Rediscovering the Moral: The ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Sociology of Morality in the Context of the Behavioural Sciences

Introduction

The sociology of morality, a perspective that seeks to explore moral phenomena in their relation to the social and cultural contexts, is a recently ‘rediscovered’ field of studies (McCaffree, 2016) – over the past few years, considerable efforts have been made for its re-institutionalization, which includes, most importantly, publishing a couple of specific volumes (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010a; Jeffries, 2014) and founding an American Sociological Association section on the subject. While the importance of reviving sociologists’ interest in this once almost forgotten topic is now recognized, it is yet not clear what this new research program should look like, especially given that the theme of morality is widely and successfully investigated (at least, in terms of both academic and public impact) in biology, psychology and other behavioural sciences. There have been several attempts to speculate about the general perspective of the ‘new sociology of morality’, some of which can be seen largely as a reaction to the current position of the behavioural science of morality (Abend, 2010, 2011; Firat and McPherson, 2010; Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010b), but from all such efforts one still cannot tell whether the sociology of morality will not remain just an umbrella term gathering various studies and approaches, united, in fact, by nothing more than the same topic of interest – as opposed to biological and psychological traditions that look much more consistent. And yet, despite the latter’s popularity, there are certain layers of human morality associated with its social complexity and cultural diversity, which have good chances of being left under-theorized and unexplained without employing a comprehensive sociological perspective.

Fascinated by the impressive research programs of studying morality in behavioural sciences, as well as their public influence, a modern sociologist of morality might get an uneasy feeling of being an ‘intellectual orphan’ – a feeling, of course, deeply false and misleading. It is true that sociology experienced a significant decline of explicit interest in morality-related phenomena from the middle of the 20th century until very recently (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2013: 52); but it is equally true that the classical sociological tradition saw explaining (and sometimes justifying) morality as one of the key problems (see Levine, 1995) and its heritage is still a valuable source of knowledge concerning human moral capacity. Moreover, the latter thesis finds its confirmation in the logic of development of current research in moral psychology, which also suggests that the sociological perspective might have been disregarded quite prematurely. Given all this, the article’s main objective is to analyse the relationships between the sociological and behavioural scientific approaches to studying moral phenomena and offer some ideas concerning the future development of the sociology of morality, which make up two possible general perspectives – reflecting both the possibility of integrating the sociological approach with those of behavioural sciences, and of keeping it analytically autonomous and independent.

In the following pages, I first briefly consider the crucial figures of the classical sociology of morality in order to show the importance of the traditionally sociological perspective of the conceptualization of moral reality (see also Abend, 2008, 2010; Levine, 2010 and others). Then, based on current debates concerning naturalism in sociological theory, I discuss the relationships between the sociology of morality and behavioural sciences and analyse some sociologically relevant conceptions in modern moral psychology. As a result, I conclude by proposing two general perspectives for the sociology of morality as a re-developing field, which I, rather arbitrarily, label as cognitive and analytical.

The Classical Sociology of Morality

Even though it is difficult to define morality strictly (scholars commonly understand it as a complex of norms and feelings about what is right and wrong, although there is a considerable variation in definitions), the nature of moral phenomena was one of the core problems in classical sociology. The founding fathers of the discipline were heavily influenced by both philosophical ethics and social philosophy of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the idea of social progress. The latter assumed not only the constant development of social institutions, but, most importantly, the progressive improvement of morals, which could be described by corresponding ‘social laws’, as sociology, in contrast to philosophy, aimed at scientific analysis of morality. The discipline’s ‘godfather’ Comte provides an example of a combination of this progressist thinking with the idea of sociology as a science dealing with discovering ‘invariable laws’. Among these laws, he believed the major was that of the historical process of subordinating ‘individual instincts’ to ‘social instincts’, egoism to altruism (Comte, 1875), which shows the important context in which the sociology of morality was born: that is, moralistic progressism conjoint with the idea of positive social science.

Comte’s idea of social progress had a considerable impact on Spencer, whose approach, in contrast, was individualistic and utilitarian, and he saw morality as a form of adaptation to collective life that ultimately results in preventing mutual aggression and providing room for individual development. Yet, like Comte, Spencer was a progressist, and his idea of Evolution as a basic principle of the Universe’s development contained a considerable normative component: he believed the idea of objective moral progress should serve as a general methodological principle of sociology, and in any scientific research it should be taken into account at what relative stage of development a given society is (Spencer, 1873).

