The Turn to Ethics.

• Author: Pickett, James R.
• Position: Book Reviews

The Turn to Ethics. Edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 2000; pp. xi + 256. $85.00; paper $19.95.

In recent history, argumentation has taken several turns. One of the most enduring paths was blazed by Robert Scott, who argued that rhetoric and argumentation were epistemic, a claim advanced in varying degrees by the likes of Farrell, Goodnight and Willard, A more recent generation turned to the inspiration of the Birmingham Centre, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism to develop critical and cultural studies of argumentation. With the twin movements of postmodern culture and globalization of the economy, social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman argue that we should focus on the ethics of the relationships influenced by these configurations. Public arguments structure those constellations. But some might argue that the ethical road has already been marked by rhetorical materialism and virtue theory, a la MacIntrye.

Neither of these two positions sparked debate over an ethical theory of argumentation and its requirements. Nor did these two positions exhaust all the possibilities of ethical theory. Therefore the question of an ethical turn in argumentation is still an open one, and the inquiry into such a theory for our "New Times" (to borrow Stuart Hall's neologism) is even more relevant. The resources of philosophy and cultural studies might be helpful in working through our responses to these issues.

The volume under review provides an anxiety over ethics as an answer. That apprehension concerns whether an ethical turn, in both everyday life and literature, is an attempt to displace politics with ethics. One source of that trepidation is articulated in the editors' introduction to the volume, in which they examine how a number of public scandals and controversies have lead to a view of ethics as "moral orthopedics." The other fount of concern are those theorists who haunt this collection: Michel Foucault and his intellectual parent Friedrich Neitzsche, Jurgen Habermas and his antecedent Immanuel Kant, and Emmanuel Levinas.

They materialize in Judith Butler's essay on "Ethical Ambivalence," causing her to worry that this turn becomes an excuse for a kind of thin moralism from which even Levinas may provide no respite. They inhabit James Gilroy's essay on "The Ethical Practice of Modernity," leaving him to fret as to whether or not citizens can develop...