The Self, Relational Sociology, And Morality In Practice 3030318214, 9783030318215, 9783030318222

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
1 Introduction: A Relational Sociology of Morality in Practice......Page 11
Chapter Outline......Page 16
References......Page 18
2 An Overview of Relational Sociology......Page 21
What Is Relational Sociology Standing Against?......Page 22
The Critique of Holism and Structure......Page 23
The Critique of Individualism......Page 28
The Relational Constitution of the Subject......Page 31
The Relational Constitution of Action......Page 35
Agency and Practice......Page 38
Relational Sociology and Practice......Page 44
Summary......Page 51
References......Page 52
3 From Rationalism to Practices, Dispositions, and Situated Subjectivities: The View from Philosophy......Page 58
The View from Philosophy......Page 59
Practice and Virtue in MacIntyre......Page 64
Dreyfus and Ethical Comportment......Page 71
Entangled Subjectivities and Entangled Action: Carol Gilligan......Page 78
Summary......Page 84
References......Page 86
4 From Holism and Individualism to a Relational Perspective on the Sociology of Morality......Page 91
The Sociology of Morality: From the Old to the New......Page 92
Durkheimian Holism......Page 97
Bauman’s Moral Individualism......Page 104
Summary: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena......Page 113
References......Page 115
5 The New Sociology of Morality and Morality in Practice......Page 120
Morality and the Realm of Ordinary Practice......Page 121
Ordinary Moral Concern in Habituated Interaction......Page 129
Reflexivity, Relational Entanglement, and Morality in Practice......Page 135
Summary......Page 141
References......Page 143
6 The Self and a Relational Explanation of Morality in Practice......Page 149
Habitus and Moral Dispositions......Page 150
Mead and the Social Emergence of the Self......Page 157
Self-Consciousness and Self......Page 159
The ‘I’, the ‘Me’, and the ‘Generalised Other’......Page 160
Individuation and Dialogic Selfhood......Page 162
The Self in Action......Page 164
Mead, Moral Habituation, and Moral Consciousness......Page 166
Beyond the Dispositional: Mundane Reflexivity and Morality in Practice......Page 170
The Self and Reflexive Moral Subjectivity......Page 174
Summary......Page 178
References......Page 180
7 Conclusion: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena......Page 185
References......Page 190
Index......Page 191

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN RELATIONAL SOCIOLOGY

The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice Owen Abbott

Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology Series Editors Nick Crossley Department of Sociology University of Manchester Manchester, UK Peeter Selg School of Governance, Law and Society Tallinn University Tallinn, Estonia

In various disciplines such as archeology, psychology, psychoanalysis, international relations, and philosophy, we have seen the emergence of relational approaches or theories. This series, founded by François Dépelteau, seeks to further develop relational sociology through the publication of diverse theoretical and empirical research—including that which is critical of the relational approach. In this respect, the goal of the series is to explore the advantages and limits of relational sociology. The series welcomes contributions related to various thinkers, theories, and methods clearly associated with relational sociology (such as Bourdieu, critical realism, Deleuze, Dewey, Elias, Latour, Luhmann, Mead, network analysis, symbolic interactionism, Tarde, and Tilly). Multidisciplinary studies which are relevant to relational sociology are also welcome, as well as research on various empirical topics (such as education, family, music, health, social inequalities, international relations, feminism, ethnicity, environmental issues, politics, culture, violence, social movements, and terrorism). Relational sociology—and more specifically, this series—will contribute to change and support contemporary sociology by discussing fundamental principles and issues within a relational framework. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15100

Owen Abbott

The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice

Owen Abbott University of Manchester Manchester, UK

Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology ISBN 978-3-030-31821-5 ISBN 978-3-030-31822-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31822-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Philartphace/E+/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Sally and John Abbott, for everything they have done for me

Acknowledgements

Throughout the process of writing this book, innumerable people have gone out of their way to offer help, support, and guidance for very little reason at all other than that they are good people—which is, to some extent at least, indicative of part of the point of this book. Firstly, I would like to thank François Dépelteau for the time he gave in assisting me with the proposal of this book. His kindness was palpable from the support he lent me, and his keenness to bring together those who work in relational sociology will be greatly missed. Special thanks goes to Dr. Nigel Pleasants for guiding and shaping my ideas and interests as my Ph.D. supervisor, and for continuing to be wonderfully supportive in the course of bringing this book together. Since examining my Ph.D., Ian Burkitt has been kind and generous beyond belief, firstly by suggesting that my thesis may work within the Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology series, and from there forward reading through drafts of chapters and offering instructive feedback from his position of leading expertise in the field. I owe a huge amount to Ian, and it won’t ever be forgotten. Having read much of Nick Crossley’s work during my Ph.D. research, serendipitous good fortune led me to work in the same department as him at the University of Manchester, and I have been clogging up his email ever since. He has been a tremendous source of inspiration and guidance, particularly since he took over the co-editorship of the relational sociology book series in light of François’s untimely passing. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am just one of a whole host of people at the University of Manchester and beyond who has benefited hugely from the profound wisdom, generosity, and humour of Wendy Bottero. In my case, Wendy has not only laid and rediverted the path of my ideas, but has also made engaging with ideas thoroughly enjoyable. I have particularly benefitted from the Pragmatism Reading group at Manchester, in which Wendy, Charlotte Branchu, Kirsty Morrin and Laura Fenton have tugged and hammered my thoughts into a hopefully passable shape, although they should bear no responsibility should this not be the case. During my time at Manchester, I have been lucky enough to have been taken under the collective intellectual might of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. As even a cursory glance at my reference list will affirm, the work conducted by members of the centre has offered me a wellspring of guiding ideas that has driven my work forward. As anyone in a similar position will attest, surviving early careers academia requires not just a great deal of support, but also kindness and friendship from within the academic world, all of which have been provided in spades by Nadim Mirshak, James Rhodes and Andrew Balmer, among many others at Manchester. Dr. Kaine Southey and Dr. Jack Hendy provided the most wonderful environment for the completion of the Ph.D. thesis upon which this book is based, something for which I, and everyone else who revelled in the delights of Greville road, will be forever grateful. For years of friendship and intellectual stimulation, I have to thank Hywel Abbott, David Abbott, Josh Simpson, Paul Herron, Shane Jarvis, Steven Barrett, Dan O’Sullivan, Ricky Ketley-Prentice, Adam Ollis, Rob Dyer, Ben Wilson, Tom Arnall, Joe Rowsell, Tom Hollis, Ben Clarke, and all at Gordano RFC who gave me respite from academic tedium. Several people said they would give me a fiver if I named them in the book, so thanks also to Chris and Lee Worgan, Beaker, and Matt Stevens. The music of Spencer Flay has also helped me through the writing of this book. Most importantly, and most deeply, I would like to thank NatalieAnne. She has been so wonderful to me in so many ways, both personally and in her willingness to point out that what a sentence says in my head and how it reads to others are sometimes some distance from being the same thing. Her wisdom and her compassion have provided me with an irrepressible fount of inspiration and support throughout this whole process, for which I am incredibly grateful.

Contents

1 Introduction: A Relational Sociology of Morality in Practice 1 Chapter Outline 6 References 8 2 An Overview of Relational Sociology 11 What Is Relational Sociology Standing Against? 13 The Critique of Holism and Structure 13 The Critique of Individualism 19 The Relational Constitution of the Subject 21 The Relational Constitution of Action 25 Agency and Practice 28 Relational Sociology and Practice 34 Summary 41 References 42 3 From Rationalism to Practices, Dispositions, and Situated Subjectivities: The View from Philosophy 49 The View from Philosophy 50 Practice and Virtue in MacIntyre 56 Dreyfus and Ethical Comportment 62 Entangled Subjectivities and Entangled Action: Carol Gilligan 69 Summary 75 References 77 ix

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4 From Holism and Individualism to a Relational Perspective on the Sociology of Morality 83 The Sociology of Morality: From the Old to the New 84 Two Grand Positions on the Sociology of Morality: Durkheim and Bauman 89 Durkheimian Holism 89 Bauman’s Moral Individualism 96 Summary: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena 105 References 107 5 The New Sociology of Morality and Morality in Practice 113 Morality and the Realm of Ordinary Practice 114 Ordinary Moral Concern in Habituated Interaction 122 Reflexivity, Relational Entanglement, and Morality in Practice 129 Summary 134 References 136 6 The Self and a Relational Explanation of Morality in Practice 143 Habitus and Moral Dispositions 145 Mead and the Social Emergence of the Self 151 Self-Consciousness and Self 153 The ‘I’, the ‘Me’, and the ‘Generalised Other’ 154 Individuation and Dialogic Selfhood 157 The Self in Action 158 Mead, Moral Habituation, and Moral Consciousness 160 Beyond the Dispositional: Mundane Reflexivity and Morality in Practice 164 The Self and Reflexive Moral Subjectivity 168 Summary 172 References 174 7 Conclusion: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena 179 References 184 Index 185

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Relational Sociology of Morality in Practice

The rise of ‘relational sociology’ in the last twenty years or so has coincided with something of a resurgence in the sociology of morality. It is interesting that the critiques of dualistic and static thinking that relational sociology has so thoroughly levelled against modernist social theory are not dissimilar from the kind of critiques in contemporary moral theory that have given the sociology of morality its new impetus. In the same way that relational sociology has sought to find new ways to move beyond seeing individuals as either determined products of social structure or as atomised subjects, in favour of conceptualising individuals as embedded interdependent actants, so too have certain significant trends in moral philosophy been scathing of the Enlightenment tradition of orienting ‘the moral’ in accordance with the deliberative, universalising reasoning and rational action of the disembedded individual (see, for example, Gilligan 1982; MacIntyre 1985; Dreyfus 2014; Hekman 1995; Benhabib 1992). In line with such critiques delivered from a philosophic perspective, there has been a drive by sociologists to reconceptualise morality as something that is ordinarily enacted in the intersubjective dynamics of everyday social practice, and which is of tangible significance to the accounts that people give of themselves and their action (see, for example, Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; May 2008; Luckmann 2002; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). However, as Emirbayer (1997: 310) identified in his Manifesto for a Relational Sociology, ‘[o]ne of the most serious shortcomings of relational © The Author(s) 2020 O. Abbott, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31822-2_1

