ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Bauman (1993), Ahmed (2000), Irigaray (1991), Foucault (1986) and Taylor (1992) to construct more positive accounts of contemporary morality. The chapter draws on these theorists to conceptualise how self, emotions and cultural ideals of authenticity and self-improvement can work as meaningful moral structures in late-modernity. The chapter begins by arguing that Bauman (1993; 1995) – despite his later ‘liquid’ pessimism – is significant in tackling the moral present on its own terms, moving sociology away from Durkheimian-based decline theorising and providing a useful sketch of the sources, strategies and experience of contemporary morality. Bauman’s concept of ‘being for the Other’ is critiqued as missing particular and embodied relationships and effacing the self in endless responsibility to the Other. Taylor’s (1992) ‘ethics of authenticity’ is argued to be important in reasserting the self removed from Bauman’s ‘moral saint’ but needs to be understood as part of the classed production of value and subjectivity rather than a universal practice.
