What is Ethics and Narrative Ethics in Modern and Postmodern Writing?
Modern and postmodern writers approach ethics differently. To explore this assertion, I will briefly review modern and postmodern treatments of ethics before looking at narrative ethics. For modernist writers there are obdurate universal ethics that do not vary by time and place. And for the pro-modernist, the postmodernist encourages a life of lies and extreme relativism in which one can “say and do anything.” Postmodern ethics writers such as Bauman (1989; 1993), however question the ubiquitousness of universal ethics. A brief review of his work will set up a middle ground in what appears to be incommensurability and answer the following quest: Can postmodernists claiming the simultaneity of multiple positions and the illusion of universal standard, advocate ethical positions? I will focus on the issue of relativism since it continues to be an obstacle for cooperative science. I will first present the postmodern side, and then the modernist challenges. No Universalism and Postmodern
