Owen Abbott

This book provides an interdisciplinary series of essays on key social theorists of morality. It explores contributions to social moral theorising made by W. E. B. Du Bois, G. H. Mead, Jane Addams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Carol Gilligan, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Jonathan Haidt. It thus seeks to integrate alternative voices at the “foundations” of sociological theorising about morality, while entering into dialogues with post-Enlightenment moral philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. In so doing, it engages with perspectives of pragmatism, virtue ethics, care ethics, feminist critiques, and moral foundations theory. The essays discuss key topics in social theories of morality, including moral action, socialisation, habit and reflexiveness, relationships, emotion, self, identity, racism and colonialism, universalism, and innateness. It centres crucial (but often overlooked) questions of moral power, and assesses the relationship between moral theorising and normative argument. The essays are conjoined by a running theme of moral agency—how it is constituted and how it is enacted—which orientates the book’s arguments and critiques.

Drawing on pragmatism, this chapter thus provides a sketch of how moral agency needs to be conceptualised to facilitate a relational account of moral practice. In dialogue with contemporary sociological and psychological studies of morality, it is argued that G. H. Mead’s work is especially effective at providing a framework for firstly conceptualising the relational constitution of moral agency, and secondly for conceptualising an interactionist-relational account of how moral agency is enacted across the dimensions of agency specified in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) famous relational account of agency. However, Mead’s account – along with wider traditions of conceptualising moral agency – gives insufficient attention to crucial dimensions of power and emotion in how moral agency is constituted and enacted. The work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Carol Gilligan are deployed to explore the significance of power for moral agency, and Jane Addams’s work is brought into dialogue with contemporary moral psychology to expound the role of emotion in moral life. I close by briefly setting out the value of this pragmatist account of moral agency to understanding the processual nature of moral relations at a ‘social’ scale.

This chapter introduces the theorists and perspectives covered in the book. It shows how the dialogues established in this book help us to explore current themes in the sociology of morality. This includes questions of interdisciplinarity, normativity in social moral theorising, rethinking the canon, the relationship between morality and power, and moral agency. This introduction thus sets out how the theorists covered are used as sounding boards for explorations of key themes and topics in social theorising about morality.

This chapter engages with contemporary moral psychology via the work of Jonathan Haidt, with the intention being to strike a dialogue and exchange between contemporary sociological and psychological accounts of morality. It uses Haidt’s work to explore key arguments in moral psychology regarding moral judgement, as well as Haidt’s specific arguments about innateness and moral foundations. It is argued that Haidt—and contemporary moral psychology more generally—provides crucial insights into moral judgements and into diversity in how the moral domain is understood. Haidt’s key positions of social intuitionism and moral foundation theory are expounded in sections one and two. Section three argues that there are limitations to the extent to which moral action can be understood as being intuitively driven, especially with respect to complex (but relatively ordinary) moral decisions in everyday life contexts. It is then argued that important dimensions of social relationships and power need to be given greater credence in Haidt’s account. This relative absence causes limitations for explaining moral change in the moral foundations framework. The conclusion explores potential issues that emerge from moral accounts that claim to be purely descriptive and normatively neutral.

This chapter primarily aims to illuminate Jane Addams’s unique and remarkable contribution to social theorising about morality. It is argued that Addams offers an alternate vision of moral theorising, which takes moral engagement via social reform as its starting point and sees moral theorising as best arising from engaged and challenging moral living. This reflects an integral pragmatist moral epistemology developed and enacted by Addams, which sees moral knowledge as arising from socially engaged experience. Through this epistemological perspective, Addams delivers resounding critiques of abstract moral theorising. She is also critical of academic focuses on collecting data in abstraction from working towards social reform. Addams thus provides unique insights into how moral theorising relates to normative argument and social action. Crucial to Addams’s arguments are the roles that interaction, emotion (notably sympathy), and perplexity play in engendering social change on a personal and social scale. Finally, it is argued that Addams’s overlooked work The Long Road of Woman’s Memory illuminates the significance of memory to moral agency.

