As we know, Adorno claims that we have a kind of precognitive, intuitive sense of the awfulness of social reality evil of the world. This can take the form of a mood of despair at the greyness or the horror of the world. Or it can take the form of the ‘shudder’, a negative form the experience of wonder at the world, a kind of involuntary fright at the awfulness of reality. Adorno is of the view that we are living in a situation of moral emergency or of ongoing moral catastrophe. In that context, the single ideal of 'never again Auschwitz' stands as a kind of absolute moral minimum that must be striven for whatever else can or cannot be achieved .

Finlayson says that the problem with Adorno's ethics of resistance is that it:

....provides little or no practical orientation to the present, for it appears to ask us to resist everything at once. What can total resistance amount to, practically speaking, apart from total inactivity?... Adorno thought an ethics of resistance appropriate to the modern world precisely because it contained so many developments that were worth resisting....If we take Adorno’s own life as an example, we can see that in his view an ethics of resistance need not be an excuse for resignation and a recipe for quietism.

Finlayson goes on to argue that if this so then:

"...we have to modify our understanding of the second central thesis of Adorno’s negativism, that the social world is radically evil. There must be something positive, some reliable values in virtue of which these acts of resistance are to be performed. It would be self-defeating for Adorno to ground an ethics of resistance simply on the extant negative value of the social world. We have already seen that an ethics of resistance presupposes at least the virtues of Mündigkeit, modesty and affection. Adorno cannot claim that what makes these virtues, or their exercise, good or right, is merely that they somehow resist the extant evil of the social world, that they hinder the course of that world or prevent its reproduction. For that would imply that acts of Mündigkeit, modesty and affection, if they are good, are only good as means of resisting incorporation into the radically evil social world. But if such acts are only instrumentally valuable, they are part of the very context of universal fungibility they are supposed to resist; they are themselves radically evil."