Bauman, Zygmunt and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness

The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity is the most recent addition to Zygmunt Bauman's oeuvre, one of the most prominent sociologists of our time.It is a captivating dialogue between Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, a professor of Politics at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania, on the banality of evil in contemporary capitalism.According to the authors, a new, nondemonic, ambivalent form of evil characterizes contemporary society and this is a growing moral insensitivity towards the others around us and their suffering.This moral numbness is not bounded to certain fixed territories or designated groups.Rather, it has become the underlying logic of every aspect of our lives, which explains the urgency the authors feel to account for it and seek for possible alternatives.Bauman and Donskis respond to this challenge of our current epoch with a rich theoretical discussion informed by several key figures of modern Western thought, ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Simmel, from Anthony Giddens to Immanuel Levinas.Moral Blindness cannot be understood in isolation from Bauman's earlier works, particularly Liquid Modernity (2000).The book is a written exchange of ideas between Bauman and Donskis.It is composed of five chapters, plus an introduction.Each chapter opens with a set of questions Donskis poses and it continues with both authors' reflections.The authors ask how we can understand morality in the liquid modern world and their thesis of moral blindness centres on the concept of the "adiaphorization of human behaviour".Simply put, it refers to leaving certain acts and groups of humans "outside the universe of moral obligations" (39), hence freeing oneself from the responsibility of taking a moral stance towards such acts or people.The main dynamic behind the "adiaphorization of human behaviour" is the transplantation of the logic of the market and the consumer-commodity relation into human relations.This logic pervades our lives, from love and friendship, to education and politics.For instance, it turns "old-fashioned" forms of friendships into "liquid friendships" (e.g.Facebook), turns citizens into

Blindness · Epistemology · Modernity · Psychoanalysis · Sensitivity (control systems · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Optometry

• Planificación urbana posible, imaginario, existencia y cultura

  Open Access•Alfredo José Altamirano-Enciso•Tempo Social•2021

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