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sociology to date is its relative neglect of normative concerns’, and it seems that the situation today is not overly different from how it was in 1997. Although frequent reference is made to morality in the relational sociology literature (see, for example, Donati and Archer 2015; Burkitt 2008; May 2013; Crossley 2011), and while some relational concepts have entered into the moral theory literature and definite parallels in the direction of theorising have been drawn (see, for example, Christman 2014; Fritzson 2018; Gergen 2011), the distinct formulation of a relational sociology of morality is found wanting. This is regrettable because relational sociology provides the theoretical and methodological means to radically reconsider how we conceptualise social phenomena. It allows us to conceptualise social phenomena not as entailing substances external to interaction, but as being relationally produced and dynamically unfolding in the interdependent practice of relationally moulded individuals. Likewise, relational sociology does not reduce social phenomena to the actions of detached subjects, but rather sees individuals and their agency as being the product of the relations in which they are embedded. In what follows, I argue that relational sociology, specifically an interactionist-relational sociology, provides sociologists of morality with the means to reconceptualise how moral phenomena are understood, but also how moral action and moral subjectivity are constituted and shaped within relationally entangled interaction. I argue further still that this provides a sociological theoretical framework for understanding morality with a dynamism which allows us to cut between the dualistic separation of the individual and social context in the formation of, and engagement with, morality in practice. The overall aim of this book is thus to show how a relational approach allows us to provide a coherent theory firstly of how morality is done in practice, and secondly of how individuals come to be able to engage with morality in practice in the ways that they do. In so doing, a relational approach contributes to an increasingly persistent critique of how morality has been conceptualised in the Western modernist traditions of philosophy, particularly in terms of how the conditions of moral action have been understood and how the moral subject has been conceptualised. The ascendency of relational sociology has much to do with its capacity to simultaneously undermine holist/objectivist modes of thinking on the one hand, and individualist theories on the other. It does this ‘by conceptualizing both individuals and larger formations in which they participate (like collectivities, institutions, and social systems) as belonging to the same

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order of reality, a relational order’ (Powell and Dépelteau 2013). In the relational view, broadly construed social phenomena, including moral phenomena, are reconceptualised as being constituted and sustained across vast, historically produced networks of interaction, which engender and maintain emergent properties such as cultural practices, languages, social constraints, institutional formations, orders of practice and so forth (Crossley 2011). Such phenomena are reconceptualised as being the product of ongoing interaction, and are thus conceptualised in processual terms, as being continually in the making. This is not to say that social phenomena are therefore the product of individual action, because it is within these networks that the actions and subjectivities of the individuals themselves are constituted. The relational approach makes this point on several grounds. Firstly, as will be argued predominantly in relation to the work of George Herbert Mead in Chapters 2 and 6, the individual, their subjectivities, dispositions, and modes of practice, as well as ‘higher’ faculties such as capacities for moral evaluation and judgement, are necessarily formed within the relational interactions that constitute their socialisation, and which also embed the individual within the networks and practices that comprise their social world (Mead 1934; Habermas 1995). Secondly, the form that individual action can take is given course by the interdependences, institutions, and orders of practice that exist across the networks of relations within which they are enacted (Elias 1991; Hilbert 2009). Importantly also, relational approaches highlight how the directionality of interactions unfold intersubjectively between actors, who ‘profoundly affect each other as they interact’ (Barnes 2000: 64; Bottero 2009; Crossley 2011). However, the plasticity of conceptualising phenomena in terms of relations, as oppose to ‘social structures’, allows the relational approach to facilitate the fact that reflexively capable individuals stratify the world in very different ways, that their subjectivities are formed across a variety of settings that they occupy from differing positions, and that their action occurs and is transformed within multitudes of fluid, variable, and indeterminate interactional settings. What this view thus adds to the sociology of morality is a processual picture of how moral phenomena, such as values, expectations of conduct, terms of evaluation and judgement, are shared and sustained, and yet also transformed, as they are variably enacted and engaged with by differentiated individuals in the messiness of practice. It allows plural and intersecting moralities to be conceptualised as being necessarily socially constituted, but also as resisting being universalised, and

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as being differentially understood and engaged with depending upon our differentiated positions in our social world and upon the specific and intersubjectively emergent situations in which we are acting. I argue that this view thus lends itself to the growing trend of conceptualising morality in terms of practice, as something that is engaged with and moulded in interaction, at varying levels of habituation and reflexive consideration, by individuals whose moral subjectivity has been likewise constituted in practice, and which is consequently conceptualised as being inextricably entangled and embedded within relations. More specifically, I argue that morality has its roots and is routinely enacted within ordinary, everyday practice. This is to extend the argument, already well-established in the resurgent sociology of morality, that ‘lay moralities’ are an ordinary facet of participation in social life, and that the bulk of moral action occurs at the level of ordinary practice (Sayer 2005; May 2008; Burkitt 2008; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). Indeed, this book seeks to show how a relational approach can provide a sociological account of the capacity of ordinary people to be ‘ordinarily ethical’, as it has been termed, in their everyday lives (Barnett et al. 2005). This is a phenomenon that has gained significant traction within the re-invigorated sociological concern with morality, and within this, this book seeks to investigate and explain how people engage with morality in everyday practice. The re-orientation of moral theory towards lay moral capacities, as well as the consideration of morality in terms of practice, is prominent not just in contemporary sociology, but also in recent movements in moral philosophy. It has been argued (see, for example, Dreyfus 2014; Gilligan 1982; Taylor 1989; Williams 1973; Hekman 1995) that while the dominant trends of philosophic thought in the twentieth century attempted to radically redress the Enlightenment visions of the rational autonomous subject, moral philosophy has been largely unwilling to divest itself of the modernist notion that action is moral when it is undertaken from the perspective of the detached universalising reason of the disembedded individual. Several key lines of critique have argued how this unencumbered view of moral action and subjectivity provides a decidedly dissociative view of how moral action is actually engaged with, and have thus sought to re-orientate conceptualisations of morality towards practices (MacIntyre 1985), everyday embodied comportment (Dreyfus 2014), and situated subjectivities (Gilligan 1982). The modernist view of moral action and subjectivity is particularly problematic from the perspective of sociological explanation, and the implicit

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association of questions of morality with ‘philosophical games and abstract argument’ is a key ‘part of the sociologist’s reluctance to openly address the question of moral values’ (Smart and Neale 1999: 118). Accordingly, in line with the kinds of critiques levelled against modernist moral philosophy by the likes of MacIntyre (1985), Dreyfus (2014), and Gilligan (1982), the re-invigorated sociological perspective on morality sees morality not as something that is to be definitively formulated in the abstract, nor as something that is or is not achieved depending upon adherence to such a formulation, but rather as something that is sustained and engaged with in practice, in the situations that confront us in everyday life in the social world (Sayer 2005; Shilling and Mellor 1998; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). It is consequently common within sociology to conceptualise morality in terms of its ordinariness. Sayer (2005: 8), for example, sets out that ‘[b]y morality I mean simply the matter of what kinds of behaviour are good, and thus how we should treat others and be treated by them’, with an emphasis on ordinary (often informal) embodied practices that are relatively routine in everyday social life. Likewise, Luckmann (2002: 19) argues that the moral simply refers to ‘a reasonably coherent set of notions of what is right and what is wrong, notions of the good life that guide human action beyond the immediate gratification of desires’, and continues that such moral ‘notions, as all notions, are of course held by individuals, but they do not originate with the individual. They are intersubjectively constructed in communicative interaction, and they are selected, maintained, and transmitted in complex social processes’. Although sociologists still approach any sort of questions of morality with an air of trepidation, there is a growing recognition that sociology needs to be able to talk of the moral effectively if it is to avoid alienating itself from an aspect of social life that is of tangible significance to lay experience (Sayer 2005; Shilling and Mellor 1998; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). It is nonetheless important to stress at the outset that I am not by any means saying that people are always moral, nor could it possibly be denied that people all too often turn a blind eye, deceive, exploit, repress, and fail to care enough. However, alongside this, ‘[s]ociology’s understandable concern with the bad’ should not obscure the fact that people routinely display ordinary moral capacities and considerations in the course of their social lives (Sayer 2005: 49). And the particular task of this book is to explain why this is the case, and how people become able to engage morally with practice in the ways that they do.

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However, the question of how such practice is engaged with brings us to a further point to be made in this book, which is that a Meadian-based interactional relationalism provides a better means of accounting for how morality is done in practice than a Bourdieusian approach of habitus and structural relationalism. A common critique of Bourdieu’s work is that it underplays the role of reflexivity in interaction, which firstly undermines the role of mundane reflexive monitoring of conduct and the directing of action at the moment of practice, and secondly negates the role of our more occasional deliberative ruminations on the moral quandaries that life throws our way, and subsequently underestimates the capacity of intersubjectively affected individuals to engage with and transform their perspectives and orient their action accordingly (Sayer 2005; McNay 2000; Bottero 2009; Crossley 2006; Aboulafia 1999). Such critiques are utilised within my argument alongside a body of empirical research that demonstrates how morality in practice is engaged with at varying phases of consciousness, from habitual pre-reflective embodiment, to mundane reflexivity, and more concerted considerations of what to think and how to act. It is this evidence that points towards the Meadian-based interactionist brand of relationalism being offered here for the purposes of explaining how morality is engaged with in practice.

Chapter Outline Chapter 2 will set out the major contentions of relational sociology, as well as outlining the particular interactionist-relational sociology that I will be applying throughout this book. The critiques that relational sociology delivers against holist and methodologically individualistic conceptualisations of social phenomena are not only resounding, but also, I argue, provide an essential challenge to how morality has been conceptualised both within philosophy and sociology. These critiques will be detailed alongside a relational view of practice and situated subjectivity, which I will go on to argue offers a new path out of previous impasses in moral theorising. As with any broad umbrella of social theory, there are some fairly stark differences in how relational sociology has been conceptualised. Although arriving at a definitive conclusion on these debates is far from the purpose of this book, Chapter 2 will also seek to provide a rounded justification for favouring an interactionist-relational approach, which will feed into the subsequent arguments regarding why this approach offers the theoretical

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and conceptual framework that is best placed for providing a foundation to a sociology of morality in practice. Chapter 3 carries forward the relational critiques of methodological individualism and rational action theories, and applies them specifically to a critique of modernist philosophic conceptualisations of the moral subject and moral action. I argue further that a relational depiction of situated subjectivity, coupled with its concurrent theory of intersubjectively emergent action, builds upon and extends various contemporary philosophic critiques of the modernist conception of morality. In relation to this, the sociological value of the work of MacIntyre (1985), Dreyfus (2014), and Gilligan (1982) will be evaluated with the aim of extending the argument for viewing morality as something that is sustained and conducted in relationally entangled interactional practice. Chapter 4 moves to address the sociology of morality more directly. It begins by outlining the arguments for the value and necessity of a sociological view of morality, before arguing that the customary positions assumed within the renewed research agenda of contemporary sociologies of morality lend themselves to relational-based theorising. 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 which will be detailed via a critique of Emile Durkheim’s (holist) and Zygmunt Bauman’s (individualist) formulations of the sociology of morality. The chapter concludes that the capacity of relational sociology to undermine and circumvent dualistic distinctions allows it to guide sociological conceptions of morality in a way that avoids the pitfalls associated with either holist or individualist approaches. The main purpose of Chapter 5 is firstly to make the argument that people do ordinarily engage morally in everyday practice, and secondly to assess the ways in which they do so. The sociology of morality necessarily needs to build its theoretical depiction of morality out of what is the case. Empirical evidence that people do routinely engage with morality in everyday practice is abundant, and it will be drawn upon throughout for strengthening the argument for viewing morality predominantly in practice terms. Referring back to the relational theory of practice set out in Chapter 2, this then feeds into the argument that it is predominantly in everyday practice that morality and moral phenomena as we know them are enacted, sustained, and transformed. However, there is also a body of research that deals with the question of how people engage with such practice, which indicates that

