When Adorno queries whether it is possible to lead a good life in a bad life, he is asking about the relation of moral conduct to social conditions, but more broadly about the relation of morality to social theory; indeed, he is also asking how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live. In his lectures Problems of Moral Philosophy, he writes:

ethical conduct or moral and immoral conduct is always a social phenomenon – in other words, it makes absolutely no sense to talk about ethical and moral conduct separately from relations of human beings to each other, and an individual who exists purely for himself is an empty abstraction. [2]

Or again, ‘social categories enter into the very fibre of those of moral philosophy.’ Or, yet again, in the final sentence of the lectures:

anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world … we might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today. [3]

Bultler