The Communicative Relationship Between Dialogue and Care By Marie Baker-Ohler and Annette Holba

The Communicative Relationship Between Dialogue and Care By Mari ...

Chapter Intro:

Introduction

Read

ABOUT
- Data
- Description
- Reviews
- About Author
- Cover
RESEARCH
- Bookmarks
- Notes
FONT
- Font Size
  - x-small
  - small
  - medium
  - large
  - x-large
- Line Height
  - 1.00
  - 1.25
  - 1.50
  - 1.75
  - 2.00
- Letter Spacing
  - Default
  - 1 pixel
  - 2 pixels
  - 3 pixels
  - 4 pixels
DOWNLOAD
- Complete Edition
PAGE
- TOC
- Copyright
- References
- Index

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

In postmodernity we are free of oppressive duties, free of commandments, free of absolute obligations, free of responsibility. Bauman claims that in a postmodern moment,

The idea of self-sacrifice has been delegitimized; people are not goaded or willing to stretch themselves to attain moral ideals and guide moral values.…Ours is an era of unadulterated individualism and the search for the good life, limited solely by the demand for tolerance (when coupled with self-celebratory and scruple free individualism, tolerance may only express itself as indifference). (1992, p. 3)

The postmodern moment is then viewed as ethics free. Persons are concerned only for themselves and have completely rejected any sort of responsibility to community and the world around them. Persons are no longer guided by any “ought,” obligation, or duty. This is consistent with some criticisms of the early sophists, as they were labeled moral relativists (Dues & Brown, 2003).

MacIntyre (1984) referred to this lack of guiding ethics as living in a time “after virtue” (p. ix). According to MacIntyre, the language of morality has passed from a state of order to a state of disorder. We are no longer guided by common narratives that clearly define the virtues of our society. Instead we are left with relativism, each person deciding for himself in each situation right from wrong, unable to judge anyone else. MacIntyre defined this relativistic phenomenon as emotivism:

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character…being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there is none. (1984, p. 12)

In other words, personal preference rules and traditional ethical judgment is impossible. MacIntyre (1984) lamented the condition of emotivism