August 20, 2005
In his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics R.M. Bernstein says that from the perspective of intimacy (and its voice of care) the fragmentation of modernist morality into Kantian (good willing) and utilitarian (good ends) strands is a function of the distortions incurred by mass society; and that some reconstructed conception of virtue ethics matches our deepest intuitions, and ethical reality itself when the distortions are removed.
I'm very partial to that account. It expresses what I've felt, and struggled with, in my personal life; it makes sense of my recoil from both kinds of rule-bound moralities; and it reinforces my return to a virtue ethics concerned with character and a flourishing human life well lived. So I have read Adorno's Minima Moralia in terms of a virtue ethics.
Bernstein states his thesis this way:
It does not seem implausible to suggest that Kantian and utilitariarian morality are moralities for hard times, moralities for a world in which neighbours have become strangers and the coordinating mechnaisms for social reproduction are impersonal ones like the market, rather than intersubjective discursive practices ... Kantian morality answering the need for guidance in personal interactions between strangers, and utilitarianism the need for policies applicable to the institutions that coordinate the public actions of such individuals? Might not the oft-noted difficulties of with Kantian morality and utilitarianism derive from the fact that, at bottom, they are remedial moralities, moralities standing in under adverse conditions for morality proper?(pp.47-8)
Good question. I reckon they are damaged moralities.
That is why Adorno makes his stand in the sanctuary/enclave/refuge of private life and seeks models of an undeformed moral life, even this is beyond reach and we are not able to form an image of such an ethical life. But we can take the pulse of rationality (right living) within the relationships of personal life.
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But we can take the pulse of rationality (right living) within the relationships of personal life.
I don't see how this could be Adorno's view. Wouldn't Adorno also say that the hollowing-out (disenchantment?) of social relations also deforms personal life, because personal life now has to compensate for the hollowing-out of the social sphere? The family, for example, became under capitalism "the haven in a heartless world." But Freud shows us what a breeding ground for neurosis the modern family is. (Here, I'll confess, I'm thinking of Freud from the perspective constructed by Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus.)
Moreover, by locating a sort of rationality in personal life (the family?), the position becomes very much like the "communitarianism" of Alastair MacIntyre. And there is something right in thinking of Adorno along those lines; Adorno is a virtue ethicisit. But he's a negative virtue ethicist, because he--unlike MacIntyre--is aware that the virtues require social institutions for their expression and cultivation, but it is precisely such institutions which capitalism undermines and enfeebles.
This is why the Kantian and utilitarian moralities are the best we've got. A society which could restore virtue ethics could not be organized as our modern/postmodern advanced industrial capitalist societies are organized. That's a strong claim, but I'm fairly sure that Adorno is committed to it.