Resumen de Ética, historia y postmodernidad
This essay was originated in a research about the possibility of an ethically concerned writing of History, undertaken from a postmoderm perspective. Its inspiration and starting point is the phenomenology of historical consciousness developed by Paul Ricoeur in his third volume of Time and Narrative (1985) and, specially, in his recent paper "The mark of past" (1997), but the concrete debates that are discussed here are rather absent in these texts. After making clear what is to be understood as "ethical", the author comments on two postmodern arguments against any claim of an ethically conditioned writing of History: a) the one that would see in any modality of this claim the return to a metaphysical thinking that is considered now exhausted and old fashioned; and b) the one that considers this kind of writing as sterile from the point of view of a systems-theoretic sociological theory that contemplates modern societies as differentiated by their functions, and does not believe that the fundamental ethic categories exist in the codes of any of the social systems.
