Abstract
When pressed, many people now claim that moral choices depend on “How-I-Feel,” a stance that coheres with the postmodernist notion that human ethics have no foundation. Kramer shows that traditional faiths and modernist reasoners (usually consequentialist) have struggled to respond satisfyingly to the postmodern dilemma, the lack of agreement about ethics. But he also argues that postmodernist scepticism fails to account for evolution-based ethical universals and for the increasing agreement about human rights, often arising out of faith traditions. After examining the weaknesses of Zygmunt Bauman’s “other”-based ethics and also market-based ethics as they respond to the postmodern dilemma, Kramer argues that in practice postmodernity is marked by a provisional consensus about contractarian processes and human rights duties.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Okaka Opio Dokotum, “Re-membering the Tutsi Genocide in Hotel Rwanda (2004),” African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review 2:3 (Fall 2013): 129–50. Linda Melvern, “Hotel Rwanda – without the Hollywood Ending,” Guardian, 17 November 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/hotel-rwanda-hollywood-ending.
- 2.
Twenge, Me, 27; Twenge and Campbell, 206. James, 16. Men were more likely to justify their cheating than women were.
- 3.
Shea, 237–8. Jaime L. Natoli, Deborah L. Ackerman, Suzanne McDermott and Janice G. Edwards, “Prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome: a systematic review of termination rates (1995–2011),” Prenatal Diagnosis 32: 2 (February 2012): 142–153, Wiley Online Library, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pd.2910/full.
- 4.
Bibby, 8, 213.
- 5.
Angus Reid, 10, 21–2.
- 6.
Taylor, Sources, 211–47, 188–93.
- 7.
C. Smith, 48–9, 52, 203.
- 8.
Rebecca Eckler, “Hey mom, I’m so high right now!” Maclean’s, 22 February 2016, 79.
- 9.
Vollmann, Rising, 85, 93.
- 10.
Hobbes, Ch. 29, 365.
- 11.
Vollmann, Rising, 94.
- 12.
Vollmann, Rising, 467.
- 13.
Vollmann, Rising, 34.
- 14.
Vollmann, Rising, 448.
- 15.
Vollmann, Rising, 461–71.
- 16.
Vollmann, Rising, 414.
- 17.
Vollmann, Europe, 645.
- 18.
Joyce 117.
- 19.
Boyd, Origin, 170, 196. Sugiyama, 188–9.
- 20.
Flesch 4, 10. Readers anticipate vindication of the innocent and punishment of the guilty (Flesch, 163–4).
- 21.
Flesch 78–81, 90–1.
- 22.
Panych, 37, 40, 57, 92, 87–8.
- 23.
Douzinas, 50, 55. For human rights as a “hegemonic ideology,” see Freeman, 204.
- 24.
Douzinas in Goulimari, “Introduction,” 6.
- 25.
Douzinas, 52. Douzinas applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to the human rights subject, who supposedly desires a missing object to fill her lack, “the unattainable ‘right to be loved’” (Douzinas, 66). Applying Occam’s Razor to this overly complex psychic process, I would say that people simply don’t want to be harmed.
- 26.
One of the most devastating critiques of Foucault’s thought belongs to Habermas: Foucault can give no account of the normative functions of his own discourse (James Miller, 458).
- 27.
Douzinas, 51.
- 28.
Pinker, Better, 384, 386,411–12, 429, 436, 438, 440.
- 29.
Pinker, Better, 149–52, 390, 45, 454–71; Pinker, Enlightenment, 223.
- 30.
Statistics Canada, “Homicide offences, number and rate, by province and territory,” 2014-12-01, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/legal12b-eng.htm.
FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, 2013, Table 8, Michigan, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-US-2013/tables/table-8/table-8-state-cuts/table_8_offenses_known_to_law_enforcement_michigan_by_city_2013.xls.
- 31.
Douzinas, 53–4.
- 32.
Douzinas, 56.
- 33.
Freeman, 11.
- 34.
Freeman, 42.
- 35.
Henderson, 78–9. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism” brochure, http://www.venganza.org/images/spreadword/sk_brochure.pdf.
- 36.
Charles in Lipovetsky, 8, 11.
- 37.
Putnam, 258–9.
- 38.
Putnam, 261; CDC 2013 survey; Twenge, iGen, 88.
- 39.
Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com, 1 January 2013, https://twitter.com/mmflint/status/286023749197774848, retrieved 28 April 2015.
- 40.
A. O. Scott, “The Black, The White and the Angry,” The New York Times, 24 December 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1, retrieved 28 April 2015.
- 41.
Tarantino, Interviews, 74, 95–6.
- 42.
Tarantino, Pulp, 29–30.
