The shaky high moral ground of postmodernist "ethics"

The paper takes as its starting point the paradoxical question of whether postmodernism can have amoral, ethical and values base. It explores the murky waters of postmodern relativism, which works against professions such as social work taking a strong ethical stance against injustice. It explores some philosophical arguments supporting the search for moral universals, no matter how minimal they might be, and advocates the enduring utility of ethical codes, despite their limitations. By its very nature ethics has a transcendent quality and Habermas’s groundbreaking ethical schema is described for its enduring fit with the Western philosophical tradition and its compatibility with social work thinking on ethics.