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willow
i generally actually really like this train of thought, and buy the central negative premise. however, i think it's a bit too optimistic about what morality can do for us "after the revolution", as it were.
fabian freyenhagen, adorno's practical philosophy: living less wrongly, pg 92 What is clear from these considerations is that Adorno is not claiming that there are no longer moral demands, but, rather, that many of these demands cannot be realised any more by individuals. In fact, the explanation of why the individuals cannot live a moral life any more relies on the discrepancy between what is morally demanded (changing the social world) and what the individuals are capable of (limited forms of resistance to it). To change our current social conditions of unfreedom is a moral demand first of all because this unfreedom undermines individual autonomy and morality, so that a change of society is in fact the necessary condition for morality to become actual.71 In this sense, the demand for social change is a moral demand to put in place the conditions of morality, and it is the first and foremost moral demand. For without it, there can be no others. Moreover, changing our social world is not only a moral demand because this would realise the conditions for morality, but also because the current state of unfreedom is characterised by other fundamental evils (see Chapters 1–2). In particular, the modern social world produced Auschwitz. More generally, the current social world produces evil continuously, by undermining our freedom, by relying on depersonalisation and exploitation, by neglecting our material needs, and by causing physical and psychological suffering as well as by leading to political and economic crises with their knock-on effects such as war and racism. In this sense, we can see now why we live in conditions of a moral catastrophe (and why, hence, socially acceptable behaviour is both insufficient and to some extent countermoral). We live in such conditions in the double way just indicated. Firstly, it is presumably morally extremely problematic to live under conditions where morality itself is blocked, when it would be a real possibility to actualise it …
willowDec 3, 2024
adorno, 167-168, problems of moral philosophy differently phrased.' On the question of whether moral philosophy is possible today, the only thing I would be able to say is that essentially it would consist in the attempt to make conscious the critique of moral philosophy, the critique of its options and an awareness of its antinomies. In these lectures I have tried to provide you with something like a model with which to do this. More than this, I believe, cannot in all decency be promised. Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest. I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness - rather than covering it up with sticking plaster - will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good lite today would consist in resistance to the forms 168 of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged. I may add that, negative though this assertion is, it can hardly be much more formal than the Kantian injunction that we have been discussing during this semester. So what I have in mind is the determinate negation of everything that has been seen through, and thus the ability to focus upon the power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us to a vastly greater degree. Little else remains …