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Bauman, Zygmunt and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cam- bridge: Polity Press, 2013, 218 pp., $24.95 Paperback (9780745669625)
Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity is the most recent addition to Zygmunt Bauman's oeuvre, one of the most prominent sociologists of our time. It is a captivating dialogue between Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, a professor of Politics at Vytautas Mag- nus University in Lithuania, on the banality of evil in contemporary capitalism. According to the authors, a new, nondemonic, ambivalent form of evil characterizes contemporary society and this is a growing moral insensitivity towards the others around us and their suffering. This moral numbness is not bounded to certain fixed territories or designated groups. Rather, it has become the underlying logic of every aspect of our lives, which explains the urgency the authors feel to account for it and seek for possible alternatives. Bauman and Donskis respond to this chal- lenge of our current epoch with a rich theoretical discussion informed by several key figures of modern Western thought, ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Simmel, from Anthony Giddens to Immanuel Levinas.
Moral Blindness cannot be understood in isolation from Bauman's earlier works, particularly Liquid Modernity (2000). The book is a writ- ten exchange of ideas between Bauman and Donskis. It is composed of five chapters, plus an introduction. Each chapter opens with a set of questions Donskis poses and it continues with both authors' reflections. The authors ask how we can understand morality in the liquid modern world and their thesis of moral blindness centres on the concept of the "adiaphorization of human behaviour"....