It is not an accident that Zygmunt Bauman’s withering critique of ‘orthodox sociology of morality’ (2000a [1989]), appears only fleetingly in the Handbook. Gabriel Ignatow dismisses Bauman in a few pages (2010:415–417). Bauman then appears briefly in Abend’s chapter (2010:567, 574) in references linked to Abend’s earlier programmatic piece, “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality.” There Abend oddly
assimilates Bauman to a ‘Durkheimian’ approach to morality (2008:89) while annexing Bauman’s ‘orthodox sociology of morality’ phrase and applying it to ‘value-free’
sociology of morality (which Abend dubs the ‘Weberian Paradigm’). Thus, Abend doubly misleads, for Bauman’s ‘orthodox sociology of morality’ (Bauman 2000a) refers
(somewhat unfairly) to ‘Durksonian’ (Bauman 1976) approaches that assimilate morality to socially prevailing legal norms (Bauman 1990a:12). Instead of recognizing that Bauman discards Durkheimian (and Parsonsian) sociology of morality in favour of a Levinasian ethical a priori, Abend equates Durkheim’s relativist notion of moral validity with Bauman’s universalist claims about ethical subjectivity (Bauman 1990a:34).
Abend’s attempt to bracket the severity of the problems of agnosticism for the
sociology of morality can be linked to his misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s attempt at a wholesale critique of the ‘orthodox sociology of
morality.’ While Abend characterizes the orthodox position as advocating the neutral objectivity of a ‘value-free’ approach, Bauman sees the elements of sociological orthodoxy rather differently. According to Bauman, the standard sociological view assumes that individuals require society as a moralizing force because of their innate moral depravity. In addition, the standard view places scientists in a legislative/expert role (i.e., society needs us because individuals lack capacities of moral self-regulation).
According to Bauman, morality is innate, society should be seen as primarily
constraining or manipulating (rather than enabling) our innate moral impulses, and social scientists should be interpreters, not experts or legislators (Bauman 1987; 1990a).
Abend’s and Bauman’s very different interpretive approaches to the Holocaust illustrate the gap between them. Abend uses the Holocaust to test the possibility of scientific value-neutrality, and concludes that if we wish for a complete explanation, perhaps we will not be able to treat the Holocaust in a value-neutral fashion (i.e., since
‘thick descriptions’ of moral or immoral qualities will tend towards an indictment of Nazi society). Bauman, by contrast, wants to question the notion of relative moral-validity (i.e., Durkheim’s thesis that each society has a morality that is appropriate to it). For Bauman the question is not that of ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ moral concepts or even of ‘ecological validity.’ Neither is it a question of an alternative between value-free and normative sociology. The issue, for Bauman, is whether it is immorality rather than morality that is a
measurable social substance (i.e., a ‘social fact’ in Durkheim’s sense).6 According to Bauman, while immorality has peculiar societal forms, morality has universal pre-societal sources in basic human sociality, which constitute a priori conditions of possibility for society: the sociology of immorality help explain how, in Nazi Germany, human morality was constrained and neutralized by emergent and then institutionalized social practices.
Bauman goes much further than Abend’s suggestion that sociologists should pay attention to contemporary moral philosophy. He follows Emmanuel Levinas in arguing that morality should be treated as ‘first philosophy’ (Levinas 1979:43), as prior to socialization, as necessarily distinguished from institutionalized social forms, and as riven with equivocation and ambivalence (Bauman 1990b; Junge 2008). This is not the same as approaching morality agnostically (and thus that sociological analysis of Nazism and the Holocaust should not presuppose that moral truths may be found there). Levinas begins Totality and Infinity by claiming that “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1979:21). We cannot proceed agnostically. We begin by getting our metaethics in order. Morality should be approached with Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, for morality does have a truth:
absolute responsibility in the face of the ethical demand of the Other (cf. Løgstrup 1997).
Abend is more sanguine. On his reading, sociology does not need to base itself on moral philosophical premises. We should consult moral philosophy, but if it does not supply us with a consensus on morality, that is okay. He suggests, on the one hand, that
“most...empirical research on morality is based on hopelessly bankrupt
6 Chapter 2 argues that this is one way of reading Marx’s position on morality.
epistemological/methodological foundations” (2008:88) and that sociologists should better acquaint themselves with recent “advances” in moral philosophy, but then suggests that “given the fundamental disagreements that persist in the philosophical literature, any authoritative verdict about their worth would be questionable” (90). The tension, here, bordering on contradiction, is surely a common experience for those who engage in interdisciplinary exploration. The difficulty of adjudicating between competing
authorities in a field in which one has not received a primary formation can weaken the conviction that interdisciplinary conversation can be effective. If no authoritative verdict is available, can Abend be sure that moral philosophy has advanced or that sociologists should consult it?7 What is more, this claim of progress constitutes his own authoritative verdict. But was that really the Owl of Minerva that you saw flying at dusk, or just bats?
