Abstract

The texts that play a major role in my dissertation include Hobbes's Leviathan, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals. My research is situated on the border between ethics and politics because I challenge the belief that ethical conduct always requires universal laws. The articulation of an ethical sensibility that is not grounded on a universal law has been one of the thorniest issues in political theory. Ethical reflection has been unnecessarily trapped between the poles of moral universalism and/or relativism. Through readings of Hobbes, Kant, and Nietzsche in reference to foundations and specific human feelings, I demonstrate that the absence of moral universals does not put an end to ethics but is the condition for a new ethical sensibility that overcomes the this opposition. A critical ethic confronts the difficulty of articulating the relationship between ethics and politics in an age of disenchantment