Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

the most cogent theorists of a postmodern ethics will actually have
nothing to do with relativism. Zygmunt Bauman (1993), for example,
points out that ethical relativism is all about competition among
different ethical frameworks, and his understanding of postmodern
ethics denies any possibility of an ethical framework. For him, as
soon as we entertain the possibility of an ethical code to guide our
actions, we remove the possibility of moral action. Moral behaviour
has to be utterly spontaneous, untainted by reasoning or calculation in
terms of the principles of some ethical code, since this would remove
moral responsibility from us as individuals and place it within the
ethical paradigm to which we are obedient. All we have to guide us,
claims Bauman, is our conscience. “If in doubt,” he says, “trust your
conscience” (1993, p.250).
Bauman’s understanding of postmodern ethics, which is one of
the most important in the field, bears some interesting similarities to a
theory of ethics known as intuitionism. Intuitionist moral philosophers
suggest that the source of our moral beliefs is intuitive: at the most
basic level, we cannot explain why we think something is good – we
just know at a gut level that it is. Our intuitions tell us so. A respected
moral philosopher, G.E. Moore (1903), came to this conclusion after a
life of studying ethics. A short step from here is the perspective that
the only moral resource we have is our moral intuitions, or, as Bauman
would have it, our conscience.
These might seem good grounds for ethical responsibility in
comparative education research, that researchers should be guided by
their individual consciences and moral intuitions. But there are two
problems here. The first is with what critics refer to as a subjectivist
turn in moral philosophy. They question whether all ethics are entirely
subjective, merely the result of individual conscience and intuitions,
and seek to defend a more public and rational view of ethics that
strives towards some degree of reasonableness. How is it possible,
they ask, to offer a rational justification of an ethics that is founded
in conscience and intuitions? And how would one judge between
competing subjectivist moral claims without some ethical background,
some “horizon of significance”, as Charles Taylor (1991, p.37) calls it, in
terms of which our moral decisions have significance and meaning?
The second problem with an ethics based in conscience and
intuition follows directly from the first, and has to do with the need
for a publicly defensible ethical framework in educational research, in
terms of which researchers may be held accountable. Since research
is a public activity, in the sense that researchers are responsible as
professionals to those participating in their research, to their colleagues,
and to the wider community, such a framework is important. But it is
difficult to see how a subjectivist ethics based in individual researchers’
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