Zygmunt Bauman: from the Criticism of Universalism to the Unlimited Moral Responsibility

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman is an iconic figure in sociology. But perhaps the most important part of Bauman’s work is his reflections on ethical issues and morality. Bauman’s main idea on morality is the impossibility to reduce the moral act to something beyond morality, including ethics, understood as the universal code of normative rules or the body of knowledge about morality. According to this approach, ethics is assessed as what limits unlimited and rationalizes the non-rationalized. Ethics is closely connected with society, whose institutions performs a similar with modern ethics function, but is directed not at theoretical knowledge, but at practical action. It does not mean that Bauman rejects ethics and society, on the contrary, he recognizes their crucial significance because they are capable, both to create the conditions for a moral act as well as to distort it. Bauman upholds the primacy of morality over gnoseology, society and ontology. His criticism of universalism is connected with the protection of the idea of the autonomy of morality in the modern society inclined to totalitarianism. At the same time, Bauman formulates the idea of the universal morality and defends it in the context of the liquid version of modernity. He urges not only the jettisoning of xenophobia and agree to live with the Other, but to build lives around responsibility for the Other or “Being for the Other”. Bauman’s reflections on the situation with migrants and refugees in today’s world and the call for the responsibility for them closely link Bauman’s thought with everyday life.