ETHICS WITHOUT MORALITY,
POST-MODERN STYLE
Postmodernism creates an ethical dilemma that threatens to undermine the stated subjective values that are contained within the very fabric of postmodern thought, when dealing with the subject of ethics. The theories of personal freedom of choice, the ability to act in a self-determinative fashion, the need to protect civil liberties and human rights, the value of women as contributory enablers for the social matrix beyond the home: all appear to be lynchpins contained within postmodernisms fold. Yet each of these assumptions are germane to the conceptual idea of standards that extend beyond the individualist’s self-confining reality, and imply rights coupled with obligatory needs that are effective, thus supporting the value of human nature that exists with or without community.
Ethics of a social variety and those more narrowly confined to the privatized approach, consider the individual’s responsibility to care for both self and others, in a judicious fashion, which is necessarily self-limiting in the expression of activity. As with many philosophical considerations, risk is achieved when the subject under scrutiny is examined in an isolated format. Historical presence, communal pressure and individual responsibilities concerning self-survival operate in a cohesive expression that projects valuable standards of conduct that should be applied arbitrarily, if community is to be achieved. Discussing ethics, by necessitation, should extend beyond cultural confiners and be witnessed through the metanarrative’s paradigm. Teleological orderliness implies the need for conformity to external laws if natural order is to be advanced.
Responsibility is a means of conductivity for the centrifugal force that comprises ethical considerations. Postmodernism falls to the exceedingly great danger of the self-imposed Damocles sword of freedom without restriction, when morality becomes an imposed activity upon individuals, and a converse position of no morally binding dictum is espoused as a viable means of conduct. This creates an absurd conflict of interest that the postmodernist purist is hard pressed to resolve in a cohesive fashion: without entering into a postmodern type of fideism concerning the individual oratorical ejaculations of the philosophical musings by the postmodern advocates.
Which objective standard is appropriate for judging behavioral conduct historically? The re-evaluation of pre-Modern tribalistic necessities becomes relevant concerning ethics and postmodernism. Reification of by-gone standards of ancient culturalisms and moors, coupled with antiquated belief patterns seems to be the focal point of interest in historical subjectivism’s pursuit, as man seeks to inculcate his current realities with his primal past.
The meltdown occurs when the philosophical meanderings of postmodern assumptions concerning non-philosophically binding conditions that are directed into conformable comportments of categorical distinctions. A nonsensical absurdity, by necessitation, can be the inevitable result that can in turn lead to the allegation of the biblical assertions of ethical behavioralisms that extend through the pre-Modern, Modern and postmodern mindsets. Ethics of conduct conform to the idea of law existing as a reflective quality that belies the notion of self-sufficiency. Law and order imply ideological realities that exist as binders for the mini-narratives, granting form and substance throughout creation.