This chapter explores the intervention that Alasdair MacIntyre brought to moral thought in the 1980s. MacIntyre not only delivered seminal critiques of Enlightenment moral philosophy but also reorientated moral thought towards the social. The chapter begins by expounding MacIntyre’s critiques of Enlightenment moral philosophy, indicating the continued importance these arguments have to understanding problems associated with abstracting moral theorising from culture and history. An additional appeal of MacIntyre’s arguments from a social theory perspective is how he developed his conceptualisations of virtue in relation to concepts of practices and identities. MacIntyre stresses the necessity of moral theorising to engage with sociological concepts and perspectives throughout his work. How successful he is in doing this with regard to his applications of practices and identity is discussed in the middle section of this chapter. The final section explores MacIntyre’s more recent Dependent Rational Animals and its contribution to understanding moral living in relation to human flourishing.

This chapter revisits Carol Gilligan’s contribution to moral thought some forty years since In a Different Voice was first published. It sets out how Gilligan’s work was truly transformative in its critiques of the male-centredness of moral theorising, in its centring of women’s moral experiences, and in its development of what came to be known as care ethics. It is argued that the empirical work underpinning In a Different Voice remains of great value to understanding how complex moral decisions are constituted within dynamics of power, entangled relationships, personal desires, senses of self and worth, and messy practical circumstances. Although more often remembered for Gilligan’s different “voices”, I argue that her work could thus be better remembered for its illustration of the relational constitution of moral action and her insights into how difficult moral decisions are experienced. In this respect, her work provides an interesting counterpoint to more recent psychological accounts of moral judgement. Nevertheless, Gilligan’s work was strongly critiqued from the moment it was published. This chapter engages with these critiques and weighs how her work and her contributions should be understood today.

Du Bois’s work, especially his early work, was explicitly concerned with morality. Yet, the long-overdue revival of Du Bois’s contribution to sociology has given little credence to his work on morality. Likewise, the resurgent sociology of morality has scarcely engaged with Du Bois’s work at all. This chapter firstly aims to introduce and explore Du Bois’s work on morality. In so doing, the chapter sets out the aims of Du Bois’s work on morality, explores his empirical investigations into the topic, and argues that recognition of Du Bois’s ongoing concern for the relationship between racialisation and moral status allows the moral content of his more familiar writings and concepts to come to the fore. It is argued that Du Bois’s writings on morality yield foundational insights mostly overlooked by other foundational figures in the sociology of morality. Furthermore, it is argued that Du Bois’s work on morality anticipates many of the features of contemporary sociologies of morality in its emphasis on moral contestation and power, in its focus on practices, and in its intention to use the study of morality for the purpose of social reform. But his work also goes beyond current approaches in its recognition of the significance of moral judgement to processes of racialisation. How Du Bois’s work contributes to the future of current sociologies of morality is the focus of the conclusion.

This chapter firstly aims to centre Mead’s specific writings on morality, which are often overlooked next to his more famous work on the self. Through their focus on the “social act”, Mead’s specific moral writings yield a number of important critiques of Kantianism, sociological determinism, and psychological determinism that continue to be prescient. The second section explores how Mead’s work on the self and consciousness in action produces a crucial pragmatist account of the interrelationships between interaction, habituation, evaluativeness, and reconstruction in moral action and consciousness. Finally, Mead’s attempts to formulate a pragmatist account of moral change and social reform are assessed. While the difficulties associated with Mead’s writing on morality are discussed, it is argued that Mead’s work provides vital insights into the role of phases of consciousness and interaction in moral agency.

This chapter explores the wide-ranging moral theorising of Kwame Anthony Appiah. The chapter begins with Appiah’s early engagement with Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and his initial considerations of the ways in which race can be considered morally significant. Appiah’s reformulation of his arguments about race into questions of identity (while contested) leads his work to offer important contributions to understanding how moral lives are formed and lived in relation to collective identity meanings. It is argued that Appiah’s work adds to contemporary sociological-psychological work on moral identity by integrating deeper notions of who we are and how we understand ourselves as being to questions of ethical significance. Yet, his work remains wedded to notions of individuality and life plans that are hard to sustain from the perspective of contemporary social scientific accounts of human agency. How this point manifests itself in Appiah’s resort to “as if” arguments is the focus of the final section.

