Towards a Democratic Liberatory Ethics: A restatement

In this article, I will try, first, to critically assess the approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early modernity, which aimed at deriving an "objectively" grounded liberatory ethics, second, to explore the reasons why today's liberatory ethics should avoid both the Scylla of "objective" ethics as well as the Charybdis of irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relativism and, finally, to show that a democratic liberatory ethics, which could only be derived through a process of democratic rationalism, should necessarily express those moral values which are intrinsically compatible to the democratic institutions themselves. CHAPTERS: Introduction: What is liberatory ethics?; 1. "Objective" approaches to liberatory ethics; The Marxist approach to liberatory ethics: one-dimensional ethical relativism; The libertarian approach to liberatory ethics; The myth of Progress; The crisis of "objective" ethics; 2. The postmodern critique of "objective" ethics; 3. The Castoriadian critique of the separation of ethics from politics; 4. Towards a democratic ethics; Incompatible ethics; Compatible ethics;