The Sequestration of Experience: Rights Talk and Moral Thinking in `Late Modernity'

Abstract

Giddens argues that modernity is characterized by the separation of time and space, by disembedding mechanisms and by institutional reflexivity. These characteristics combine with a dynamic pace and scope of change and contribute to modernity's emphasis on institutional control. Internally referential systems exclude those moral and existential issues that threaten `ontological security'. Bauman similarly emphasizes modernity's passion for order and `progress', the fragmentation of social roles and personal identity and rapid technological change. In both these scenarios modernity must necessarily be morally arid. In late modernity Giddens suggests that radical doubt and the threat of meaninglessness encourage the `return of the repressed' and Bauman cautiously indicates that humankind may be willing to struggle with issues of moral responsibility. I would argue that Bauman and Giddens are mistaken in viewing late modernity as a time of moral renewal. Rather, rights talk has come to colonize moral thinking. Giddens and Bauman fail to give sufficient attention to the invocation of rights in the governance of human affairs and, therefore, fail to recognize the way in which rights talk constitutes the sequestration of morality in late modernity.