Drawing on the provided sources, the origins and evolution of postmodernity represent a complex intellectual and cultural shift that significantly relates to and critiques aspects of modern moral philosophy. **Origins of Postmodernity** The term and concept of "postmodernity" began to gain wider traction in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly from the 1970s onwards. While its exact definition is difficult due to its broad scope, its emergence is linked to perceived changes in human circumstance and intellectual thought. Early uses of the term "postmodern" were somewhat amorphous. In the 1950s, it was used to describe post-war prosperity becoming amorphous. By the 1960s, figures like Leslie Fiedler used it in a cultural context to describe a new sensibility among younger generations in America, characterized by nonchalance, disconnection, and a repudiation of modernist distinctions between high and low culture, finding expression in a new literature that returned to sentiment and burlesque. Amitai Etzioni linked a "post-modern" period to a decline in the power of big business and elites, suggesting a move towards a more democratic society. These early usages were often seen as "terminological improvisation or happenstance". A significant moment in the theoretical development and diffusion of the notion of postmodernity was the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's _The Postmodern Condition_ in the autumn of 1979. This book was the first to treat postmodernity as a general change in human circumstance. Lyotard linked the arrival of postmodernity to the emergence of a post-industrial society, where knowledge became the main economic force but had lost its traditional legitimations. David Harvey would later offer a more thorough economic answer to the problem Lyotard raised about the cause of change. The concept of postmodernity is also discussed in relation to architectural movements and movements in philosophy and cultural studies, such as new materialism which took shape in the early 2000s. Postmodernism as a philosophical school of thought is presented as questioning, or outright rejecting, the core tenets of "traditionalists". **Evolution and Characteristics of Postmodernity** As postmodernity evolved as a concept and intellectual current, it developed several defining characteristics, often framed as a departure from or critique of modernity. A core aspect of postmodern thought is a questioning or rejection of overarching, universal explanations or justifications, referred to as "meta-narratives" or "grand narratives". Lyotard argued that the defining trait of the postmodern condition is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives, such as the Enlightenment tales of humanity's liberation through knowledge or the progressive unfolding of truth. This delegitimation was seen as stemming from developments within the sciences themselves, leading to a pluralization of argument types and a technification of proof that reduced "truth" to "performativity". Science, in this view, becomes just one language game among others, losing its "imperial privilege". Instead of grand narratives, postmodern science is characterized by "paralogism," focusing on the production of the unexpected and discontinuous. "Little narratives" become the essential form of invention. The doxa of postmodernism, descending from Lyotard, is described as an "undemanding medley of notions, whose upshot is little more than a slack-jawed conventionalism," though influential due to its congruence with material interests, particularly the market. Postmodernism and related critical theories (like critical theories of everyday life and poststructuralism) share several affinities, including excoriating abstract reason, acknowledging non-rational tendencies (embodied desires, poetical qualities), privileging marginalized or de-centred spaces and practices, criticizing dualisms of modernity (mind/matter, nature/culture, masculine/feminine), and focusing on culture, intersubjectivity, and language. However, some critical theorists maintain a dialectical critique of modernity, acknowledging both its negative and positive aspects, and reject the "textualism" of postmodernism, which reduces complex social practices to language, as well as politics detached from social transformation. Postmodernism often questions traditional theories of language and culture, arguing that consciousness is a product of the meanings we learn, rather than the origin of language. It challenges the idea of a single viewpoint or a stable, knowable reality, suggesting that reality itself is culturally relative. The challenge to realism and the embrace of the signifier's capability to create new forms and rules are noted. This questioning extends to the idea of a centered subject, favoring the "erratic swarmings of desire" and viewing the subject as "undetermined" or as a product of power relations and discourse. The "postmodern attack on truth" is seen as a challenge to established philosophical traditions like analytic philosophy, which values logic, reason, clarity, and logical coherence. Postmodern thought is associated with prominent thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan. These figures are often linked to post-structuralism, which concerns the relationship between humans, the world, and meaning-making, challenging traditional accounts of knowledge and being. Foucault's work, in particular, offered genealogies of power and interrogated classical notions of institutional hierarchies, often seen as critical of traditional Marxism. Derrida's critique of logocentrism challenges binary divisions and totalizing thought. Postmodernism has been critiqued from various perspectives. Some see it as a product of political defeat on the left. Postcolonial critics argue that the concept of postmodernity, particularly as formulated in the "metropolitan countries," ignores or suppresses practices in the periphery that actively reject its categories, viewing it as potentially neo-imperialist and wiping out the possibility of postcolonial identity. **Relation to Modern Moral Philosophy** Postmodernity's questioning of grand narratives, universal truths, abstract reason, and the stable subject has significant implications for modern moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, or ethics, is a branch of philosophy that investigates the problems