In an interview on Disability

Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics is your next choice.

I am very interested in ethics, particularly bio ethics. In 2000 I wrote a book called Help. At that stage I was really interested in care. Disabled people said, We don’t want care; we want independent living.  We want to be able to control our lives.  I think, well, yes of course, but at the end of the day many disabled people are receiving care in different ways. So the disability movement says we want to be able to pay for it. Give us the money and we will employ people to do it for us and that will solve our problems.

But, of course, it doesn’t really get away from the fact you are still dealing with two or more individuals in a relationship, you are still dealing with feelings of dependency, obligation, gratitude and equality. And I was very interested in those issues. When I was writing my book one of the books I read was Zygmunt Bauman’s. His theory is that we don’t have the old rules or foundations in the way that we understand ethics in this postmodern era. So how is it that we can still do this stuff? He basically talks about care for the other and about being oriented towards the needs of other people. It fits well with the feminism ethic of care, for example.

I am very interested in the question of how to live virtuously and I think sociologists sometimes shy away from that issue. Postmodern Ethics is a sociologist battling with this issue.