Bauman, in contrast to Abend, aligns himself with a particular moral philosophy, and assumes the validity of the claims it makes about moral truth. In a move with more in common with Weber than with Durkheim, however, Bauman sees this moral truth as lacking in legislative force. That is, Levinasian moral philosophy asserts the existence of a primordial moral sociality in the form of a categorical imperative, a formal duty whose content must be supplied by each individual. Concrete ethical decisions cannot have their legitimacy supplied by expert or collective authority. Bauman does not present morality as a contest between fundamentally opposed values, as Weber does—as the ‘ethic of absolute ends’ vs. the ‘ethic of responsibility’ (1958a)—but his characterization of
7 These were the stakes of the debate between Luhmann and Habermas about the autonomy (what systems theory refers to as autopoiesis) of different fields of discourse. Neither Abend’s article nor any of the other articles in the Handbook deal in any detail with this balkanization problem.
morality as fundamentally ambivalent has affinities with Weber’s emphasis on decision.
Abend’s pragmatic agnosticism allows one to continue with disciplinary activity while lacking certainty about the (true) worth of one’s work. But this is a real aporia.
Why should we begin working on such a shaky foundation? It requires great faith in the broader meaningfulness of pragmatic work procedures. While Abend correctly points out the importance of engaging with philosophical and moral neuroscientific approaches to morality, he underplays the extent to which this derives from the permeability, underlying instability, and perpetual questionability of disciplinary practices as such (cf. Halberstam 2011). Similarly, while he provides an engaging review of some questions typically addressed by sociologists of morality, this pragmatic ‘style’ appears unserious insofar as it treats moral questions as reducible to the question of objective moral knowledge, not also as questions constitutive of (sociological) subjectivities.8
Levinas, by contrast, (and following him, Bauman) demotes the epistemological question, posed in the Cartesian and Kantian tradition (i.e., of beginning with
skepticism), by making the ethical question into the fundamental transcendental
condition, and subordinating the true (both epistemology and ontology) to the good: “Not
‘Why being rather than nothing?’, but how being justifies itself” (Levinas 1989:86).
However, while the aporetical notion of ethics as absolute responsibility for the other may sideline the epistemological problem of moral knowledge or the ontological question of being, it may actually block the sociology of morality, or reduce it to disciplinary
self-8 A question for all forms of pragmatism (as types of functionalism), whether Abend’s or other recent formulations (e.g., Morgan 2013): pragmatic for whom? If the answer is ‘everyone,’ we are necessarily pushed back into foundational questions (e.g., like universal categorical imperatives).
critique, or to a sociology of immorality, as in Bauman’s reading (2000a [1989]; 1993;
1994; 1995). On this view, which takes the moral impulse to be
a challenge that precedes all socially created and socially run ontological settings...society is primarily a contraption for reducing the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility-for-the-Other, or the infinity of the ‘ethical demand,’ to a set of prescriptions and proscriptions more on a par with human abilities to cope and to manage. (Bauman 2008:48)
On this view, then, Nazism and the Holocaust do not indicate the failure of the social to restrain our innate moral depravity, the ‘return of the repressed,’ but rather the success of modern socially constructed forms of adiaphorization, which effect the neutralization of the moral impulse. Sociology can only diagnose the social conditions that limit and constrain morality and thereby enable specific forms of immoral action.
Terry Eagleton has suggested, however, that Bauman and Levinas’s revision of Kantian duty-focused morality—which revises away from Kant’s deduction of the
categorical imperative from the transcendental conditions of practical reason and towards the face-to-face encounter with the other, rendering the moral and the ethical something
“to be approached through sensibility rather than through cognition” (Eagleton 2009:224)
—demands too much. On Eagleton’s reading, Levinas exaggerates the priority and the absolute alterity of the Other, and as a result Levinasian “Absolute responsibility...is really a case of Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’” (237). Eagleton suggests that when we read morality transcendentally/phenomenologically as constituted by the pre-societal ‘party of two,’ the confrontation with the face of the absolutely other, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of concrete moral (and political) action: “Levinas seems not to recognise that
to strip the subject of its social context is to render it more abstract rather than more immediate, and thus more akin to the bloodless Enlightenment subject he detests” (227).
