ABSTRACT
In a less well-known set of lectures on morality, Theodor Adorno offers the modest claim that there can be no morality without an “I,” a first-person perspective through which one poses the question, “What ought I to do?” or, indeed, “what have I done?”. He writes, for instance, that “it will be obvious to you that all ideas of morality or ethical behavior must relate to an ‘I’ that acts” (Adorno 1997, 28). And yet, it is equally clear to him that there is no “I” who can fully stand apart from the social conditions of his or her emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms that, as norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely individual meaning.