This linear progressism, however, was questioned by Durkheim, who is widely considered as one of the major figures in the classical sociology of morality. In contrast to Comte and Spencer, he rejected the idea of objective moral progress and claimed that sociology should not have an immanent value orientation but rather take value judgements as ‘facts’ for rigorous scientific analysis. Durkheim believed that morality is fundamentally related to the social, rather than biological organization: ‘moral fact’, he argues, can be distinguished from any other fact by specific social sanctions resulting from a violation of a moral rule (Durkheim, 2010: 20). His position was based on a certain moral relativism, as he argued that every society has its own system of moral codes or ‘moral reality’, which can be studied with the methods of positive science (e.g. Durkheim, 1979: 31; see also Abend, 2008) – as will be shown, understanding morality as a manifestation of collectivity and the idea of moral relativism are those features of Durkheim’s theory which make it highly relevant for the modern science of morality. In fact, virtually all the classics of sociology were particularly interested in the conceptualization and explanation of structural and cultural differences between traditional and modern societies, and the moral dimension often had a central place in their conceptual schemas, although the accounts for these differences given by Spencer (militant vs. industrial societies), Durkheim (mechanic vs. organic solidarity), Weber (traditional vs. Protestant ethics) or Tönnies (Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft), looking somewhat similar, were not always consistent with one another (Abend, 2008).

Parsons is another major figure of the classical sociology of morality, who tried to create an integrated all-embracing theory of norm-oriented ‘systems of action’. According to Parsons (1966), the ‘ultimate ends’ of social action are neither random nor wholly subjective: an essential characteristic of an action is its normative orientation; that is, conformity with certain external (though internalized) normative standards or expectations (for Parsons (1991), ‘normative’ is a far wider category than ‘moral’ as it includes, for example, considerations about rationality or aesthetics). The concept of ‘pattern variables’ was used by Parsons to describe the alternatives of choice among different value patterns a given social system offers to the actors, such as orienting an action towards individual or collective interests (Parsons and Shils, 1962). The focus of Parsons’ theory, hence, is not on purely subjective value motives but rather on the social and cultural conditions of normative order (and, what is sometimes neglected, their variations), which is fundamentally seen as an analytically constructed ‘system of action’. In this complex conceptual framework, morality has the function of providing integration (including ‘ultimate ends’) for both society and personality (Parsons, 1991: 99). However, his conception was subsequently widely criticized for overemphasizing the normative orientation of action and its inability to account for actors’ active reflection on the values and the fact that their actions often do not comply with the declared norms (Wrong, 1961) as well as for its implicit political conservatism (Gouldner, 1971).

Parsons is arguably the most controversial theorist in 20th-century sociology, and his name is usually associated with the decline of the sociology of morality (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010a, 2013). While it is true that his system theory fell out of favour for a number of reasons, it is unlikely to be the sole cause of the significant decrease of attention to the study of morality within the discipline. Tracing the history of the sociology of morality back, this decline can be seen as a gradual process that started with the rejection of the once crucial ‘grand’ ideas of moral Progress and Evolution and led to a crisis of functionalism and, generally, holistic thinking in sociology. The problem of morality, treated by the founders of sociology as fundamentally related to ‘objective’ forces of social development or social solidarity, lost much of its importance because these ‘objective’ factors no longer have any serious status in sociological explanations. A related factor of this process is the crisis of general theorizing in sociology: increased specialization and even the ‘fragmentation’ of the discipline did not foster sociologists’ interest in the – necessarily ‘grand’ – theme of morality. As the result, the latter virtually dissolved in numerous special sociological subfields and concrete research, such as the studies of deviance, religion, communities, identity and so on (see Hitlin and Vaisey, 2013 for a review), while no one attempted to develop a comprehensive general theory of morality that would be applicable across a number of sociological spheres. In this sense, Parsons was the last eminent theorist who tried to develop an integrative conception of social action and social systems based on the idea of ‘ultimate ends’; however, apparently contrary to his intentions, in the second half of the century the problem of normativity and morality became in sociology almost marginalized.