Gillian Rose develops a reading that is broadly consonant with Eagleton’s, suggesting that the Levinasian position installs “repetitive dualisms of power and otherness” (1996:10), rendering activity (including sociological activity) permanently melancholic rather than engaged in genuine (ethical/political) acts of mourning (11) or social transformation. This melancholia is mobilized by a ressentiment that loses itself in declarations of absolute guilt or absolute victimhood (e.g., the sacrificial sublimity of the Holocaust, from which Bauman tries to derive too much meaning by reading it as a thoroughgoing indictment of Enlightenment reason). The Bauman-Levinas position, in other words, has affinities both with what Hegel called ‘unhappy consciousness’ (in the transition from self-consciousness to Reason) and with what he called the ‘beautiful soul’
(in the transition from Spirit to Religion), and seems to conclude with a mere declaration of guilt in the face of the other. The problem, here, lies not with the declaration of guilt, but with the failed attempt to invert Kant’s first two critiques and to make (and this is Ignatow’s point in labelling Bauman an ‘inverted Kantian’) ‘practical reason’ the
transcendental basis for ‘pure reason.’ On this question I follow Rose and J.M. Bernstein, who argue that Kant represents, above all, the philosophical (if not the material) origin of the tragic modern diremption or ‘trisection of reason’ (Bernstein 1997), in which truth, goodness, and beauty are incapable of being unified under an act of comprehensive reason. This diremption cannot be repaired by making ethics into first philosophy (i.e., by
subordinating truth to goodness).
Bauman’s transcendental ethical position appears at times to reject all forms of sociology that would conceive of morality as a human construct, a concrete form of ongoing human activity, what American sociologist Alan Wolfe calls “the precious gift society is” (1989:23). For Bauman, morality remains ambivalent, but human values are timeless. As a result, in a certain sense morality has no history. Only the social
institutions that constrain and limit our moral impulse in various ways have a history.
Only immorality has a history. Though the two universal human moral values of freedom and security (Bauman 2008:13) are persistent, history shows us that, “instead of
following a path of linear progress toward more freedom and more security, we can observe a pendulumlike movement: first overwhelmingly and staunchly toward one of the two values, and then a swing away from it and toward the other” (13–14). At the moment, we live, on the one hand, in the era of the consumer; social forces of globalizing capitalism and individualizing consumption of commodities have enabled us to break away in new ways from our primordial ‘ethical demand’ as they ‘adiaphorize’ new spheres of activity, neutralizing and rendering our moral impulse irrelevant. On the other hand, the value of security is reduced to an American empire-sponsored ‘war on terror’
that takes advantage of that adiaphorization in order to enable the ‘smooth functioning’ of military policies that (perpetually) attempt to ‘cleanse’ and ‘purify’ the world of ‘terror.’
Against this view of immorality as having a social history, while morality is ahistorical and focused entirely on ‘the face of the other’ (i.e., ‘the moral party of two’) as
absolute but abstract otherness, Gillian Rose proposes a neo-Hegelian reading of social change and of the (moral/izing) encounter of self and other as a “dialectic of
misrecognition” (1996:74). (Historical) mediation is an essential element of morality, and not just its reduction or its socially constrained expression. The mediating element, here, what Rose calls ‘the broken middle,’ deserves to be distinguished both from Axel
Hönneth’s ‘struggle for recognition’—because that assumes a too-idealistic (and one-dimensional) view of the trajectory of human nature (cf. the critiques of Hönneth by Butler 2008; Geuss 2008; Lear 2008) or rests on an incomplete analysis of power
relations (cf. McNay 2008)—and from Habermas’s ‘criticizable validity claim’—because this assumes a too-rationalistic view of particularity, and too narrow a view of how motivation and expression are linked together or reducible to a content to be directly communicated and debated. As Bernstein (2001) argues, Habermas endorses ‘double men,’ with passions and sensuous experiences, on the one hand, and discursive reasons on the other, too formally endorsing the law as the embodiment of a process of
democratic will-formation. His notion of communicative reason is too incommunicable.
Though she does not accept his rejection of style, nevertheless, like Habermas and unlike Bauman, Rose gives central standing to the mediating role of law. While the Bauman-Levinas view of morality suggests that we are “inborn moral beings” (Bauman 2008:54–55), Rose argues that it is through a risky sublimation/endorsement of the law, through immanent critique, through an act aimed at the good of all, that we discover, experience, and establish usufruct on new moral territory and manage to deconstruct the
exclusionary logic of social solidarity achieved through scapegoating (1996:35–36).