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morality in practice should be seen as being engaged with at various levels of habitude and reflexive consideration. This proves to be key to the brand of interactional relationalism offered here. Having set out the ways in which morality is engaged with in practice, Chapter 6 moves into the argument of how individuals come to be able to engage in moral practice in everyday life in the ways described in Chapter 5. It is here that I make the argument for favouring a Meadian-based interactional relationalism over a Bourdieusian approach. I justify this on the grounds that Mead’s theory is firstly better equipped to explain moral habituation, something which Bourdieu’s work largely neglects (Sayer 2005; Lamont 1992; Ignatow 2009). Secondly, because Mead puts a greater emphasis than Bourdieu on the role of reflexivity in interaction, his work is able to account for the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in interactionally situated moral conduct. Finally, by foregrounding the role of reflexivity in the social emergence of the self, his theory is able to provide a socially situated account of the dialogic capacities of the individual to develop and articulate their own subjective moral positions in relation to the perspectives of others, in a way that is potentially transformative of their own standpoints and courses of action. This last point is particularly significant from the perspective of moral theory, because it affords a place for a deliberative and individuated moral subjectivity, capable of relatively autonomous resistance to social pressure, without retreating into conceptualisations of the disembedded moral subject. Combined, I argue that a Meadian approach thus accounts for the capacities for ordinary engagement with morality in practice at the varying levels of habituation and reflexivity that it is enacted.

References Aboulafia, M. (1999). A (Neo) American in Paris: Bourdieu, Mead, and Pragmatism. In R. Shusterman (Ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (pp. 153–174). Oxford: Blackwell. Barnes, B. (2000). Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action (1st ed.). London: Sage. Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N., & Malpass, A. (2005). Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption. Antipode, 37 (1), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00472.x. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bottero, W. (2009). Relationality and Social Interaction. The British Journal of Sociology, 60(2), 399–420. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01236.x.

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Burkitt, I. (2008). Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London: Sage. Christman, J. (2014). Relational Autonomy and the Social Dynamics of Paternalism. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 17 (3), 369–382. Retrieved from JSTOR. Crossley, N. (2006). Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Donati, P., & Archer, M. S. (2015). The Relational Subject. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (2014). Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (M. R. Wrathall, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elias, N. (1991). The Society of Individuals (Reissue ed.). New York: Continuum. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281–317. https://doi.org/10.1086/231209. Fritzson, F.-A. (2018). Subjectivism and Relational Good. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21(2), 359–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9886-6. Gergen, K. J. (2011). From Moral Autonomy to Relational Responsibility. Journal of Religion and Science, 46(1), 204–223. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1995). Individuation Through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. In Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (pp. 149–205). Cambridge: Polity Press. Hekman, S. (1995). Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hilbert, R. (2009). Ethnomethodology and Social Theory. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (pp. 159–178). Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Hitlin, S., & Vaisey, S. (2013). Back to the Future. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 3–14). https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4419-6896-8_1. Holdsworth, C., & Morgan, D. (2007). Revisiting the Generalized Other: An Exploration. Sociology, 41(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038507076614. Ignatow, G. (2009). Why the Sociology of Morality Needs Bourdieu’s Habitus. Sociological Inquiry, 79(1), 98–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X. 2008.00273.x. Lamont, M. (1992). Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luckmann, T. (2002). Moral Communication in Modern Societies. Human Studies, 25(1), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014838423896. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.

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May, V. (2008). On Being a ‘Good’ Mother: The Moral Presentation of Self in Written Life Stories. Sociology, 42(3), 470–486. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038508088836. May, V. (2013). Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave. McNay, L. (2000). Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of A Social Behaviorist: 1 (C. Morris, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powell, C., & Dépelteau, F. (2013). Introduction. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 1–12). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342652_1. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. A. (1998). Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action. The British Journal of Sociology, 49(2), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.2307/591309. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1973). Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

An Overview of Relational Sociology

In the last decade or two, ‘relational sociology’ has arguably become the most significant of sociology’s so-called ‘turns’. Like many of sociology’s turns, it has produced a ‘Manifesto’ (Emirbayer 1997), the publication of a Handbook (The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology [Dépelteau 2018]), several paradigm-setting books from key theorists (see, for example, Towards Relational Sociology [Crossley 2011] and Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for Sociology [Donati 2010]), edited collections devoted to questions of what it means for sociology to be ‘relational’ and how this should be applied in research (Conceptualizing Relational Sociology [Powell and Depélteau 2013]; Applying Relational Sociology [Dépelteau and Powell 2013]), and a book series, of which the present volume is part. A standard starting point (both for those who seek to expound the paradigm and those who wish to critique its paradigmatic claims) is that this ‘relational’ approach to sociology is nothing new (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Classical social theorists from Marx (1888) and Durkheim (1893) to Weber (1922) and Simmel (1950) all made reference to society being in some way made up of relations. Indeed, Marx’s quip in Thesis on Feurebach (1888) that ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’, and in Grundrisse (1939) that ‘Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of the connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’,

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read as though they could have been pulled straight from the contemporary relational sociology literature. In more recent social theory, Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Tilly, and Howard Becker have been taken as guiding proponents of the contemporary relational turn. If we were to designate the task, the contribution, the raison d’être, of relational sociology, it would be, simply put, the centring of social relations as the basic unit of sociological explanation (Crossley 2011). The language of relations is used in order to explain social phenomena on both a macro and a micro level in a way that transcends the necessity of reference to the traditional sociological dualisms (structure-agency, objectivismsubjectivism, holism-methodological individualism), which have, in the eyes of relational sociologists, stunted and misdirected our capacity to explain the social world in a way that is accurate to social phenomena themselves. There are two broadly discernible sides to the relational critique that simultaneously attack dualistic thinking in sociology. Against theories that are oriented towards methodological individualism or subjectivism, or which designate agency in terms of detached, individualistic agentive capacities, it is argued that individuals, their action, and their agency are fundamentally constituted by social relations (Burkitt 2016; Crossley 2015). Against the perhaps stronger tradition in sociology of referring to ‘society’ or ‘social structures’ in the objectivist, substantive terms associated with holism, relational sociology posits that ‘society’ and ‘structures’, if they can be talked of at all, can only be properly understood as the continually unfolding relations that exist between interdependent interactors (Dépelteau 2008). The success of relational sociology has been its capacity to undermine both sides of the dualisms that have characterised the history of social theory simultaneously via the argument that social phenomena, at all levels of analysis, from the institutional to the interactional and the personal, are constituted by nothing more than interdependent social relations (Powell 2013). This manoeuvre posits the individual as fundamentally and inextricably constituted by social relations, while simultaneously seeing ‘social structure’ as only existing in the relations that exist between interacting individuals. We will see how this is operationalised shortly, but expounding the virtues that relational sociology holds over previous modes of sociological thought means it is firstly necessary to identify what it stands against.

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What Is Relational Sociology Standing Against? Relational sociology levels itself against a history of social theory that is beleaguered by a tendency, as often implicit as it is explicit, of giving ontological primacy to the individual or society, structure or agency, objectivism or subjectivism (Elias 1991; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). With virtually all of social theory’s many ‘turns’ purporting their usefulness in terms of their capacity to undermine such dualisms, it is perhaps easy to forget the lingering significance that these debates have for framing contemporary social thought. As Donati and Archer (2015: 5) remind us, Not so very long ago the conflicting claims of individualism and collectivism dominated the philosophy of social science in the embattled positions of methodological individualism versus holism. Until quite recently homo economicus pursuing ‘his’ lone and individual preference scheduled through instrumental rationality confronted homo sociologicus as ‘organisational man’, the puppet of rule and role requirements.

The bifurcation of the individual and society, agency and structure, has long since been challenged (for example, Giddens 1979, 1984; Bourdieu 1977). However, often in critique of these ‘first waves’ of challenges (see, for example, King 2004; Dépelteau 2008), relational sociology has built itself around giving new force and direction to the task of overcoming such dualisms, arguing that this task is best achieved ‘by conceptualizing both individuals and larger formations in which they participate (like collectivities, institutions, and social systems) as belonging to the same order of reality, a relational order’ (Powell and Dépelteau 2013: 3). The arguments of relational sociology are consequently based in the simultaneous critique of holism and structure-based accounts of social life on the one hand and individualist accounts on the other.

The Critique of Holism and Structure Firstly, relational sociology has sought to undermine objectivist/holist accounts of ‘society’ or ‘social structures’ as being distinct from the interactions of actors. Holism ‘contends that social systems have emergent properties that cannot be derived from their component parts’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 16). Relational sociology challenges such approaches by arguing that ‘social structures’ exist as the relations between actors, and are constituted, sustained, and transformed in the same interactions that they

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produce (King 2000; Crossley 2015). The ontological arguments made by relational sociologists on this front are perhaps the key distinguishing feature of the movement, which is based on two fundamental claims about social phenomena: when we refer to ‘society’, ‘social structures’, social phenomena, shared norms and practices, and so forth, we firstly need to consider them as relationally constituted and secondly as continually processual (Dépelteau 2008). They are relationally constituted in the sense that even the most enduring and pervasive facets of the social world, which feel so external to the individuals whom they influence, are in fact composed of the relations that exist between actors (King 2004). Secondly, because social phenomena are sustained and enacted in the relations that exist between social actors, such phenomena are never static, but instead are in a continual process of being made and remade within specific emergent social contexts, some of which endure for longer than others. Relational sociology perhaps does not differ hugely in its interpretation of the effects of ‘social structure’ on individual action; whether they are referred to as structures or the effects of relations, various supra-individual institutions mould individual practice in notable and often routine ways, for example by impacting on rates of educational attainment between different groups, or patterning behaviour in relation to the availability of divorce as a genuinely viable option (Smart and Neale 1999). The point of departure of relational sociology is to recognise that social phenomena cannot be understood in static or substantive terms, but instead exist insofar as they are produced, maintained, and transformed by the multitude of relations that direct and constitute the interdependent interactions that occur between various social actors. The reason for this shift in perspective is that the conceptualisations and modes of thought that have characterised social theory have often depicted the supra-individual influencers of interaction in terms that externalise and reify these ‘structures’ beyond the interactions in which they are sustained. Key examples here are Durkheim’s insistence that we should treat ‘social facts’ as ‘things’ in themselves (Powell and Dépelteau 2013) and Parson’s separation of the ‘“ego” and “system” as distinct things’ (Tsekeris 2013: 90). As Bourdieu enjoins, The chief danger of the objectivist point of view is that, lacking a principle of generation of those regularities, it tends to slip from model to reality – to reify the structures it constructs by treating them as autonomous entities endowed with the ability to “act” in the man-ner of historical agents… Pushed to its