This necessarily brief outline by no means contains a comprehensive analysis of the conceptions of morality in classical sociology. The aim of this section was, rather, to review some major classical sociological conceptions of morality which have the potential for thorough reconsideration, as they deal with those aspects of moral phenomena that are of primary interest in the modern interdisciplinary science of morality. The latter, however, originated rather from biological and psychological traditions, so that a sociological theory of morality willy-nilly needs – at least – to acknowledge the conceptions and methods of studying moral phenomena in the behavioural and cognitive sciences. Yet, a more difficult and challenging task is integrating the models of explanation of morality, popular in other fields, into sociological conceptions, while not losing the sociological identity and traditional analytical focus in our age of the cross-fertilization of scientific disciplines. This task assumes a closer investigation of the relationships between the sociological and behavioural scientific approaches to studying morality.

The Sociology of Morality and Behavioural Sciences

The development of sociological theory in the second half of the 20th century left almost no trace of the once ‘grand’ ideas of progressism, evolutionism and functionalism – ideas on which the classical sociology of morality heavily relied. While Spencer ‘died’ (or, to use Parsons’ famous words, was ‘killed’), because his evolutionism was largely considered as a naïve or simplistic perspective, morality became a subject of close study in biology, where neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory gained recognition as a common paradigm of explaining human behaviour. Contrary to sociological relativism and the well-known Durkheimian ‘golden rule’ of explaining the social by the social, evolutionary biologists seek to understand moral behaviour, cognition and emotions as universal and innate adaptive traits brought into existence by natural selection (Krebs, 2008). While sociological theorists were traditionally engaged in endless debates about the scientific foundations of their discipline (Collins, 1989), biologists, who are usually not that much concerned with the question of whether what they do can be called science, developed a number of theories explaining human moral capacity. And since virtually no one in sociology considered the very idea of ‘outdated’ synthetic narratives, like those of Comte and Spencer, seriously (although see Turner, 1981), the sociological and biological perspectives remained, to a large extent, mutually exclusive for decades. It turned out that morality became a sphere where this situation manifested itself in the most evident way.

The explanation of the origin and functions of morality in human societies was among those subjects in which evolutionary biologists have been interested since Darwin (1981), so that it would be unfair to view the current situation as an ‘invasion’ into the sphere of sociology’s competence. Darwin’s paradigm-setting ideas, however, were eventually elaborated into several general approaches to explaining human moral capacity, with reference to several types of natural selection. Theories of kin (Frank, 2013) and group (Wilson, 1975) selection provide a general framework, which sees moral behaviour (such as altruistic help or punishing an aggressor) and moral emotions (such as empathy or anger) as fundamentally grounded in mechanisms of adaptation which allowed our ancestors to survive. ‘Biological interpretation of moral systems’, to use Alexander’s (1985) expression, attempts to explain cooperation between presumably selfish individuals using the ideas of direct and indirect reciprocity, thus providing evolutionary accounts for basic moral phenomena, such as a sense of fairness and justice (e.g. Axelrod, 1984). Evolutionary biologists, together with biologically minded psychologists (Kurzban et al., 2015) and anthropologists (e.g. Allen-Arave et al., 2008) follow this general research programme by studying universal foundations of morality and cooperation in human societies, both developing theoretical models and conducting comprehensive empirical work. All this, along with the progressing neuroscience of morality (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008) and recent findings concerning innate moral dispositions of infants (Hamlin, 2013) complete the triumphal picture of the perspective of human morality, offered by natural sciences.