of morality, such as the standard of moral judgment and the highest goal of human life. It explores questions like why one should be moral, what constitutes right and wrong, and whether standards are relative or absolute. Historically, philosophy, including ethics, sought rational explanations for things, sometimes independent of religion, though questions of divine influence on morality also arose. In the historically usual sense, philosophy combined views on the universe with a practical ethic to guide life. The fundamental problem of ethics and politics has been reconciling social life needs with individual desires, achieved through devices like law, religion, and philosophical arguments. Modern moral philosophy is often seen as having roots in thinkers like those of the Enlightenment, who pursued freedom and sought rational justifications. Figures like Kant focused on universal laws of nature and formulated moral laws based on willing lawfulness. Hume discussed justice as a convention arising from reciprocal expectations and inductive inferences, viewing natural moral law as a system of conventions. The rise of urbanism and proto-capitalism led to a shift in some views towards a more rationalist balancing of competing self-interests, away from sentiment. Traditional moral theories like consequentialism and deontology, which have dominated ethical thinking for centuries, focus on particular acts and aim to provide decision procedures for moral dilemmas, centering on rationality and often impartiality. Postmodern thought and associated critiques challenge the foundations of this modern ethical landscape. 1. **Critique of Abstract Reason and Universalism:** Postmodernism excoriates abstract reason. Modern moral philosophy, particularly deontological approaches like Kant's, relies heavily on abstract reason and universal principles. Postmodern thought's skepticism towards universal claims and grand narratives undermines the idea of universal moral laws or objective ethical standards. 2. **Loss of Teleology and Foundationalism:** Alasdair MacIntyre, often discussed in the context of critiquing modernity's ethics, argues that modern moral philosophy suffers from the loss of a natural teleology, a concept present in Aristotelian and medieval ethical frameworks where ethics aimed at helping humans achieve a natural end or telos. The secular and scientific rejection of teleology, combined with religious voluntarism that separated moral judgment from practical reasoning, left modern ethics without a coherent context. Thinkers like Hume and Kant, attempting to justify morality in this new context, were caught between individual autonomy and the authority of arbitrary principles. MacIntyre claims this led to emotivism, where moral decisions are based on emotions because there's no objective good to validate claims, and instrumental reasoning, where others are treated as means rather than ends. This perspective aligns with postmodern critiques of the failure of Enlightenment rationality. 3. **Focus on Power and Contingency:** Foucault's genealogy of morals focuses on power relations and forms of domination in modern societies, viewing morality not as universal principles but as constructed through historical processes and power/knowledge relationships. This approach challenges the idea of an autonomous, self-sufficient moral subject and sees individuality and moral attributes as partly constituted by power relations. This directly contrasts with modern ethical theories that often assume a rational, independent agent making choices based on universal rules or outcomes. The focus shifts from universal "what is right" to how moral categories are constructed and function within power structures. 4. **Questioning the Subject:** Poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers question the "illusory autonomy of the bourgeois subject". Rethinking subjectivity is not about postulating what we _must_ be but introducing another way of thinking. This challenges ethical theories that depend on a stable, rational, and autonomous subject as the basis for moral agency and judgment. Foucault notes that recent liberation movements struggle to find a basis for new ethics, often relying on "so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is," highlighting a perceived crisis. 5. **Crisis in Ethical Thought:** Foucault and Lacan diagnose a crisis in ethical thought, not necessarily in the rational grounds for ideals, but in what these ideals mean to us and our experience. They promote a "suspiciousness" concerning the demands of moral theory and the degree to which it can satisfy them, suggesting a lack of attention in contemporary English-speaking ethical philosophy to the "passionate or erotic relations with ourselves and with others". They question traditional ethical authority, whether bureaucratic, charismatic, scientific, or mediatic. The "question of ethics" becomes what can be _new_ in ethics, requiring a suspiciousness about received values. 6. **Critique of Moralism:** Figures like Nietzsche (often a source for postmodern thought) and Jameson critique moralizing. Nietzsche unmasked traditional categories of good and evil as "sedimented traces of power relationships". Jameson views moralizing about postmodernism as an "impoverished luxury" that replaces complex political analysis with simplified binary moral judgments. This suggests that applying traditional moral judgments (binary codes of individual conduct) to cultural or social phenomena like postmodernism is intellectually and politically disabling. In summary, postmodernity, as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon emerging in the late 20th century, fundamentally questions the universalism, foundationalism, abstract reason, and the stable subject that are often cornerstones of modern moral philosophy. Influenced by thinkers who analyze power, language, and historical contingency, postmodern perspectives critique modern ethics as potentially arbitrary (due to loss of teleology), masking power relations, or failing to address the complexities of lived experience and the constructed nature of the self. This leads to a focus on questioning received values, acknowledging the crisis in traditional ethical frameworks, and exploring how ethics operates within specific historical and social contexts rather than as a set of universal, rationally determined rules or goals.