In Closing

Abstract

This work has been based on a conception of ethics as an informed, sensitive, tolerant, responsive and responsible focus on the welfare of others in thought and action, with the existential experience of ethics being irremediably tensional in nature. Such a conception is grounded in traditional applied ethical theory. It may therefore be seen, in virtue of that grounding, as necessarily unsympathetic to the trends that have been the focus of critical attention in this analysis — those trends being aspects of contemporary, post-traditional or postmodern cultural change, which is fundamentally or epochally different from traditional, modernist culture (Bagnall, 1999a; Usher, 2001; Vattimo, 1992). In response to this concern, the ethical framework used here to evaluate the trends was interpreted through the perspective of a contemporary situational approach to ethics.