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limits, objectivism cannot but produce an ersatz subject, and portray individuals or groups as the passive supports of forces that mechanically work out their independent logic. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 8)

This reification occurs when social structures come to be seen as separate from the relations between interdependent interactors that comprise them, and there are several additional problems with taking this perspective. Firstly, it misconstrues how social phenomena, structures, and institutions exist. In spite of their external feel, ‘an institution does not function automatically because of some inner dynamics of system requirements; it functions because people at different points do something, and what they do is the result of how they define the situation in which they are called on to act’ (Blumer 1969: 19). It is, of course, not hard to see why social structures get conceptualised in objectivist and externalist terms. When we encounter educational policy or government bureaucracy ‘we are experiencing something tangibly real’ in terms of the constraint and directionality it gives to our action (Hilbert 2009: 172). Likewise, when we witness job cuts as the result of economic slowdown, or class inequalities in educational outcomes, we are witnessing the effects of institutionalised decisions and practices that are beyond the actions of any one individual. However, to construe institutions and their effects as external from the interactions and practices of which they are comprised attributes a substantial actuating reality to social phenomena, which separates them from the constellations of interaction that constitute them (Powell and Dépelteau 2013; Schatzki 2011). Aside from anything else, this misconstrues how such structures can possibly function and affect action. Even the most pervasive of ‘structures’, such as the free-market economy, only function as they do because vast networks of interdependent individuals are acting in relation to each other in certain ways, ‘through the chains of interaction that make up the continuing affairs of collectivities’ (Hughes and Sharrock 2007: 253). Universities exist as more than a collection of buildings because practices and interactions are—with a notable degree of ‘fuzziness’ and variability—fulfilled in ways that accord to a broad extent with particular roles (student, lecturer, department manager), university directives (duration of lectures, publication outputs, grade requirements for prospectus students), governmental policy (instrumentalisation of funding and fee structures), and so forth. All of these are variably enacted and contested, but their functioning ultimately requires their enactment at innumerable points within vast networks of interdependent interactions and practices

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that constitute and sustain the relational form of the institution. In this sense, ‘[t]o talk of an institution is a short-hand and simplified way of referring to these complex networks of individuals, whose daily interactions and practices, constitute the institution’ (King 1999: 272). And these institutions and their practices affect our action insofar as it is constrained and directed by extensive interconnected networks of practices and interactions that are similarly given shape within these networks: the individual with whom we have to cope in institutional relations is supported by a vast unseen network of other individuals, who give that individual power over us. Since the relationship we have with an individual bureaucrat presupposes the existence of large numbers of people who all recognise the network of individuals which is the institution, and therefore, empower that institution, it seems as if we confront something wholly impersonal, un-individual and objective. (King 1999: 272)

Clearly, pervasive ‘structures’ and institutions constrain and affect people’s action, and while ‘social arrangements are experienced as external, objective and constraining’ (Bottero 2019: 187), these effects and constraints cannot be adequately explained through the notion of an autonomous structure imposing itself upon the individual (King 2004). In relational sociology, social structures are explained ‘merely by reference to the great flow of interactions between innumerable humans’ (King 2004: 230). Relational sociology differs from the objectivist/holist approach in its interpretation of how societal values, norms, and institutions exist, because it emphasises that these should not be considered as rigid structures, external to interaction. Rather, they exist as relations between actors that are brought to bear in interaction by engendering mutual interdependencies and expectations of action, moulding their practice and understanding of the world, and by orienting the position of actors in relation to others (Dépelteau 2008). The contribution of relational sociology is to argue that we do not need to look beyond the relations that exist between interdependent actors in order to explain how this process occurs. Relational sociologists thus ‘treat social phenomena as processes, constituted by flows of action and interaction, which operate imminently to the lives of individuals rather than on a separate order of reality’ (Powell and Dépelteau 2013: 2). When this is overlooked in favour of a substantialist view, explaining change and transformation becomes problematic.

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While a social context is in many ways defined by the endurance of certain institutions and practices, even broadly construed institutions such as the national economy, what a university consists of, and what the institution of the family looks like in a particular social context, are always under some degree of transformation, no matter how incremental. ‘Corporations, cultures, and economies might enjoy longevity, but the bundles and constellations [of practices] in which they consist exhibit varying and evolving mixes of stability and metamorphosis’ as ‘ways of doing things shift, tasks undertaken evolve, and arrangements are altered’ at the level of the interdependent interactions and practices upon which they are ultimately constituted (Schatzki 2011: 21), for example through shifting social attitudes, adjustments in policy, and reconfigurations of behaviour in relation to new technology. A key reason for the proliferation of relational sociology into the mainstream is its capacity to accurately account for the relationship between the individual and society in processual terms. Norbert Elias (1978) and Bourdieu (1989) argued separately that the concepts and language employed in much of social theory is generally more adept at designating static objects than it is at describing relations and unfolding processes, which leads us to ‘draw involuntary conceptual distinctions between structures and processes, or between the actors and his activity, between objects and relationships’ (Elias 1978: 113). But attempting to conceptualise of culture or family as existing as external structures homogenises dynamic and variable processes into a heuristic stasis that can neither account for how the particular state of the phenomena arose, nor how it continues to change and unfold as they are variably enacted and engaged with (Crossley 2015; May 2013). It is imperative to recognise that ‘society’ is not a fixed thing that hangs over us, but rather is something that we do, something that we participate in, which in turn reproduces and remakes the social phenomena as it exists in the particular moment. Simmel (1950: 10) called this process ‘sociation’. This is not in any way to deny the significance and regularity of social phenomena such as the family or cultural practices, but rather is to acknowledge that their significance and regularity ‘are outcomes of a long historical process of interaction, held in place by interactions and control mechanisms (external and internal) these have given rise to’ (Crossley 2011: 30). A social phenomenon, such as the family, moral conceptions, cultural practices, and so forth, comes to ‘feel as though it exists “out there”, separate from these

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interactions that constitute it’ because they have ‘become a seemingly permanent and universal way in which people organize their relationships’ and conduct their lives (May 2013: 41). However, as Simmel identified (1990: 174), ‘interaction between individuals is the starting point of all social formations’. Humans exist within, are moulded by, and interact within vast, historically moulded networks of interdependent interactions (or ‘figurations’ in Elias’s [1994] terms), that ‘manifest properties which are irreducible to the actors involved in them and, over (historical) time, generate further emergent properties including fundamentals such as languages and moral systems, which are similarly irreducible’ (Crossley 2011: 2). It is in interactions that the social phenomena that are commonly referred to as comprising ‘society’ are formed. However, these phenomena are by no means reducible to any one individual or a particular iteration of interaction (Elias 1991; Tsekeris 2013: 90). The actions and interactions of individuals are formed and oriented within these webs of interactional relations, firstly as the dispositions and subjectivities of individuals are shaped within them in an interactional process of socialisation (Mead 1934), secondly as actions are given course by the interdependences that are engendered across these networks, and finally as the directionality of interactions unfold intersubjectively between actors (Elias 1991; Crossley 2011). The argument of relational sociology, which will be continued throughout this chapter, is that it is the same process of interaction within networks of relations that constitutes both social phenomena and individuals and their action, meaning that the separation of the two is artificial. The social is constitutive of persons and ‘persons constitute the social through their actions’ (Calhoun 2003: 558). However, ‘though these actions are never entirely free of social determinants they do offer us at least a little chance to shape social reality as well as our own place within the social world’ via the ‘potential of individual improvisation, virtuosity, reflexivity, creativity, and choice’ (Calhoun 2003: 558; Tsekeris 2013: 89). An argument to be developed more fully throughout is that individuals do indeed regularly exhibit agentive capacities to interpret and negotiate the social world before them and to take up individuated stances upon that world that are efficacious for their action. However, the virtuosity and autonomous subjectivity they enjoy is itself a product of the social emergence of the self (Burkitt 2008; Crossley 2006). The key point to recognise for now is that the bounded degree of agency that is achieved through our social existence engenders a notable variability in how social life is done, which indicates the necessity of a fluid and processual model of social phenomena (May 2013).

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The Critique of Individualism This is a brief sketch of how relational sociology seeks to undermine objectivist/holist accounts of ‘society’ or ‘social structures’ as being distinct from the interactions of actors. However, the success of relational sociology lies in its capacity to concurrently undermine methodological individualism by depicting the individual and their engagement in practice as being moulded in the same relational process that constitutes social phenomena (Dépelteau 2015). Bourdieu (1989) argued that moving beyond the dialectic of objectivism and subjectivism requires us to avoid seeing objective social structures and individual subjectivities as distinct. In accurately depicting the social world, it is impossible to not recognise that we as individuals, our experience of the world and our actions within it, are shaped and moulded by certain durable social relations, such as gender, ethnicity, economic position, the type of government we live under, and so forth. But sociological analysis also ‘must recognize that the consciousness and interpretations of agents are an essential component of the full reality of the social world’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 9). We cannot discount the fact that individuals engage in social practice from subjective standpoints, modes of action, wants, desires, and strategies that are relatively distinct, and which they recognise as being their own. It cannot be denied that individuals have certain dispositions and perspectives, or that they routinely make decisions about their lives that express their beliefs, their values, and their understanding of the social world, even if these occasionally resist the norms and social pressures that have moulded them (Bourdieu 1989). However, in recognising this critique of objectivism/holism, it is paramount that sociology does not sidestep the sociological tendency for over-socialisation and fall into the trap, more pervasive in the economic sciences, of methodological individualism. Methodological individualist approaches do not deny that there are properties to the social world that are distinct from, and irreducible to, individuals; indeed they mimic the holistic approach in maintaining this distinction. However, in opposition to holism, they maintain that it is only individuals who have an active capacity to act in the social world, which they take to imply that ‘all social phenomena are in principle explicable strictly in terms of the goals, beliefs and actions of individuals’, meaning the locus of explanation of social phenomena is squared solely on the intentions and actions of the individual (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 16; Crossley 2011). Relational sociology rejects this

