The landscape of ethics or moral philosophy in the Western tradition has been thoroughly shaken and restructured by a late 20th-century philosophical and literary movement, generally known as postmodernism. Spearheaded by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, the movement is distinguished from others by its broad skepticism about reason or rationality in traditional Western ethics and its vigorous defense of subjectivism or relativism. It is also marked by a general suspicion of the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.¹ This movement's preferred method of philosophizing has been identified by Derrida as "deconstruction," by which he means a form of philosophical and literary analysis with close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts.²