Through acts of this sort (e.g., Antigone illegally mourning her slain brother) ‘mourning becomes the law,’ not law as a system of prohibitions and punishments, except insofar as it is also the law of risky obligation for which we must discover new modes of
fulfilment.9 This may be on the basis of an ‘inborn’ morality, but the law in this sense is not the silencing or the minimizing of morality, as in Bauman, but one of the conditions of its excitation, although not exactly in the sense conceived by Habermas. For Rose, as for Habermas, law is the middle. It is, however, a ‘broken middle,’ for Rose, precisely because law and morality are more fundamentally and traumatically split than Habermas has argued. Nevertheless, we cannot preserve our morality by turning away from the law, but only by enacting the law in the face of its actually existing forms, perhaps by
breaking it. In the notion of mourning becoming the law rather than remaining the melancholy illegality of much criminalized behaviour, Rose points to the phenomenon Hannah Arendt (1998) called natality.
Against the sanguinity of pragmatic agnosticism, Rose’s model entails faith (in the law) and risk in the face of avoidable danger. And perhaps this formulation best renders visible the criteria for a weak program in the sociology of morality. In any case, whether I have been fair to Abend or to Bauman, this dissertation properly begins here,
9 See, on this point, the contrasting readings of shame’s role in identity and social relation-formation developed by sociologist of emotion, Jonathan H. Turner (2011) and affect theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003). Sedgwick’s discussion of shame’s role in shaping identity and relation in a way that precedes prohibition and repression (based upon Basch 1976) supports Rose’s notion of a political dialectic of misrecognition, and appears to offer a subtler resource in thinking about morality’s relation to the law than Turner’s structural and quantitative approach to ‘the problem of emotions.’
with the sense that uncertainty (and ambivalence) provoke an accountability that is neither an a priori absolute nor, on the other hand, reducible to expressions of agnosticism, and that answerability for scholarly practice forms a key element of the sociology of morality.
Still, what passes for answerability may be no more than a moral narcissism linked to an inflated (or absolute) sense of responsibility (cf. Cremin 2012), what Butler refers to as “the reduction of ethical philosophy to the inward mutilations of conscience”
(2005:135). To counter this possibility, we need to combine Butler’s claim that there is a permanent gap between truth and the subject—a gap which means that I can never fully account for myself, but that “my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (84)—with Foucault’s distinction (1997:223–252) between self-knowledge and ‘care of the self.’
This approach may allow us to avoid the ‘bad infinity’ that dogs the Baumanian-Levinasian position—which always needs to bracket (phenomenologically) the effects of socialization—without reverting to Abend’s pragmatic agnosticism—which needs to bracket (analytically) the existence of moral truths in order to act (sociologically).
Bauman is unable to consistently maintain the Levinasian distinction between primordial sociality and societal moral forms. His discussions of morality depend on a social stock of exemplary moral accomplishments—such as resistance to Nazism—and moral heroes that have been supplied through particular and institutionalized forms of memorialization, cultural narration, education. He claims (2000a; cf. Arendt 1998) that sociology cannot
explain the moral heroes that he celebrates, but surely the virtues he assigns these heroes, like Lech Walesa’s hope, courage, and stubbornness (Bauman 2008:30), can be traced, without being explained away, to antecedent (but not a priori) social experiences which may serve as social determinations, although certainly not mechanistic causes, of action (cf. Morgan 2013). On the other hand, Abend is unable, as he has himself begun to admit, to ‘scientifically’ bracket non-agnostic assertions about moral truth.
This dissertation diverges from Hitlin and Vaisey’s collection of Durkheim-heavy approaches because it emphasizes the paradoxical or aporetical relationship between sociology and morality. The sociology of morality has constantly fallen into
contradictions. These contradictions have been rooted in the paradox that, instead of simply ‘explaining’ moral phenomena, sociological concepts of morality tend to displace and replace everyday morality with expert concepts. How can we approach sociological conceptualizations of morality without merely displacing the social objects, practices, and realities to which they respond? It is, in an important sense, a question of symmetry. To change metaphors abruptly, the loose thread that stitches the chapters that follow, whether tying or simply entangling them, is the concept of answerability. This is the thread with which I hope to suture some paradoxes seemingly inherent to sociology of morality.