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Modern Morals in Postmodernity: A Critical Reflection on Professional Codes of Ethics

Centre for Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Nijmegen

This article provides a critical analysis of the topical debate about the revision of anthropological codes of ethics in the 1990s. Ethical codes are approached from the viewpoint of postmodern ethics, which rejects the foundation of morality in a hierarchy of values on which professional codes of ethics are based. Whereas ethical codes are founded on the proposition that morality is non-ambivalent and universal, in postmodern ethics it is argued that the condition of morality is essentially ambivalent and not universalizable. The institutionalization of moral rules and regulations in an ethical code for anthropologists is therefore exposed as characteristic of morality in modernity, allowing the substitution of a code of ethics for the moral self. Postmodern ethics instead aims at the emancipation of the autonomous moral self and the vindication of its moral responsibility. In many ways this anti-Enlightenment project of postmodern philosophy bears interesting similarities with the premodern tradition of Socratic philosophy.

Key Words: codes of ethics • moral philosophy • postmodern ethics • social anthropology

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