This obvious success of natural sciences in dealing with human behaviour, as well as the permanent crisis of sociological theory, led to the growing dissatisfaction of some theorists with the models of explanation traditionally used in sociology – what is notable is that this regards not only the sphere of morality, but is a more general process. The need for a substantial integration of sociology with evolutionary behavioural sciences is now recognized by a number of sociologists, who propose certain ways of constructing bridges between the two distinct worlds. For instance, Hopcroft (2009) shows that sociological research in such fields as family and stratification are implicitly based on what she calls the model of the ‘evolved actor’, which corresponds to the concept of evolutionary psychology. She suggests that an explicit acknowledgement of this model would both provide a basis for a theoretical integration within sociology and facilitate interdisciplinary dialog. S Turner (2007) goes even further when he claims that social theory must reconsider its basic concepts (such as the commonly used notion of ‘culture’), since most of them are ‘fictional’ and have no reference in reality, particularly in the human brain; in his view, sociology needs to rely on the methods of cognitive neuroscience, in order to simply be realistic about human nature. Elsewhere (Turner, 2013), he mentions the experiments in the neuropsychology of morality with neuroimaging techniques as an exemplar of how sociological research should look in order to be more rigorous and ‘scientific’.

A similar, somewhat radical naturalist position is also held by J Turner in his project of ‘evolutionary sociology’, which is directly concerned with morality: while defining it in terms of cultural codes specifying what is right and wrong, Turner emphasizes emotions as a crucial component of human moral capacity (Turner, 2010). His analysis, however, is almost entirely devoted to the possible ways of evolution of moral emotions in hominids, which, according to Turner, can be explained as adaptations to the particular life conditions on the savannah. This pronouncedly evolutionary approach resembles, in spirit at least, that of Spencer – moreover, Turner (1981: 95) believes that the latter’s ‘murder’ was very unfortunate for sociological theory, because, if the Spencerian perspective had been acknowledged and elaborated in due time, ‘sociology would be a more mature science’.

While some sociologists might still doubt whether biology and cognitive science should have any impact on the sociological theorizing on morality, being afraid of reductionism or for other reasons, I also argue that the natural scientific approaches need to be at least seriously considered (which does not necessarily mean uncritically accepted). There are, of course, many different and competing visions of sociology, but if we understand it more or less as a discipline that proposes scientific explanations of human social behaviour, then other disciplines that do the same cannot be easily and safely ignored, because this would just deprive sociologists of theoretical models of human morality’s functioning and descent that have proved to be successful across a number of fields. The history of the ‘migration’ of the concept of altruism from sociology to evolutionary biology, for instance, is very illustrative, as it shows that if well-established scientific models of moral behaviour are not even thought of as deserving attention, there might be a considerable risk for the sociology of morality to transform into mere moralism (see Bykov, 2017).

Yet, while an evolutionary account of morality, without doubt, represents one of the most insightful and compelling scientific achievements, one might still ask a legitimate question: if universal explanations of moral capacity are so sound, then what about culture? Criticizing sociological theory for disregarding interdisciplinary evolutionary perspective (as done by J Turner and others) should by no means lead to the collective amnesia of the discipline’s historically basic foundations; that is, focusing on the causes of social and cultural variations of moral worldviews (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2013). The classical sociological tradition emphasized both the ontological and epistemological importance of an obvious fact that different groups of people have different morals, and there is something in the social milieu that can explain these differences; however, because of the reasons discussed above, this comparative perspective lost its once fundamental status in sociological theorizing. And yet, this idea recently experienced a rebirth – but this time, astonishingly, within the field of moral psychology. Those scholars who are trying to revive a sociological approach to morality, thus, found unexpected allies (or competitors?) from another tradition, and these psychological approaches need to be looked at a little closer.

Moral Psychology: Turning to Social Relations

The rise of moral psychology over the past few years was the result of a wide consensus among scholars in both the ontological notion of the human moral capacity and the methodological foundations of the new ‘science of morality’. The former was related to the neo-Darwinian synthesis and meant a more or less common understanding of morality as having an evolutionary origin and using the idea of natural selection as the basic frame of reference in explaining both phylogenetic and ontogenetic moral development (Krebs, 2008). Over the past years psychologists and neuroscientists, along with those philosophers who adhere to the experimental approach (Knobe et al., 2012), have conducted numerous studies aimed at discovering the universal psychological mechanisms of making moral judgements and evaluations and comparing these empirical findings against normative ethical conceptions, most notably, deontology and consequentialism (see, for example, Greene, 2013).