- 43.
Pulp Fiction, 22.
- 44.
As of 7 May 2015.
- 45.
Pulp Fiction, 42–3, 156.
- 46.
Spike Lee, Spike Lee Twitter, 22 December 2012, https://twitter.com/SpikeLee/status/282611091777941504, retrieved 28 April 2015.
- 47.
Tarantino, Interviews, 91.
- 48.
Hart, 420.
- 49.
C. Smith, 48.
- 50.
Gregory, 182, 190, 184, 77.
- 51.
Pew, “World Publics,” 33–4. Angus Reid, 21.
- 52.
Pinker, Better, 60.
- 53.
Gregory, 196.
- 54.
Gregory, 378.
- 55.
Pinker, Better, 127–8, 427–8. Statistics Canada figures, reported in McKnight, 38–41. Some of these social problems declined from the 1970s to the 1990s, but rates were still higher than in the early 1960s.
- 56.
CDC 2013 survey.
- 57.
McKnight, 38–41.
- 58.
Pinker, Better, 128. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2013 survey. According to Pinker, the statistics on drug use and overdoses point to decreases in use by younger generational cohorts, while Baby Boomers still account for the majority of the drug problem as they age. Pinker, Enlightenment, 184.
- 59.
In Canada, 16% of young people smoked marijuana or hashish in 1984, 18% in 1992, 37% in 2000, and 32% in 2008. Other illegal drugs were used at a rate of 11% in 1984, 8% in 1992, 14% in 2000, and 12% in 2008. Smoking dropped from 30% in 1984 to 23% in 2008, while the consumption of alcohol dropped slightly from 76% in 1984 to 71% in 2008 (Bibby, 75–6). For American high school students, marijuana use increased (though down from a high in 1999), while smoking and the use of most hard drugs declined between 1991 and 2013 . Pinker, Better, 128. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2013 survey.
- 60.
Bibby, 211.
- 61.
Pinker, Better, 84.
- 62.
Haidt 22.
- 63.
Pinker’s much broader analysis in The Better Angels of Our Nature points at the complex interrelation of a number of historical factors: the state’s increasing monopoly on violence, the growth of commerce, feminization, cosmopolitanism, and the escalator of reason.
- 64.
Gregory, 189.
- 65.
Haidt, 257, 265, 267.
- 66.
Putnam 66–7, 117.
- 67.
Putnam, 136–7.
- 68.
Putnam, 137.
- 69.
Haidt, 236, 266.
- 70.
Hauser calls such donations selfish, 288.
- 71.
Gregory, 231, 182.
- 72.
de Waal, Bonobo, 56.
- 73.
Gregory, 213, 381.
- 74.
Gregory, 219.
- 75.
Shafer-Landau, 270.
- 76.
Norenzayan, quoted in De Waal, Bonobo, 219.
- 77.
De Waal, Bonobo, 220.
- 78.
Bibby, 10.
- 79.
Gregory, 77, 188, 357.
- 80.
Gregory, 245, 254, 308.
- 81.
E.O. Wilson, Consilience, 278.
- 82.
Pinker, Enlightenment, 11.
- 83.
Sam Harris, Moral, 65.
- 84.
Sam Harris, “Science.” Even the usually more circumspect Joshua Greene holds out hope that brain imaging will give us a real way of measuring happiness (Greene, 166).
- 85.
Churchland, quoted in Sam Harris, Moral, 68.
- 86.
Sam Harris, “Science.”
- 87.
Sam Harris, Moral, 64.
- 88.
Dawkins, 247, 250, 252.
- 89.
Winnipeg Free Press, 23 May 2015.
- 90.
Indeed, Putnam has shown that political cynics, for example, volunteer less than other people do (Putnam, 132).
- 91.
Dawkins, 253.
- 92.
Dawkins, 298–300, 261.
- 93.
Twenge, Me, 162.
- 94.
Dawkins, 300.
- 95.
See Nicholas Wade, “Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome,” New York Times, 12 Feb 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/science/13neanderthal.html, and Zach Zorich, “Should We Clone Neanderthals?” Archaeology 63:2, March/April 2010, https://archive.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html.
- 96.
Grayling, 8:11–12.
- 97.
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, “TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR A GLOBAL HUMANISM,” 2007, http://www.thecodeforglobalethics.com/pb/wp_ff9e877a/wp_ff9e877a.html.
- 98.
Greene, 25.
- 99.
Joyce, 159.
- 100.
Grodal, Embodied, 191.
- 101.
Pinker, Better, 90.
- 102.
Fight Club, Dir. David Fincher, Twentieth Century Fox, 1999, 46:55.
- 103.
Hein et al. Activation occurred in the nucleus accumbens.