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by arguing that individuals and their action, along with their beliefs, intentions, values, and subjective standpoints, are inextricably constituted and moulded by social relations, meaning that ontological and methodological priority cannot be given to individual intentions and actions in sociological explanation. The relational view paints a picture of the individual and her action as being constituted in a continuous process of relational interaction. This in turn allows us to rebut methodological individualism’s arguments vis-avis holism, which claim that it is ultimately individuals who act, and they do so with a variance that is inexplicable to frameworks entailing social structure. While relational sociology seeks to provide a complex, highly variable, and processual view of how the social world is sustained at the level of interacting individuals, it points out that this does not mean that individuals and their action are not thoroughly socially constituted and interdependent. Instead, the constitution of individuals and their action is conceptualised as being sustained and moulded in the relations that exist between actors in emergent and intersubjective interaction in a way that is irreducible to the actions and intentions of the isolated individual. What is more, relational sociology—indeed any sociology worth its salt—fundamentally challenges the purposive action basis of methodological individualism, which assumes that individuals act in order to achieve self-determined ends (Crossley 2011). This model assumes that ‘action is initiated only after meaningful goals have been set in the cognized world and then – in a separate act of will – the decision to pursue such goals has been taken’ (Joas 1996: 157). This firstly ignores that the bulk of our action is habitually enacted and intersubjectively produced in the flow of interactional practice in a way that cannot be preceded by goal-orientation (Dreyfus 2014; Taylor 1999; Heidegger 1962; Mead 1934; Schutz 1970). It also over-estimates the capacity for detached rationality, problematically obviating the role that the social plays in orienting the course of both our habitual and discursive action through the interactional moulding of our dispositions and subjectivities, which occurs in relation to social positioning and operations of power (Foucault 1998; Bourdieu 1984). This aspect of the critique of individualism is of particular significance for what follows because it correlates to some extent with the critique of why orientating morality in terms of the detached rationality of the disembedded subject, so common to how much of Enlightenment moral thought has proceeded, is problematic. Indeed, it is interesting to note that while the dominant threads of twentieth-century philosophy coalesced around practices, habit,

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intersubjectivity, and critiques of disembedded reason, the realm of moral thought has been less willing to divest itself from its Enlightenment inheritance (Hekman 1995; Dreyfus 2014; Hermann 2015; Sie 2014). Prior to getting to this however, it is necessary to outline the value of relational sociology arguments contra individualism, which will briefly take us through the relational constitution of the individual subject, and the interactional and intersubjective emergence of action, before moving into the critique of rational and purposive theories of agency, which will bring us to the reasoning for positing the concept of practice throughout. The Relational Constitution of the Subject Relational sociology argues that it is a mistake to give ontological priority to the intentions and actions of individuals because these are always formed and nestled within relations. First and foremost, we are born dependent upon others, and it is within this dependency that the individual develops the kind of features that we tend to consider to be the hallmarks of a fully fledged individual (May 2013; Burkitt 2008). Our capacity to use language, to understand and engage in social practice, the ability to recognise our own agency, to form decisions about our action, to reflect upon our choices, and to recognise our own moral orientations are not primordial properties of the biological organism but rather capacities and dispositions acquired in and sustained through interaction. Not only do moral and linguistic agency presuppose histories of networks of interaction that have generated the morals and languages in question, for example, they also presuppose interactions, usually in childhood, through which those structures have been acquired and mastered. (Crossley 2011: 2)

The work of Mead has frequently been utilised by relational sociologists as a means for conceptualising the process whereby the individual and her action are socially constituted and embedded within broader social processes (Côté 2018; Burkitt 2008; May 2013; Emirbayer 1997). While Côté (2018), along with others (see, for example, Archer 2003; Dépelteau 2008), reminds us that we cannot be too gung-ho about taking Mead as being uncomplicatedly compatible with contemporary relational sociology, the standard line taken is that Mead’s work describes the interactional mechanisms through which seemingly individual capacities and dispositions are socially engendered. Perhaps the key recognition of Mead

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on this front is that the human capacity for reflexivity (upon which theories of rationality rest), as well as the self that is reflexively engaged with, are interactionally produced (Mead 1925, 1934). For Mead, subjectivity develops in the complex interactional processes through which we emerge as selves, the details of which will be explained more fully further on in this book. Mead’s theory illustrates how intersubjective meanings that comprise our social worlds are taken on by the individual from childhood through interactional exchanges, which allow the individual to arrive at an understanding of what certain actions mean, and what responses are appropriate (Mead 1934; Habermas 1995). Briefly put, as the child comes to recognise her own gestures as eliciting certain responses from other actors, the child comes to recognise herself as a source of action, and she comes to understand the meaning that her actions hold for those she is in relation with (May 2013). The child gradually comes to recognise the meaning that certain actions have in terms of how others respond to these actions when she applies them or when others apply them to her, which allows her to recognise how her action affects the action of others and vice versa (Mead 1934). It is this basic process that allows the individual to recognise herself firstly as the cause of action that elicits responses and secondly as an object for the attitudes of others (Mead 1934; Habermas 1995). The individual thus comes to perceive herself and her action as a social object, which others respond to and take attitudes towards. In recognition of this the child gradually comes to adjust her action according to these attitudes, which is demonstrative of the basic capacity to take an attitude of another and turn it towards herself. It is thus in this interactional process that reflexive self-consciousness develops, as the child becomes able to engage with the attitudes of others, and to understand their meaning to the extent that these attitudes can be turned back upon herself in the moderation of her own action (Aboulafia 1999). For Mead, this interactional emergence of reflexivity ‘is the essential condition… for the development of mind’ within the individual; but it also allows ‘common or social meanings’ to be ‘rendered possible’ (Mead 1934: 134, 156): It is by means of reflexiveness – the turning-back of the experience of the individual upon himself – that the whole social process is thus brought into the experience of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means, which enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that

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the individual is able consciously to adjust himself to that process, and to modify the resultant of that process in any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. (Mead 1934: 134)

Emerging as a self embeds us into a complex world of intersubjective meaning, which fundamentally shapes our understanding of the social world of which we are part. Because a major part of the social emergence of our self has to do with socialisation into social action, the self emerges in relation to shared understandings of practice that become internalised by the individual, and thus come to be integrated into the individual’s experience of the world and mould her engagement in practice. Or, as Habermas (1995: 179) put it, it is through the emergence of the self that ‘the behavioural expectations of one’s social surroundings… have, as it were, migrated into the person’. This in turn allows complex ‘social structures’ such as gender norms to be explained as being sustained in a relational interaction process, as various relationally held meanings shape the attitudes and interactions from which we emerge as selves (May 2013). As Mead puts it: The individual possesses a self only in relation to the selves of other members of his social group; and the structures of the self expresses or reflects the generalised behaviour pattern of this social group to which he belongs, just as does the structure of the self of every other individual belonging to this social group. (Mead 1934: 164)

Much more will be made of these points later. But for now it can be recognised that Mead’s theory of the social emergence of the self firstly provides the foundation for a social explanation of how the individual develops the capacity to engage with and understand the parameters of their social world, and subsequently develops the dispositions for action that reflect the norms and expectations into which she has been integrated. However, Mead’s theory is able to elaborate this into a development of subjectivity that the individual is responsible for. This is because his theory depicts the emergence of the self as a ‘mediated process of socialization and the simultaneous constitution of a life-history which is conscious of itself’ (Habermas 1995: 153). The advantage of Mead’s theory thus lies in its capacity to explain reflexive subjectivity itself as being an inherent facet of the social constitution of the self, in which interactional engagement within a complex social context is productive of a subjectivity that the individual is able to reflexively acknowledge and engage with in the course of her existence. This occurs

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as the increasingly reflexively capable individual develops what she recognises as being her own ‘voice’ and perspectives in relation to the diversity of perspectives she encounters (Joas 1997; Mead 1934). It is from this recognition of her own perspectives that the individual achieves the kind of self-understanding that allows her to recognise herself as having her own standpoints on shared issues, and as having a distinct life history in which she is intimately involved, and which she herself is conscious of as something that she is capable of shaping (Habermas 1995). This consequently results in a subjective self that is able to recognise its own attitudes as its own, and its actions as being something for which it is accountable (Habermas 1995). One of the decisive contributions of Mead’s work is the recognition that the capacities that are commonly taken to be indicative of the rational actor are themselves relationally produced. From a relational perspective, capacities for autonomy and responsibility are arrived at via the transformative power of social relations, as they ‘constitute a context wherein we develop the capacity to make decisions and act upon them, including decisions which deviate from social norms and resist social pressures’ (Crossley 2006: 4). Thus, our capacity for reflexive engagement with an individuated subjectivity which we appropriate as being our own, and through which we recognise ourselves as being able to take charge of our action, is itself an outcome of a socially embedding process. The final point to be made here, which links the Meadian points together, is that because the subjectivity with which we reflexively engage is socially constituted, it cannot feasibly be understood in terms of rationalist individualism. As Joas (1996: 147) argues, ‘[f]rom the perspective of advocates of rational models of action in a broad sense, childhood development is merely the process of acquiring the capacity for rational action’. However, from birth individuals are embedded in complex webs of social relations, and they come to occupy a particular position within these formations that are riddled with power dynamics, and which permeate between the deeply personal and the decidedly abstract—such as family ties, educational resources, social meanings attached to place, religious beliefs, cultural heritage, scientific knowledges, expectations of gender, hierarchised understandings of ethnicities and so on—which affect our understanding of the world according to our position and experience within them (Burkitt 2008). Individual consciousness is formed and enacted within a complex nexus of relational entanglements, which orient our dispositional responses (Bourdieu 1992; Ignatow 2009; Hoffmaster 1992) and populate our dialogic deliberations with both specific and generalised others (Holdsworth

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and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). Our inner deliberations, our assessments of our action, and the strategies that we pursue are the sum of the relations that have constituted our dispositions and informed our perspectives through the voices of others who guide our judgement (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). Consequently, ontological priority cannot be given to the goals, intentions, and actions of individuals, because even when these are operationalised in action, they reflect the interactional process that has embedded us into our stratified position in the ‘manifold relations’ that the ‘social universe is composed of’ (Burkitt 2016: 336). Much more will be made of these arguments in Chapters 5 and 6, but we are beginning to get a sense of how relational sociology considers the individual and her capacity to engage in social practice to be relationally constituted (Crossley 2015). These arguments will come to be key for situating morality in terms of relationally embedded and moulded practice. But relational sociology’s critique of methodological individualism continues beyond the constitution of the individual and her capacities for action and into the relational constitution of actions themselves. The Relational Constitution of Action The social emergence of the self is of significance to relational sociology in part because this relational process is constitutive of individual capacities and dispositions for social action. This then intersects with the subsequent relational argument that how action unfolds in practice is always interdependent and inescapably entangled with social relations. Relational sociologists take this to be the case in both a broad, abstract sense and a narrower, concrete sense. On the latter, perhaps the basic point of sociology is that individuals ‘profoundly affect each other as they interact’, in the moment of interaction; something that is almost superfluously supported by a wealth of social-psychology studies (Barnes 2000: 64). In the broader sense, it is pointed out that the capacity for the individual to act in the world is not the product of choices made by independent, atomised individuals, but instead is the result of the relations that form networks of interdependent interactants that mould and orient their action and their aims (Burkitt 2016; Dépelteau 2008). We will begin with this broader point and move towards the more interpersonal and the ‘micro’. Relational sociology argues that individual action is always in some way relationally entangled and interdependent. The particular form that our action takes can only be properly understood as being ‘oriented in its

