Ład społeczny a niewidzialna etyka
Social Order and Invisible Ethics

From Equal Rights to Equal Kindness

Author(s): Wojciech Pawlik
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Sociology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: empathy; ethics; law; religion; kindness
Summary/Abstract: Following the collapse of communism, one can observe processes in Poland similar to those previously seen in the West, which can be described in terms of secularization and normative deconstruction. Religion and morality ceased to be regarded as universal, rigid and normatively structured systems. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, ethics, religion and the social world are becoming fluid. But does this fluidity necessarily lead to anomie? Are we heading towards a society where social control will be reduced to the narrow domain of law and economics, while the rest of our lives descends into normative chaos? The thesis of the paper: the disappearance of traditional mechanisms of social control based on codes, norms, orders and prohibitions is accompanied by the emergence of new mechanisms for regulating interpersonal and social relations, based mainly on empathy, benevolence, moral intuition, ethics of care et al. In the same manner as traditional religiosity is replaced in the postmodern world by invisible religion, the “Kant’s man” controlled by absolutized principles, norms, and religious institutions is replaced (in the cultural sense) in the sphere of morality by a type of postmodern personality whose attitude towards other people is based primarily on ethical sensitivity and empathy. Contemporary forms of invisible ethics and invisible social control are a functional response to the death of traditional, external forms of such control, and are the realization of the demand, as defined in Leon Petrażycki’s theory, for the revival of natural law and the social ideal of universal equal-for-all empathy, of ethical openness and benevolence.

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