Fabian Freyenhagen

© Editorial matter and selection, 2008 Deborah Cook. Introduction Moral philosophy used to be full of promises. In ancient times, it aimed at providing a guide to the good life that integrated moral matters with other concerns. In modern times, it set out to present a supreme principle of morality from which a full-blown system of obligations and permissions was meant to be derived, guiding or constraining our conduct. However, if Adorno is to be believed, the promises of moral philosophy have not been fulfilled: neither the good life, nor even the moral life, is currently available. In this sense, his position can be characterized as a negative moral philosophy. What makes this position interesting is why Adorno thinks that both the good life and the moral life are blocked and what implications he draws from this in terms of criticizing the dominant strands of modern moral philosophy and suggesting how we should live our distorted and deformed lives. In this chapter we shall look at each of these aspects and ask the following questions: 1. Why can no one live the right life in our current social world? 2. Why does the task of moral philosophy today consist essentially in the critique of moral philosophy? 3. Does Adorno say anything about how we should live, or is his negative moral philosophy devoid of any practical guidance? The impossibility of right living today Adorno is not alone in thinking that something is problematic about ethical practice and theory in the modern social world. For example, contemporary Aristotelians often lament the breakdown of traditional social practices which underwrote the exercise of the virtues.

© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy. In this article, I argue that autonomy has to be conceived substantively in order to serve as the qualifying condition for receiving the full set of individual liberal rights. I show that the common distinction between content-neutral and substantive accounts of autonomy is riddled with confusion and ambiguities, and provide a clear alternative taxonomy. At least insofar as we are concerned with liberal settings, the real question is whether or not the value and norm implied by an account of autonomy are acceptable to reasonable people, not whether these accounts are content-neutral, procedural or input-focused. Finally, I demonstrate how substantive constraints are compatible with, or even implied in, the notion of autonomy at play in political liberalism. Overall, I present a normative reconstruction, clarification, and internal critique of liberalism, drawing on case law and statutes from England and Wales.

Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential, and that this optimism explains his negative views about the social world, and his demand that we resist and change it. He shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad - a guide for living less wrongly. His incisive study does much to advance our understanding of Adorno, and is also an important intervention into current debates in moral philosophy.