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ryo
willowJul 5, 2025
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 …
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.