s effort to construct an ethics
which can be universalized. It is important to notice that Bauman
does not refute these theories but simply takes it for granted
that they have been surpassed. He then goes on to debunk not
natural law or the categorical imperative, but the very idea of
foundations and universals, indeed the very idea of ethics. His
attempt to separate ethics and morality is simplistic in itself and
becomes highly tendentious when he seeks to set up an autonomous
postmodern morality against a heteronomous ethics.
This is to move too quickly from a partly justified critique of excessive
codification in modernist ethics to a rejection of all
codes and an identification of morality as that which lies beyond,
or comes before, all codes. Operating on the presupposition
that morality cannot be expressed in a code, he presents a
postmodern morality as a kind of surrogate ethics. It is one thing
to acknowledge the existence of a variety of codes, it is a second
thing to induce from this fact that there are no standards of
judgement between the codes and it is a third, and much more