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course’ (to borrow a phrase from Weber [1922: 228]) within interconnected webs of interaction. Weber himself (1922) famously illustrated this point on an institutional-to-personal scale with an example of the use of money. The meaning, use, and value of money is obviously something that is beyond our individual control, but it decisively orients our actions at an individual level. Money provides an example of Elias’s (1994) argument that our capacity to act in the ways demanded of us by contemporary modern society requires us to engage with long chains of interdependencies that extend through a multitude of impersonal networks of relations. These interdependencies then come to affect our action via our personal engagement with these broader webs of relations: the decision to invest money, rather than to leave it in a savings account because interest rates are low, for example, or indeed the hoarding of money in a personal safe because the individual distrusts banks. Such decidedly private actions are in fact inextricably orientated by an impersonal network of relations that extend well beyond the personal milieu in which they occur (Weber 1922). Indeed, decisions that seem to be deeply personal, such as the decision to cohabit with a partner (Burkitt 2016) or to move away from the parental home (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007) can only be understood sociologically as being embroiled with broader entanglements of relations, such as house prices and cultural acceptability on the one hand, and interpersonal pressures, such as perceptions of one’s relationship with significant others and personal finances, on the other hand (Burkitt 2016; Jones 1999). Similarly, Smart and Neale (1999) beautifully illustrated how decisions surrounding divorce need to be contextualised in terms of various pieces of legislation, discourses on the effects of divorce on children and the necessity of walking away from an abusive relationship, as well as certain cultural practices around the acceptability of marriage breakdown, which allow such decisions to be taken in a way that was less possible a few generations ago. However, such decisions are ultimately taken on an interpersonal level in light of an intersubjectively emergent situation, in which various concerns for children, for the ex-partner, or for maintaining a functional parenting relationship within new circumstances, as well as desires to reconcile or to distance oneself from the marriage relationship, all of which are framed by practical circumstances surrounding money and housing, and factors such as familial and social stigma. We would be wrong to see such decisions in terms of two or more atomised wills colliding with one another like billiard balls as they enact certain ends (Gergen 2009). Rather, the actions that define these contexts emerge

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intersubjectively via decisions and actions that are socially and temporarily situated in relation to the contextual circumstance in which we engage with others. Such decisions are deeply entangled with personal dispositions and subjectivities, the social context in which we live, the practicalities in which we take such decisions, our relations with significant others, our perspective of generalised attitudes towards such decisions, and so forth. Our conceptualisations of agency should not be oriented simply in terms of the reflexive will of the individual, as set against social structures, but rather should be conceptualised as having to do with the embedded action of individuals that is necessarily entangled with the relations that constitute it, and which is enacted in relation to others (Burkitt 2016). The relational view is basically that our action cannot be considered independent because it always takes its shape and is enacted in relation to others, in a way that cannot be disentangled from the various personal and impersonal webs of relations within which we interact. But as well as highlighting the entanglements in which individual action and agency is formed, relational sociology argues that action also emerges intersubjectively in the immediacy of interaction (Bottero 2010; Crossley 2011; King 2004). Individual action is non-independent in the sense that in interaction, ‘we mutually modify one another’s conduct’, to the extent that our action cannot be made properly explicable without reference to the interactional dynamics that it is formed within (Crossley 2011: 28). Interaction is cast as a processual dynamic that flows through the intersubjective adjustments that interactants make in relation to one another. While actors are a primary source of action, the action that is taken emerges in exchange, in response to the other, so much so that the course of the interaction can seldom be entirely planned, predicted, or aligned with the intentions of either party (Crossley 2011). The actions that are taken, the words and thoughts that are produced, are called forth and take their form from intersubjective responsiveness to the action of the other (Mead 1934; Merleau-Ponty 1962), meaning that those party to the interaction ‘can find themselves doing and/or saying things that they might not have imagined in advance and might not have done or said had they not been drawn along that particular path of interaction’ (Crossley 2011: 29). While the course that an interaction takes is laid by these actors, it is by no means attributable to either of them independently. The intersubjective emergence of interaction engenders a degree of indeterminacy to how interaction is conducted, which is enjoined by the fact that interaction occurs in a complex and ‘fuzzy’ world of social

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practice, carried out across a multitude of inconstant situations (Bottero 2010), between differentially situated, disposed, and intending actors, who embody various subjectivities, understandings, life histories, emotional states, capacities for action, and so forth. This means that there is always at least a ‘measure of indeterminacy’ and a degree of murkiness to how interaction unfolds. Interaction thus cannot be accurately depicted as the straightforward coming into contact of two individuals who both want to achieve their ends and who may find themselves inhibited in doing so by the other. This is because the course of action taken and the meaning of action that is thereby arrived at emerges in an intersubjective process that flows between the interactors through their actions and responses in the moment of practice (Bottero 2009). Individual action thus cannot be seen as the product of choices made by individuals that are essentially separate from and independent of their social relations, but instead is the result of these relations. This provides the foundation of the relational argument that individual social action cannot be understood atomistically because the meaning and course of our actions are fundamentally constituted via relational interaction (Crossley 2015). In acknowledgement of this, relational sociology has moved to reconceptualise individuals not as independent actors, but rather as interdependent interactants (Crossley 2011).

Agency and Practice However, the question remains of how we are able to simultaneously conceptualise individuals as interdependent interactants and construe action as intersubjectively emergent and decidedly indeterminate at the level of interaction, while also reconceptualising social phenomena as being constituted and sustained as dynamic webs of interdependent interaction. Squaring this circle necessitates the implementation of processual conceptual language that is able to examine interactions in terms of intersubjective emergence and indeterminacy, while concurrently affording sufficient regularity and consistency to these interactions to explain broadly construed social phenomena, institutions, and orders of practice. It was in response to this task, in part, that ‘theories of practice’ came to cohere (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 18). Such ‘theories of practice are described as meso-level explanations because they seek to examine the interactions between micro-level phenomena (e.g. the personal, situational, performative) and macro-level

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processes (e.g. related to institutions, social relations, political economy)’ (Mylan and Southerton 2018: 1136). ‘Practice theories’ began to emerge in the 1970s in relation to renewed philosophical accounts of human action, notably those provided by Heidegger (1962) and Wittgenstein (1973), but also through a reinvigoration of the work of Dewey (1922) (see also Bernstein 1971). These were utilised to provide a resounding critique of the capacity of dualistic social theory to accurately account for social action (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1979, 1984). Oriented around resounding critiques of the dualistic traditions implicit to rational actor-based theories on the one hand, and the structuralist explanations of Marxism and functionalism on the other, the argument emerged that the implicit maintenance of dualistic wedges in social thought had undermined its capacity to accurately account for how practice unfolds ‘in practice’. The major reason for this is that the reification of social structure or the over-emphasis of voluntarism in agency had deemed practice to be either intractably unwieldy or unrealistically malleable (Warde 2014; Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1979; Dépelteau 2008; King 2004). As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 10) put it, the traces of the ‘false antinomies’ of ‘[o]bjectivism and subjectivism, mechanicalism and finalism, structural necessity and individual agency… all collude in obfuscating the anthropological truth of human practice’ by misconstruing what practice entails and how it is engaged with. On the one hand, the eminence that rational actor theory attributes to purposiveness of action, and to individual autonomy ‘vis-à-vis his fellow human beings and environment’, have been theoretically ridiculed and proved to be empirically untenable1 (Joas 1996: 147). The assumption of theories of rational action is that in describing action, ‘first orientation is found through cognizance of the world, only then to be followed by action’ (Joas 1996: 157). In this view, action is taken in light of a detached decision to pursue a particular course, which gets closest to being ‘rational’ when least encumbered by social constraint. This becomes untenable as soon as it is recognised that the bulk of human action is habitually enacted and intersubjectively emergent, not to mention the resounding sociological inadequacy of obviating the role that the social world plays in constituting our dispositions and repertoires for action, as well as framing our responses and available means (Joas 1996; Bourdieu 1984; Giddens 1984; Dreyfus 2014; Schutz 1970). On the other hand, practice theory-based critiques, particularly Bourdieu’s (1977), identified that conceptions of structures, rules, and norms

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homogenised significant variations in action at the interactional level, shoehorning reams of indeterminate and variable practice into an encompassing model of theoretical coherence, which tended to undermined the indeterminate and fuzzy nature of practice in the drive to explicate social regularities (King 2004). In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu (1977) argued that the social sciences have often failed to accurately account for social practice because they attempt to model it in a way that in fact blinds them to the logic of practice itself. The major problem for Bourdieu is that the direction and the appropriateness of certain practices cannot be entirely circumscribed by an encompassing set of rules that can be applied unambiguously across each and every circumstance, not least because the ‘indeterminacy of social life is such that no rule, norm or social code has an unambiguous meaning that can encompass all possible situations’ (Bottero 2019: 191; Rouse 2007). However, social scientists often sought to construct theoretical models that were oriented by the aim of coherently depicting and formalising rules of social practice as a whole (Bourdieu 1992). In Bourdieu’s terms, the scholastic drive for coherence in theory undermined the capacity to provide an accurate account of social practice that remained true to practice itself. In part, as Bourdieu diagnosed, this was because the social theory itself, and the theoretical models that were produced, were often given de facto priority over the accurate analysis and description of how practice is done, which led to a sacrifice of ‘the model of reality for the reality of the model’ (Bourdieu 1977: 39). But more importantly for Bourdieu, the attempts to formalise rules of practice into a theory of social structure was problematic because if practices had as their principle the generative principle which has to be constructed in order to account for them, that is, as a set of coherent axioms, then the practices produced according to perfectly conscious generative rules would be stripped of everything that defines them distinctively as practices, that is, the uncertainty and ‘fuzziness’ resulting from the fact that they have as their principle not a set of conscious, constant rules, but practical schemes, opaque to their possessors, varying according to the logic of the situation, the almost invariably partial viewpoint which it imposes, etc. Thus the procedures of practical logic are rarely entirely coherent and rarely incoherent. (Bourdieu 1992: 12)