Seyla Benhabib’s work is among the best and most sociologically informative post-Enlightenment moral philosophy available. Yet her work is little known by sociologists. This chapter explores Benhabib’s resounding critiques of Enlightenment moral thought. These critiques are of particular significance because whereas theorists such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor focus on relatively abstract notions of culture and history to make their moral theories social, Benhabib also integrates important insights into personal relationships and everyday moral practice. Benhabib’s work also makes important contributions to conjoining moral particularism with a reformed conception of moral universalism. Benhabib’s contributions are explored in the first half of this chapter. The second half then uses Benhabib’s attempt to reformulate discourse ethics to illuminate issues of power that arise in many approaches to moral proceduralism. Specifically, Benhabib’s argument that discourse ethics can provide a procedural means to judge between competing moral claims leads her to prioritise the perspective of ‘postconventional’ Western modernism as the means to adjudicate between the moral tolerability of cultural beliefs and practices. This leads her to characterise ‘conventional’ moral systems as subordinate, which succumbs to postcolonial critiques of the role of processes of domination in organising the validity of moral claims. It is thus argued that Benhabib’s work raises important questions that sociologists of morality need to be aware of if they are to enter into cross-cultural normative argument.

This book provides an interdisciplinary series of essays on key social theorists of morality. It explores contributions to social moral theorising made by W. E. B. Du Bois, G. H. Mead, Jane Addams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Carol Gilligan, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Jonathan Haidt. It thus seeks to integrate alternative voices at the "foundations" of sociological theorising about morality, while entering into dialogues with post-Enlightenment moral philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. In so doing, it engages with perspectives of pragmatism, virtue ethics, care ethics, feminist critiques, and moral foundations theory. The essays discuss key topics in social theories of morality, including moral action, socialisation, habit and reflexiveness, relationships, emotion, self, identity, racism and colonialism, universalism, and innateness. It centres crucial (but often overlooked) questions of moral power, and assesses the relationship between moral theorising and normative argument. The essays are conjoined by a running theme of moral agency--how it is constituted and how it is enacted--which orientates the book's arguments and critiques.

In this chapter, Abbott provides an insightful and accessible overview of the major arguments of relational sociology, before relational approaches are drawn together with theories of practice to form a dynamic interactionist relational sociology, the virtues of which are expounded via a compelling critique of Bourdieu’s structural relationalism. It is argued further that the critiques delivered by relational sociology against holist/objectivist and subjectivist/methodologically individualistic conceptualisations of social life are not only resounding, but also provide an essential challenge to how morality has been conceptualised both within philosophy and sociology. These critiques will thus be detailed in via a relational view of practice and situated subjectivity, which, Abbott argues, offers a new path out of previous impasses in moral theorising.

In this introductory chapter, Abbott highlights the commonalities between the relational sociology critiques of dualistic and static thinking in social theory on the one hand, and the recent philosophic critiques of the problematic reliance of Enlightenment moral thought on universalism, rationalism, and the disembedded subject on the other. This, Abbott argues, indicates the necessity of a relational sociology of morality. Specifically, the work of the likes of MacIntyre, Gilligan, and Dreyfus, along with a resurgent body of research conducted within the ‘new’ sociology of morality, point towards viewing morality in terms of practice, including everyday practice, and thus calls for a relational sociology of morality in practice.

Abbott compellingly argues for using George Herbert Mead’s work as a basis for a relational sociology of morality. The chapter outlines why Bourdieu’s theory of habitus struggles to provide a basis for a sociology of moral practice. This is argued on the grounds that Mead’s theory of the self is firstly better equipped to explain moral habituation, which Bourdieu neglects. Secondly, because Mead emphasised the role of reflexivity in interaction, his work is able to account for the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in interactionally situated moral conduct. Finally, Mead’s theory of reflexive individuation is able to provide a relational account of the dialogic capacities of the individual to engage with their own moral articulations in relation to the perspectives of others.

