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February 27, 2006
An article by James Gordon Finlayson on Adorno's ethics.It is entitled, 'Adorno On The Ethical and The Ineffable', and it argues that Adorno's ethics are problematic. We have meet Finalyson before.
Finlayson says that:
Adorno does have an ethics...In Minima Moralia and in the posthumously published lectures on The Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno advances what we can best describe as an 'ethics of resistance'..The 'ethics of resistance' is a normative ethics. It is not just a vague gesture towards "the ethical", to use the meretricious facon de parler that has become the vogue: it is a normative moral theory which attempts to answer the questions of what one ought to do and why.
Finlayson goes on to say that:
The ethics of resistance is Adorno's response to the thesis of Minima Moralia, that there is no correct way of living a false life. It is, as we will see, a kind of practical counterpart to the aporetic and self-limiting techniques of conceptual thinking he develops in Negative Dialectics. Adorno's ethics consists in various strategies of self-conscious non-cooperation with institutionalized forms of social unfreedom and with prevailing norms and values. He maintains that practical resistance to the bad is possible even in the absence of any positive conception of the good.
An ethics of resistance is an ethics that is designed first and foremost to prevent the worst, where the worst is the 'repetition of Auschwitz' or of something similar.
This ethics is a virtue ethics based around the virtues of a refusal to capitulate or not cooperating or the power of self-determination, humility ( the refusal of self-assertion) and affection (sensitivity to and solidarity with others, vulnerability) in living a damaged ethical life. Finlayson says:
The exercise of these virtues is not constitutive of human flourishing, so they are really virtues in Aristotle's sense. They are at most prerequisites of the only good life available in a radically evil world. They are personal qualities that individuals must possess if they are to be in a position to perform ethical acts of resistance, and further, supposing there are enough people willing and able to exercise them, if they are to prevent the reoccurrence of Auschwitz or anything similar.
These considerations show that Adorno's ethics of resistance is a normative ethics. And a normative ethics presupposes the availability of some kind of normativity.
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Thank you for bringing this to our attention! I've downloaded it and I'll read in the next few days.