The significant difference for Bourdieu lies in accounting for social life in its profound regularity and representing rules of how stuff tends to be done (for example in the standardisation of greetings in relation to positions

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of social deference, of gendered expectations of bodily comportment, of responses to gift giving) and attributing these rules as being ‘causally operative’ of an underlying social structure that determines action (Taylor 1999: 39). The sheer complexity of human interaction engenders an immeasurable degree of variability in circumstance and a bourgeoning indeterminacy of meaning, necessitating a ‘practical sense’ on the part of the actor that extends beyond the capacity to enact a formulable social rule. Indeed, as Charles Taylor (1999: 41) enjoins, establishing what a ‘norm actually amounts to’ in practice requires a ‘[p]ractical wisdom [that] is marked out less by the ability to formulate rules than by knowing how to act in each particular situation’. The movements of pragmatism and phenomenology in the twentieth century did much to debunk the notion that human agency is distinguished by the capacity of the individual to take deliberatively reasoned judgement in the course of their action (Barnes 2000; Emirbayer and Mische 1998). From James (1907), Mead (1934), and Dewey (1922), to Husserl (1913) and Heidegger (1962), describing human agency meant moving away from the capacity for reasoned judgement, and towards accurately depicting agency in terms of the everydayness of action in the world (Schutz 1970; Withy 2011). This meant recognising that our primary mode of being in the world is not principally oriented in reasoned judgement and deliberative intentionality of action, but rather is centred on the capacity to act in the practical circumstances in which we find ourselves, which is predominantly carried out habitually ‘prior to the specifications of objects of knowledge’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227). Pragmatism in particular emphasised that ‘humans typically engage in a relatively unreflective form of action’, conducted largely through ‘acquired predisposition[s] to ways or modes of response’—as oppose to the determined enactment of specific actions (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227; Dewey 1922: 32). The habitual practices through which we largely respond to the world ‘are, at least potentially, dynamic and adaptive’, but more importantly they entail ‘a tacit – indeed, bodily – knowledge that, without resort to conscious planning or deliberative following of instructions, enables one to react in real time to the changing vicissitudes of social situations’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227). Social practice is rarely instrumentally planned and implemented, and our understanding of practice is rarely formed through theoretical interrogation. Instead, social practice is largely engaged with as individuals deal with variably emergent interaction within the intersubjective flow of our

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practical engagement with the world. This is largely conducted via a ‘feel for the game’ that ‘follows a practical logic, that of the fuzzy, of the moreor-less, which defines the ordinary relation to the world’, and which is formed through encompassing immersive experience of our social context, allowing us to respond in real time to the ‘spontaneity which asserts itself in the improvised confrontation with endlessly renewed situations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 22). The key recognition of the philosophic theories of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, as well as pragmatist theories, is that the individual agent can neither be conceptualised ‘as a centre of monological consciousness’, rationally construing the course of its own action, nor as a passively determined ‘cultural dope’ invariably enacting unambiguous social rules and norms. What these philosophers do, and what is carried forth in theories of practice, is to ‘set the primary locus of the agent’s understanding in practice’ (Taylor 1999: 34). This view orients social practice in terms of the predominance of the habituated embodied responsiveness over reasoned discursiveness (Giddens 1984), providing a view of embodied social embedding ‘which so much of the western philosophical tradition has found reason to flee’ (Aboulafia 1999: 156). It also resolutely challenges any methodological individualism underlayings towards explicating practice in relation to the rational pursuit of ends on the part of the individual (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Dreyfus 2014). ‘To situate our understanding in practice is to see it as implicit in our activity… much of our intelligent action in the world, sensitive as it is to our situation and our goals, is carried on unformulated. It flows from an understanding that is inarticulate’, or rather is prior to discursive articulation, with such discursive articulations standing as mere ‘islands in the sea of our unformulated practical grasp of the world’. It is this practical understanding that allows us to act in the world with an intuitive responsiveness to the fuzzy indeterminacy of intersubjective practice (Taylor 1999: 34–35). Nonetheless, while social situations and our practice within them are fluid, indeterminate, and in a process of intersubjectively emergent flux, ‘we do not generally experience them as such’, because they ‘take place, and are only intelligible, against the more or less stable background of other performances’ (Bottero 2019: 191; Rouse 2007: 505–506). The significance of theories of practice lies in their recognition that we do not need to look beyond practice itself firstly for an explanation of the ‘locus of [the] background understanding’ that allows us to engage with practice through

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a ‘practical sense’, and secondly for an explanation of how orders of practice are sustained (Bottero 2019: 191). Interactional performances unfold between the interactors present at a given moment. However, they are lent stability and intelligibility by an ordered ‘orthodoxy regarding how people should proceed in their daily lives’, into which our social existence has immersed us (Warde 2016: 152). ‘[W]hen widely repeated’ social performances ‘create the impression that there are proper ways to go about the business of everyday life’, engendering ‘a sense of an external, “objectivated” social reality, features people mutually recognise, and around which they organise their conduct and their interactions’ (Warde 2016: 152). Our social existence embeds us into the ‘orthodoxy’ of how things are done, into orders of practice and variable expectations of conduct that ‘form the background’ of our embodied habits and adaptable modes of responses to the vicissitudes of the social world (Joas 1996: 158). As described briefly above, it is through interaction that we are habituated into practice, because we come to be aware of the meaning of certain actions through the responses they commonly engender as we are inducted into the behavioural expectations of our group (Mead 1934; May 2013; Burkitt 2008). It is within this gradual and continuous interactional habituation that the individual develops the capacity to engage with variable practice with an embodied and responsive practical sense (see Schutz 1970; Giddens 1984; Dépelteau 2008). The capacity for the individual to be able to act, most of the time, with an implicit understanding of what proficient practice entails, to the extent that discursive engagement with her self or with her peers is not necessary, is only possible because she has emerged as a self in an interactional process from a vast web of relations that have induced and fundamentally moulded her understanding of the social context of which she is part. Indeed Goffman (1959) argued that the self is presented predominantly in the enactment of the minute intricacies of proficiently performing expectations of practice. However, as discussed, the course of practice cannot be accurately depicted either as the collision of two wills attempting to enact their ends, or as the determined enactment of rigidly prescribed habituation. Interaction is conducted between complexly entangled, disposed, and subjectively individuated actors, and emerges in an intersubjective flow that occurs in immeasurably variable interactional situations. Dealing with the fuzzy indeterminacy of even routine practice requires a ‘practical sense’ that extends beyond pure pre-reflexive ‘social instinct’ and into the at least partially conscious coordination of conduct (Bottero 2009: 414; Sayer 2005). Because

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the meaning of an interaction is highly variable, and diverges and flows between actors and specific social contexts, it necessitates the ‘active alignment’ and coordination of action as agents engage with, and act in relation to, the variously disposed and socially differentiated action of others that are encountered across a multitude of inconstant situations (Bottero 2009: 414). In this view, interaction necessarily occurs and functions through the ‘coordination and standardization of practical actions’ (Barnes 2000: 64), which occurs through practices, through the alignment of behaviour in relation to orthodoxies of how things are done, which allows the indeterminacy of interaction to be ameliorated and stability to be achieved (Bottero 2010), and it is also in this enactment that orders of practice are sustained. This is to say that action is intersubjectively coordinated between actors at the moment of interaction by the alignment of the exchange with learnt orthodoxies of practice. These orders of practice are themselves instituted and sustained through ‘a recursive process where the repetition of performances, in a similar fashion, by a great many different actors, establishes a way of doing things which is constraining upon others who seek to participate in the activity’ (Warde 2016: 150). As Goffman (1959, 1968) and Garfinkel (1967) illustrate so clearly, failure to conduct practice appropriately makes us vulnerable to sanction, judgement, and stigma, which, as a result of our social habituation, cannot easily be cast aside. What practice theories thus allows us to see is that ‘complexes of social interaction’, of which broader social phenomena are made, are ‘created, sustained and renewed through the process of ongoing social activity’ (Hughes and Sharrock 2007: 247). Orders of practice are sustained as people enact them and coordinate their behaviour in relation to them, as a result of their embeddedness into networks of interdependent interaction. This allows us to understand interactional practice as providing the basis for reconceptualising social phenomena as being constituted and sustained as dynamic webs of interdependent interaction, carried out by interdependent interactants, without undermining the messy indeterminacy of intersubjective interactional practice itself.

Relational Sociology and Practice The question to be asked now is how relational sociology can make a contribution to understanding social practice in these terms. Relational sociology

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‘studies social realities as relations’ (Donati 2010: 14) because social phenomena are only properly explicable in terms of the relations that exist between interdependent actors. It is in the relationally oriented interactions between interdependent actors that social phenomena are sustained and transformed, and so ‘relational sociology must endeavour to capture and analyse the social world in interaction, which is to say as a process arising between social actors’ (Crossley 2011: 21). This is of course not to say that the relations between interdependent actors are equal: they are fraught with power imbalances, which are then manifested in interaction, and thus also are manifested in the relational form that practices take. In this view, ‘social structures’ and social phenomena take their form from relations, and these relations are brought to bear in interaction. This means that there is a distinct affinity between the drive towards relationalism in sociology and the more or less coterminous drive towards emphasising practice. There are at least two complimentary affinities between relational sociology and practice theory (indeed many who designate themselves as taking a relational approach also emphasise practice, and visa-versa (for example, Bourdieu 1992; Bottero 2010, Emirbayer 1997; King 2000; Dépelteau 2015)). The first is that this view of relational sociology centres interaction itself, through which the relations that exist between individuals manifest themselves, as the locus of explanation of how social practice is constituted, sustained, and transformed across time and space. Secondly, by dispensing with notions of social structures in favour of webs of interaction, relational sociology provides a means to describe the dynamism of how practice is engaged with that overcomes the flaws of dualistic modes of social thought. What is more, a sociology of engagement in practice needs to do two things, both of which a relational approach can facilitate. Firstly, it needs to account for how people come to be able to engage in practice; how they are integrated and habituated into the social world in a way that allows them to engage with practice via the kind of everyday habituations through which most of our practice occurs. Secondly, it needs to be able to accommodate how practice unfolds and emerges in an intersubjective process of interaction. A relational explanation is able to facilitate processual dynamism in both aspects of such an account, which can be seen in its dual critique of methodological individualism. This comes firstly in the form of the relational constitution of the individual, and secondly in the assertion that agency and action are always interdependent and inescapably entangled with, and moulded by, social relations.

