one - A conceptual exploration of moral space

Summary

How a society organizes itself is a question that lies at the heart of social sciences and has its roots in (social) philosophy. Many theorists have searched for a unifying principle that underlies social order. There are several candidates that are held responsible – from God to science, and from the state to human nature. Thus, the question refers to a library of theories, philosophies and empirical studies, and seems too big to handle in a scientific way.

The question of order might be better approached from a negative angle: what happens if social order is disturbed? What efforts are made to prevent these disturbances? Crime seems a more interesting way in to study the phenomenon of societal organization. Then the moral aspects of a certain social order come to the fore. Social organization always implies a certain moral order.

But morality is a somewhat vague term. Talking about morals, people easily think of unctuous pastors or strict teachers. Moral judgements are also not easily accepted. It is generally not easy to speak openly about our own norms and values. We tend to think of our own motives and behaviour in positive terms. Yet we see a continuous flow of moral and ethical judgements about others in the public domain, as presented in talk shows on television or the bickering on Twitter and other social media. While many think that we live in a kind of immoral era, I see a kind hyper-morality: many judgements, but little consensus as to norms and values. This ambivalence says a lot about our time, or rather about the moral conditions of our time.

The way we judge our own behaviour and that of others is crucial for the social organization of a society. We act according to our values and norms, or at least we think that we are doing so. We also use them in retrospect to justify our actions. In this way, we anticipate our future actions or those of others.

I regard morality as crucial for the organization of our society. Then it is about the social imaginaries (Taylor, 2007) that we make about a good society or a bad life, about the desired relationships between people in a community, about the world that we would like to live in.