However, this biology- and philosophy-driven tradition of studying supposedly universal forms of moral cognition was complemented – if not challenged – by another approach, which aims to understand the variation of moral worldviews across different social groups and cultures. Following the spirit of classical sociology, some psychologists propose conceptual schemes which help explain morality in a comparative perspective – perhaps, the most well-known conception of this kind is Moral Foundations Theory developed by J Haidt and colleagues (Graham et al., 2012; Haidt, 2013). They see human moral capacity as based on several cognitive modules, which include considerations about Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Degradation (later, they included one more foundation – Liberty/Oppression). According to this theory, these moral foundations are universal and innate, but culture affects the extent to which people are ‘sensitive’ to them: while liberals and, generally, people from western societies, are concerned only with the first two, conservatives, and people from traditional societies, use all five to determine whether something is morally right or wrong. This multi-dimensional conceptualization of morality is, in essence, of Durkheimian nature, as the very idea of most of the ‘foundations’ is that group benefits are crucial for understanding morality, and, consequently, western liberal moral code is far from being universal – a position, famously advocated by the French sociologist. Moreover, Haidt’s (2007) emphasis on group selection theory (which sees social groups as genuine units of selection) as a possible way of evolution of these pro-group moral mechanisms also matches Durkheim’s social realism.

Another conception with a similar objective is ‘relationship regulation’ theory developed by psychologist T Rai and anthropologist A Fiske. Based on the ‘relational models theory’ proposed by Fiske, they identify four basic ‘moral motives’ which represent morality as fundamentally dependent on the social relationships – Unity, Hierarchy, Equality and Proportionality (Rai and Fiske, 2011). Rai and Fiske’s (2011: 59) central point is that these motives guide moral judgements and behaviour ‘with reference to prescriptive models of social relationships’, which are constructed differently across situations, societies and cultures. Like Moral Foundations Theory, this concept assumes that morality is much more than prohibiting personal harm, as it appears to be based on collectivistic feelings supporting a certain social order. This theory also allows for an account of morality where violence can be seen as a perfectly moral act – for example, if it is perceived as the only way to retain valuable relationships. Notably, Rai and Fiske explicitly acknowledge the influence of the classical sociological tradition on their work – so does Haidt (2008) in relation to Durkheim.

These theories are valuable for the sociology of morality, as they employ a fully sociological standpoint that sees moral phenomena as irreducible to universal mechanisms of moral development but, rather, emphasizes the social and cultural content of morality. They are also important in terms of focusing attention on the sources of genuine moral disagreement that do exist between cultures, and trying to show, in accord with the Durkheimian perspective, that moral objectivism might not be the best starting point for a theory to explain morality. While Haidt’s rather explicit moral relativism has been criticized (e.g. Gibbs, 2014), it is still essential for the sociological perspective to avoid ethnocentric views of morality, objectifying the western liberal moral code that in many respects might be really WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic; see Henrich et al., 2010); that is, does not reflect the views of the people who belong to more traditional collectivistic societies and who represent the majority of the globe’s population.

Yet, it is not my aim to review in detail or substantively criticize the theories by Haidt, and Rai and Fiske here; rather, with these examples, I would like to show that what once was a crucial sociological problematic is rapidly moving into psychology’s sphere of competence. This process, of course, is not something intrinsically negative – on the contrary, one, apparently, cannot give a full scientific account of morality by only examining its innate mechanisms, without addressing the problem of its social and cultural variation. However, I believe that the very idea of describing morality-related phenomena with a set of variables should impose on a sociologist a strong feeling of déjà vu. Of course, one should not go too far by claiming that there is any kind of direct correspondence between the theories from the classical sociology of morality and modern moral psychology – but it might be helpful to juxtapose the major points of the theories by Haidt, and Rai and Fiske, with, for example, Parsons’ model of pattern variables. Despite the apparent difference in subject and objectives (for Parsons, as mentioned above, they were much broader and more abstract), one can draw certain conclusions about the ways some moral actions (e.g. honour killing) could be, in principle, comprehended within these analytical schemes in a rather similar vein, and this inevitably leads to the question of whether overwhelming criticisms of Parsons really did a good job for the sociological theory of morality.

