"The 20th Century saw a remarkable expansion of critical theory and
its evolution. The earlier Marxist Theory created a paradigm for
understanding the individual, society and their interaction. The
Renaissance Enlightened Man had persisted up until the Industrial
Revolution when the romantic vision of noble action began to fade.
Humanism, which enshrined the nobility of man, lost validity
particularly after the Great War and the Nazi Holocaust.

Modernism, exemplified in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, wrote out God, then antihumanists such as Louis Althusser
and Michel Foucault and structuralists such as Roland Barthes presided
over the death of the author and man himself. As critical theory
developed in the later 20th century, post-structuralism queried the
very existence of reality. Jacques Derrida placed reality in the
linguistic realm stating ‘There is nothing outside the text’, while
Jean Baudrillard theorised that signs and symbols or simulacra had
usurped reality, particularly in the consumer world. This concept is
explored in the postmodernist film Blade Runner.

Post-structuralism and postmodernism are both heavily theoretical and
follow a fragmented, anti-authoritarian course which is absorbed in
narcissistic and near nihilistic activities. Normative issues are
generally ignored. This has led to some opponents of these later
movements echoing the critic Jurgen Habermas who fears ‘that the
postmodern mood represents a turning away from both political
responsibilities and a concern for suffering’(cited in Lyon, 1999, p.
103).

David Couzens Hoy says that Emmanuel Levinas’ writings on the face of
the Other and Derrida’s mediations on the relevance of death to ethics
are signs of the ‘ethical turn’ in Continental philosophy that occurs
in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Hoy clarifies post-critique ethics as the
‘obligations that present themselves as necessarily to be fulfilled
but are neither forced on one or are enforceable’ (2004, p.103).

This aligns with Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s thoughts on
what ethics is not. He firstly claims it is not a moral code
particular to a sectional group. For example it has nothing to do with
a set of prohibitions concerned with sex laid down by a religious
order. Neither is ethics a ‘system that is noble in theory but no good
in practice’ (2000, p.7). For him it would be more of the reverse. He
agrees that ethics is in some sense universal but in a utilitarian way
it affords the ‘best consequences’ and furthers the interests of those
affected (2000, p.15).

Hoy in his post-critique model uses the term ethical resistance.
Examples of this would be an individual’s resistance to consumerism in
a retreat to a simpler but perhaps harder lifestyle, or an
individual’s resistance to a terminal illness. Hoy describes these
examples in his book Critical Resistance as an individual’s engagement
in social or political resistance. He provides Levinas’s account as
‘not the attempt to use power against itself, or to mobilise sectors
of the population to exert their political power; the ethical
resistance is instead the resistance of the powerless’(2004, p.8).

Hoy concludes that

"The ethical resistance of the powerless others to our capacity to
exert power over them is therefore what imposes unenforceable
obligations on us. The obligations are unenforceable precisely because
of the other’s lack of power. That actions are at once obligatory and
at the same time unenforceable is what put them in the category of the
ethical. Obligations that were enforced would, by the virtue of the
force behind them, not be freely undertaken and would not be in the
realm of the ethical" (2004, p.184).

In present day terms the powerless may include the unborn, the
terminally sick, the aged, the insane, and animals. It is in these
areas that ethical action will be evident. Until legislation or state
apparatus enforces a moral order that addresses the causes of
resistance these issues will remain in the ethical realm. For example,
should animal experimentation become illegal in a society, it will no
longer be an ethical issue. Likewise one hundred and fifty hundred
years ago, not having a black slave in America may have been an
ethical choice. This later issue has been absorbed into the fabric of
a more utilitarian social order and is no longer an ethical issue but
does of course constitute a moral concern. Ethics are exercised by
those who possess no power and those who support them, through
personal resistance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics#Post-Critique_Ethics