In this chapter relational sociology critiques of methodological individualism and rational action theories are applied specifically to a forceful critique of Enlightenment philosophy conceptualisations of the moral subject and moral action, which culminates in a decisive critical evaluation of Singer’s applied ethics. The sociological value of recent philosophic attempts to re-conceptualise morality in terms of practices (MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Duckworth, London, 1985), everyday embodied comportment (Dreyfus in Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), and situated subjectivities (Gilligan in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982) are then assessed through a relational lens. This includes a much-needed sociological critique of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics perspective on moral practice, as well as critical appraisals of Dreyfus’s and Gilligan’s work in providing a basis for a relational sociology of morality in practice.

This chapter outlines the necessity of a sociological view of morality. However, it is then argued that the traditional dualistic tendencies towards holism and individualism, which have plagued social theory more generally, have often likewise played themselves out in sociological conceptualisations of morality. The problems of such dualistic approaches to morality are detailed via a critique of Durkheim’s holist approach and Zygmunt Bauman’s individualist conception of morality. Indeed, the critiques of moral theories of Durkheim and Bauman are among the most extensive and rigorous available in the contemporary literature. The chapter concludes that the capacity of relational sociology to undermine traditional dualistic distinctions allows it to guide sociological conceptions of morality in a way that avoid the pitfalls associated with either holist or individualist approaches.

Here, Abbott provides a thought-provoking sociology of everyday engagement with morality in practice. Drawing upon sociological research into the maintenance of tact and secrecy in interactional practice (Goffman), the facing of complex moral decisions within the family, and ethical consumption and the presentation of self-identity, the chapter argues firstly that people do ordinarily engage with morality in routine practice, and secondly that people engage with everyday moral practice at varying levels of embodied responsiveness, mundane reflexive awareness, and more concerted dialogic rumination. This then feeds into the argument that it is in everyday practice that morality and moral phenomena as we know them are enacted, sustained, and transformed.

Abundant research in adjacent disciplines shows forgiveness (including forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, and not being forgiven) to be an ordinary feature of how personal relationships are maintained, repaired, and rescinded. Sociologists, however, have scarcely considered forgiveness at all. This paper shows why sociologists of personal life should be interested in forgiveness, and how this contributes to sociological interpretations of conflict and repair in relationships. Indeed, it is argued that sociologists of personal life should be interested in forgiveness because it seems to be part of the ordinary vernacular through which relationships are made sense of. It is also argued that sociologists of personal life can deliver a perspective on forgiveness in relationships that is missing from existing forgiveness research agendas.

Noting that Benhabib’s ethical theory has seldom been engaged with by sociologists of morality, this article introduces and interrogates Benhabib’s ethical theory from a sociological perspective. It is argued that Benhabib’s critiques of Enlightenment conceptions of morality complement sociological theories of morality. Her concepts of the ‘concrete’ and ‘generalized’ other and ‘interactive universalism’ can potentially inform recurrent debates in the sociology of morality about the extent to which cultural plurality precludes the possibility of sociologists providing normative judgements, and the extent to which certain features of moral experiences can be taken to be universal. However, Benhabib’s argument that discourse ethics can provide a procedural means to judge between competing moral claims leads her to prioritize the perspective of ‘postconventional’ Western modernism as the means to adjudicate between the moral tolerability of cultural beliefs and practices. This leads her to characterize ‘conventional’ moral systems as subordinate, which succumbs to postcolonial critiques of the role of processes of domination in organizing the validity of moral claims.

Providing a theory of moral practice for a contemporary sociological audience, Owen Abbott shows that morality is a relational practice achieved by people in their everyday lives. He moves beyond old dualisms—society versus the individual, social structure versus agency, body versus mind—to offer a sociologically rigorous and coherent theory of the relational constitution of the self and moral practice, which is both shared and yet enacted from an individualized perspective. In so doing, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice not only offers an urgently needed account of moral practice and its integral role in the emergence of the self, but also examines morality itself within and through social relations and practices. Abbott’s conclusions will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers of morality, those working with pragmatic and interactionist approaches, and those involved with relational sociology and social theory.