- 104.
See Roberts, 68.
- 105.
Joyce 227.
- 106.
Haidt, 53–4.
- 107.
Joyce, 159–63.
- 108.
Shafer-Landau, 77, 88. de Waal, Good-natured, 38; Bonobo, 163. Greene, 184, 186.
- 109.
JustForLaughs TV, “Baby Stroller Falls in Water Prank,” uploaded 22 May 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNOvlymO_sw, accessed 6 May 2015.
- 110.
JustForLaughs TV, “Smoking Baby Prank,” uploaded 24 February 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvUgUKguDsc, accessed 6 May 2015.
- 111.
See McGonigal, 195–7, 202.
- 112.
Greene 141–2.
- 113.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 61.
- 114.
Rorty, xlii. Bérubé, Rhetorical, 45, 51; and Liberal, 241–2.
- 115.
Bérubé, Liberal, 249, 256–7.
- 116.
Haidt, 125, 271. Haidt calls himself a utilitarian. This is strange, considering that consequentialism tends to distrust instinct and emotion in favour of a rational calculus. Haidt seems to recognize this, and at moments he caricatures both the utilitarian and the Kantian positions. Haidt, 272, 126 .
- 117.
de Waal, Good-natured, 38.
- 118.
de Waal, Bonobo, 20.
- 119.
Hauser, 44.
- 120.
Charles Taylor, Sources, 284.
- 121.
Greene, 133.
- 122.
Greene, 137–43.
- 123.
Haidt, 89, 74.
- 124.
Joyce 130, 136.
- 125.
Foucault, Madness, 64.
- 126.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 49; Discontents, 51.
- 127.
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, “TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR A GLOBAL HUMANISM,” 2007, http://www.thecodeforglobalethics.com/pb/wp_ff9e877a/wp_ff9e877a.html.
- 128.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 180. Bauman, quoted in Jacobsen et al., 178.
- 129.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 54, 53.
- 130.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 55–6.
- 131.
Madeleine Bunting, “Passion and pessimism: Zygmunt Bauman.” Guardian, 5 April 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/apr/05/society/print.
- 132.
Putnam, 118–19.
- 133.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 78–9.
- 134.
Bartoszewski, quoted in Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 80.
- 135.
The numbers are totals as of 3 July 2018, taken from the website for Scientists Greater than Einstein, ScienceHeroes.com, http://www.scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=258&Itemid=27#Lifesavers%20in%20Book. See also Pinker, Enlightenment, 62–7, 75–6, 176–90; and Amy R. Pearce, “About the Numbers,” Science Heroes, http://www.scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=57.
- 136.
Freeman, 108.
- 137.
Thomas Urban. Aida Edemariam. For the evidence against Bauman, see the web portal, WPolityce.pl, “Kim naprawdę jest Zygmunt Bauman?” [“Who Really Is Zygmunt Bauman”], 25 June 2013, http://wpolityce.pl/polityka/160560-kim-naprawde-jest-zygmunt-bauman-przeczytaj-tajny-dokument-bezpieki-i-tlumaczenia-socjologa-dla-brytyjskiej-prasy. Bauman’s interpretation of the Holocaust as a failure of “modernity” cannot be wholly independent of his experience of Communist “modernity.”
- 138.
John Carroll, 147.
- 139.
Bauman, Discontents, 208; Jacobsen et al., 240.
- 140.
Putnam proves that percentage-wise, the economy has little effect on these changes. Putnam, 123. Twenge, iGen, 174–5.
- 141.
Putnam, 120.
- 142.
Twenge and Campbell, 252–4.
- 143.
Twenge, Me, 241; Twenge and Campbell, 252–4.
- 144.
Putnam, 128–9.
- 145.
Angus Reid, 35.
- 146.
Putnam, 119, 67.
- 147.
Twenge and Campbell, 252–4.
- 148.
C. Smith, 68, 71.
- 149.
Putnam, 119.
- 150.
Twenge and Campbell, 251, 83.
- 151.
C. Smith, 71, 68, 175.
- 152.
Greene, 263–4.
- 153.
On the significance and rise of the close-up, see David Williams, Imagined, 168–9.
- 154.
Douzinas, 66.
- 155.
Gladwell, 291–3. Crime rates rise when people question the legitimacy of their government, as in the US during the 1960s and in post-Soviet Russia (Pinker, Enlightenment, 173–4).
- 156.
de Waal, Bonobo, 160.
- 157.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 13.
- 158.
de Waal, Bonobo, 172–3, 150.
- 159.
de Waal, Bonobo, 170–1, 175–6.
- 160.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 111.
- 161.
Hauser, 289.
- 162.
Twenge and Campbell, 286.