Any further discussions of whether we are now dealing with ‘reinventing the wheel’ in any sense, however, go far beyond the scope of this article. The more critical question is what sociology should undertake in order not to completely lose its status as an important perspective from which to study moral phenomena, given that our traditional niche is becoming occupied by psychologists. Although some of us are already embracing the framework of the Moral Foundations Theory (Vaisey and Miles, 2014) or other approaches from social psychology (Hitlin, 2014), I argue that, in spite of the obvious popularity of these theories, this way is not inevitable. Indeed, the sociological tradition has much more to offer for those who are interested in understanding morality. In the next section, I present two general perspectives which, in my opinion, could be considered as possible lines of research within the new sociology of morality.

Two Possible Perspectives for the Sociology of Morality

Given that the grand theories of the classical sociology of morality have now been abandoned, and biologists and psychologists dominate in the field, one might ask whether there is a need for the new sociology of morality. However, over the past years a visible movement for the re-institutionalization of the field emerged and a number of attempts were made to consider its future. The common idea for this research programme is following the spirit of classical sociology in viewing social relations as a fundamental frame of reference in explaining morality, although there seems to be not that much elaboration of this general thesis. At the same time, this new old comprehension is explicitly reactive, as the main problem now is how to justify the necessity of the sociological perspective in a world where dozens of popular books on scientific studies of human moral capacity are written by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists. Such arguments take different forms: for instance, Abend (2011) suggests that sociologists should pay more attention to what he calls ‘thick’ morality – that is, culturally loaded meanings of ‘big’ moral concepts (e.g. ‘dignity’ or ‘cruelty’) – as opposed to studying single moral judgements popular in cognitive science. Hitlin and Vaisey (2013), formulating the main principles of the ‘new’ sociology of morality, state them in opposition to the evolutionary biological notion of morality and psychological methodology of laboratory experiments. Stets (2010) argues that a theory of identity from sociological social psychology could provide a means for overcoming the famous ‘judgement–action gap’ by emphasizing moral identity as a crucial factor that determines moral behaviour.

These and other ideas concerning the future of the sociology of morality are no doubt valuable, but the prevalence of evolutionary and cognitive psychology in studying both universal and culturally specific forms of morality still makes the sociological approach problematic. In this respect, one can suppose that for the new sociology of morality it is crucial to develop its attitude towards the interdisciplinary perspective, and the main question could be formulated as follows: should the new sociology of morality embrace the interdisciplinary naturalistic approach, which arguably means rejecting most of the discipline’s historical and theoretical heritage, or should it try to develop its own independent means for analysis of moral phenomena, which is hazardous in terms of losing direct contact with other sciences dealing with human behaviour? Although the question is difficult, I argue that both answers are possible, and both could provide a valuable addition to the current interdisciplinary science of morality. Based on such considerations, I would like to propose two possible visions of the new sociology of morality, which I call cognitive and analytical, and to outline the main problems each one might be dealing with. Needless to say, these perspectives should be seen rather as ideal types; I also do not claim that they already exist in more or less distinguishable forms – while some of the recent work in the sociology of morality could be attributed to one or the other, much is yet to be further elaborated.

Conclusion

Hitlin and Vaisey (2013: 53) argue that the new sociology of morality can be viewed as mostly ‘Weberian’, because morality is largely seen as belonging ‘more to cross-cutting groups and less to society as a whole’, and the field is generally very diverse in its themes and approaches. Whether or not this qualification is essentially correct, this article’s main point is that it might be too early to dismiss the ‘Durkheimian’ perspective. While the great 19th-century narratives of moral progress and grand theories of the mid-20th century are gone, the gap they left in sociology has still not been filled, and morality, as such, remains under-theorized. Many behavioural scientists understand morality as something universal and innate, but a number of modern moral psychologists use quite Durkheimian logic in trying to understand moral diversity across cultures – this fact, I believe, should make sociologists more thoroughly reflect on their own heritage.

Can the ‘new’ sociology of morality be called a well-established field of studies within the discipline? Even if some would agree, the way to pass is definitely long, and sociologists of morality still look like they are just trying to catch up. The two perspectives delineated above might help identify ways for further development, but what is really important for the future of the sociology of morality is moving from mere speculations and meta-theorizing to doing complex research and developing substantive theory. The current article hardly does this job, but, hopefully, will encourage scholars to focus on reconstructing a comprehensive sociological picture of moral life.