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

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:

- The ＂we＂ of irony, whose speakers share a strictly preter-verbal knowledge which is concealed in their actual utterances

- The insistent exclusive ＂we＂ of a group that has neither its own physical locality nor even a clear intellectual identity, comparable to the ＂we＂ of Jews in the diaspora

- The ＂we＂ of feminism, a separate ＂we＂ from that embracing people who happen to have been born women.

Benjamin Bennett isKenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, and Interim Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Virginia, USA.