- 163.
Vetlesen argues that while Bauman fears the state’s threat to individual morality, he doesn’t fully consider the ways that the state safeguards against the individual’s immorality—Bauman prefers Foucault to Durkheim (Vetlesen, 258). If it’s true that we’d always rather fight the previous war than the one we’re in, it may be that Bauman (like many others) is still fighting previous war against totalitarianism, admittedly an important struggle.
- 164.
Hood, 187.
- 165.
Twenge, iGen, 279.
- 166.
Vetlesen, 256.
- 167.
de Waal, Good Natured, 183.
- 168.
Pinker, Better, 124.
- 169.
Shafer-Landau, 301.
- 170.
Freeman, 125.
- 171.
Freeman, 120.
- 172.
Fargo, 62.
- 173.
Heath and Potter, 77.
- 174.
Johnson, 181–2.
- 175.
de Waal, Bonobo, 17–18.
- 176.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 11, 13. Discontents, 48.
- 177.
Pinker, Better, 691.
- 178.
Meredith, 657, 673–4.
- 179.
Heath and Potter, 326–7, 332.
- 180.
Freeman, 99–100. Pinker, Better, 682–4.
- 181.
Pinker, Better, 628, 636–7.
- 182.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 57–9. Jacobsen et al., 241.
- 183.
Lipovetsky, 84–5.
- 184.
Heath and Potter, 313. Even those who defend the moral value of markets recognize that markets rely on virtues derived from other institutions such as the family or the church. See Wight, 130.
- 185.
McGonigal, 103–4.
- 186.
Stiglitz, 206. Elizabeth Lopatto, “Genetic testing for breast cancer gets more affordable,” The Verge, 21 April 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/21/8458553/color-breast-cancer-gene-testing-brca-myriad.
- 187.
The prices and nationalities appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, 23 May 2004.
- 188.
Mitchell, Bone, 299.
- 189.
Atwood, Year, 7.
- 190.
Atwood, Oryx, 126.
- 191.
Freeman, 4–5, 37. Charles Taylor sees human rights—“the notion of rights as prior to and untouchable by political structures”—as the clearest expression of a modern moral order “underlying the political, which the political has to respect” (Taylor, Modern, 173).
- 192.
Taylor, Secular, 572.
- 193.
Freeman, 65, 87.
- 194.
Hunt, 27.
- 195.
Freeman, 41. Pinker, Enlightenment, 418–9. Hunt, 20. Jean Cohen, too, thinks that the search for the foundations of human rights is not a priority, and that we shouldn’t rest human rights on any particular conception of the good (Cohen, 181, 188).
- 196.
Christopher Farris and Keith Schnakenberg, “Human Rights Protection,” in Roser, Human Rights I.1, https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights. As well, capital punishment has declined steeply, so that now only one-fifth of the world’s countries still execute people. Pinker, Enlightenment, 209.
- 197.
Rawls, 118–23.
- 198.
Vollmann, Rising, 130.
- 199.
Pinker, Better, 556.
- 200.
Nussbaum, 314, 306.
- 201.
Sen, 226–9, 13–15, 399–400.
- 202.
Panych, 30.
- 203.
Rawls, 53.
- 204.
Greene, 16, 147, 184, 176, 302–3.
- 205.
Greene, 173, 163.
- 206.
Su, 12, 175.
- 207.
Atwood, Year, 430.
- 208.
Atwood, Maddaddam, 263, 367, 369, 378.
- 209.
Mitchell, Cloud, 248.
- 210.
Christian Welzel, cited in Pinker, Enlightenment, 224–8. This social liberalism, however, doesn’t necessarily imply a belief in liberal democracy, as can be seen by youth support for anti-system parties of the left and the right. Mounk, 120–3.
- 211.
In the 1960s, the homicide rate in the US more than doubled, “from a low of 4.0 [per 100,000] in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980. The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades” (Pinker, Better, 107). Nevertheless, the worst homicide rate in that 30-year period—“10.2 per 100,000 in 1980—was a quarter of the rate for Western Europe in 1450, a tenth of the rate of the traditional Inuit, and a fiftieth of the average rate in nonstate societies” (Pinker, Better, 116).
- 212.
Pinker, Better, 117–18.
- 213.
Pinker, Better, 109–10; Twenge, iGen, 279.
- 214.
Pinker, Better, 106.
- 215.
Pinker, Better, 125.
- 216.
Putnam notes that the percentage of guards, police, and lawyers grew a great deal since 1970, and this no doubt had an effect too (Putnam, 144–5).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kramer, R. (2019). Ethics: “How I Feel at the Time”. In: Are We Postmodern Yet?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30569-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30569-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30568-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30569-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)