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A relational account argues that social practice occurs as it does firstly as a result of the formation of dispositions and subjectivities, which emerge through intensely differentiated interaction. One of the key advantages of the relational approach generally is that, by dispensing with substantive and holism-oriented social structures, individual dispositions and subjectivities can be conceptualised as being formed within processual flows of interdependent interaction, which in turn facilitates the necessary degree of differentiation to account for substantial variation in dispositions and subjectivities across social contexts. The particular version of relational sociology I am positing here centres concrete (but differentiated) interaction as being the locus of explanation for how subjectivities and dispositions emerge. This feeds into an additional advantage that this brand of relational sociology holds on this front: it provides the basis for an account of a process of individuation, through which individuals can arrive at, appropriate, and articulate their own subjective standpoints in a way that has the potential to be efficacious for their engagement in practice (Habermas 1995). More will be made of these points in the coming comparisons between a Bourdieusian and a Meadian foundation for a relational explanation of subjectivity. Secondly, relational sociology is able to account for practice, in the moment of interaction, as being tied to the dynamic relations and the particular entanglements that define variable interactional situations in which social practice occurs. This latter point maintains that individual engagement in social practice unfolds intersubjectively in the immediate context of the interaction (Bottero 2009; Crossley 2011). A significant aspect of this last point, and part of the reason for emphasising the role of intersubjectivity in relational interaction, is that this moulding of practice occurs in the fuzzy indeterminacy of social life. The relational approach is thus advantageous because it allows for a less rigidly set account of individual social practice than theories based on definite social structure can provide. By reverting only as far as interactional relations for an explanation of social practice, rather than to social structure, relational sociology can account for practice as the product of dynamic and emergent relations, which means that engagement in practice will always be considered with a degree of indeterminacy (King 2000). However, there is something of a disconnect in relational theory as to how this explanation is provided. The emphasis on practice, subjectivities, and dispositions being constituted in interaction suggests that it is through the interactions between concrete actors, and the actual relational

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ties between them, that the relational form of social phenomena and social practices are sustained and transformed. However, this emphasis on interaction and practice raises a recurrent debate within relational sociology. It is often asserted that relational sociologists have tended towards one of two strands of thought when describing relations (Powell 2013; Crossley 2013). On the one hand, ‘relations’ simply refers to the actual relational ties between actors (Crossley 2013). On the other, ‘relations’ are considered in the more abstract terms favoured by Bourdieu (1984), in which relations refer to juxtaposed relative positions in social space, held in relation to varieties of capital. For Bourdieu’s (1984) relational approach, how we engage in social practice is tied to our objective position in social space, which is juxtaposed between individuals according to relative endowments of capital. He argued that social space is made up of multiple and tessellating fields, defined by the structured relations in and through which individuals act and interact. These fields themselves are founded on unequally distributed ‘capitals’, of which Bourdieu generally emphasises social, symbolic, cultural, and economic. The relational position within social space held between actors within a field are structured by this unequal distribution of capital (Bourdieu 1984; Sayer 2005). This is because the relational position that individual actors have within a field is structured by the type (economic, social, symbolic, cultural) and the amount of capital they can utilise (Dépelteau 2015). For example, a person may have a high degree of cultural capital, but a low degree of economic capital. But the relative worth of certain capitals varies across differing social fields: a person with high cultural capital but low economic capital may be esteemed and feel easily accustomed to certain intellectual contexts, while feeling excluded or out of place at a charity auction organised for rich business magnates. It can be seen here how relative positions affect practices in a fairly direct sense in that capital affords the individual the capacity to act according to the demands of a particular field (for example by having the economic capital to be able to go on a fancy holiday or the cultural resources to contribute to a book club meeting), and thus also to feel accustomed to or excluded from a particular field. However, practice is also moulded according to such relational positions in another way. In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu sets out how the volume and composition of capital allows people to be mapped in relation to one another, but also in relation to certain tastes and practices. For example, if we mapped the volume and type of capital according to markers such as

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income, education level, depth of social networks, and so on, it is possible to map people in relation to each other according to capital type and volume, which would lead to people with similar types and volumes of capital being clustered together. If we simultaneously mapped the respondents who said that they have been to an opera, we could then map the practice of ‘going to the opera’ according to the average volume and type of capital that the people who attend the opera have. The average attendees may be people with a high degree of cultural and economic capital, and the practice would thus be mapped near to the cluster of people with such degrees of capital (Crossley 2013). The major part of Bourdieu’s (1984) point is that the likelihood of certain tastes and practices being engaged with can be tied to one’s relational position in social space as demarked by type and volume of capital—something that his extensive methodology and sampling allowed him to do with a good degree of predictability in relation to position in social space. This is what Bourdieu meant when he referred to his work as ‘relational’—individuals and practices within social space are juxtaposed to one another according to their relative position within that space. Importantly for Bourdieu (1984), it is these relational and objective positions in social space that engender the actual interactional ties that individuals have with one another. The individual’s position in social space, relative to others, leads to a certain proximity between those in similar positions, which reinforces a similarly shared habitus, inculcated in the formation of similar dispositions, and thus increases the likelihood that empirical ties will form: As social positions embodied in bodily dispositions, habitus contribute to determining whether (biological) bodies come together or stay apart by inscribing between two bodies the attractions and repulsions between the positions of which they are the embodiment. (Bourdieu 1989: 360)

As such, Bourdieu maintains that the relations he refers to as ‘objective’ relations—‘structural relations which operate in a permanent fashion’— are, in terms of sociological explanation, prior to the actual interactional ties (what Bourdieu refers to as ‘empirical relations’) that individuals engage with, because it is the ‘structure of objective relations which determines the possible form of interactions and of the representations the interactors can have of them’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 113–114; Bourdieu 1984: 244). The consequence of this is that these ‘empirical relations’ are reduced to epiphenomena (Crossley 2013). This is tied to Bourdieu’s more general

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assertion that sociology should be concerned to ‘uncover the structure of the distribution of species of capital which tends to determine the structure of individual or collective stances taken, through the dispositions and interests it conditions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 113). He continues that in focusing on interactional relations, ‘the study of these underlying structures has been sacrificed to the analysis of particular linkages (between agents or institutions) and flows (of information, resources, services, etc.) through which they become visible’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 113). It has frequently been commented that, despite Bourdieu’s arguments to the contrary (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), such statements provide a reification of ‘underlying structures’ that resides beyond the realities of interactional practice itself—‘an intellectualist error that Bourdieu is fond of criticising in others’ (Crossley 2011: 26; see also King 2000; Bottero 2009; Dépelteau 2008). In line with what has been described above, more recent brands of relational sociology have tended towards arguing that the effects of capital, our positions in social fields, and social practices themselves are the outcome of interactional engagement with our direct relational ties to other actors, which occurs within vast networks of interdependent interaction that are composed of, and made manifest within, interactional relations themselves (Dépelteau 2015; Powell 2013; Crossley 2013; King 2004). Part of the argument is that Bourdieu’s theory makes an error in ordering. He argues that the juxtaposed relations engendered by differing access to capital influence the habitus and moulds dispositions, which in turn moulds engagement in social practice, tastes, interests and, importantly, empirical relations. Put otherwise, actual interactional ties and networks are, in Bourdieu’s model, taken to be the effect of ‘objective’ relational positioning in social space, because this moulds practices and dispositions, which in turn moulds the interactional ties that we as individuals engage with (Bourdieu 1984). The strand of relational sociology followed here, however, argues that it is incorrect to relegate concrete relational ties to a secondary position, firstly because structural positions and capitals do not have an existence beyond the dynamic networks of interaction through which they are given their form, meaning that structural relations are in fact a product of interactional relations (Crossley 2011). It is only in interactional relations, through our particular engagement with a network of interaction, that structural relations and abstract capitals are made manifest. Interactional ties should not be seen as moulded by an objective position accorded by capital, but rather our engagement with capital and social positioning should be seen as being moulded by interactional ties (Crossley

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2013). Aside from anything else, abstract phenomena and relations must, at some point or other, be brought into the experience of the individual via concrete relations with others, meaning that they cannot be considered as secondary. This is not to say that capital and social position are unimportant. It would be incorrect to deny that individual actors are relationally positioned in relation to one another according to abstract phenomena such as capital, and indeed it is true that abstract phenomena (such as capital) shape the relations between people and the practices that they engage with. Indeed, one of the key advantages of Bourdieu’s approach is that it allows ‘relations of domination’ and inequalities to be mapped via volume and compositions of capital, which in turn allows practices and ‘lifestyle choices’ to be expressed as the effect of inequality and power (Powell 2013). However relegating ‘empirical relations’ below ‘objective relations’ as epiphenomena negates the fact that it is in interaction, via empirical relations, that relational social position can come to effect and mould dispositions towards engagement in practice. It is only in interaction that dispositions and subjectivities, which shape our engagement in practice, can themselves be shaped. What is more, dispositions and subjectivities towards practice continue to be shaped as we move through the decidedly variable ‘heterogeneity of any given milieu’ which may lead actors to ‘modify and reconstruct their dispositions throughout their lives, as they traverse different social contexts and contacts’ (Bottero 2009: 409). In this sense, insisting that ‘what exist in the social world are relations – not interactions between agents and intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97) seems sociologically ill-equipped to describe the variable and interactionally emergent process through which subjectivities, dispositions, and practices are moulded and continue to unfold. As we shall see further on, this is the major reason for emphasising a Meadian basis for the relational formation of dispositions and subjectivity: it is through the interactional emergence of the self that the individual takes on her capacity for engagement (pre-reflexive or otherwise) in social practice, and this interactional moulding continues as the dialogically capable individual moves through the complexities of social life. This is a process that prioritises direct engagement in interactional relations, as it is our interactional relations with others through which our self and our action emerges. This debate is of significance to the stance that I will take on a relational account of engagement in moral practice, which counters—to some extent at least—attempts to provide such a relational account of morality from a

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Bourdieusian perspective (for example, Sayer 2005; Ignatow 2009). More specific reasons for favouring an account that prioritises actual relational ties on this front will be given in critique of Bourdieu in Chapter 6, which will set the ground for the arguments for favouring a Meadian basis for the relational constitution of dispositions and subjectivities that are carried forth into moral practice. For now, it is simply necessary to hint at the argument that direct interactional ties cannot be relegated as secondary in relational sociology. Bourdieu has produced a rich line of research for relational sociology into the effects of capital on practice. However, the line of relational sociology followed here maintains that we do not need to look beyond the actual interactional relational ties between actors themselves as being what shapes engagement in practice (Crossley 2013).

Summary The major aim of this chapter has been to provide an overview of relational sociology, to outline its challenges to former modes of social theorising, and to feed it forward into theories of practice, which will be key for understanding morality in interactional and processual terms. The take-away message from the interactional brand of relationalism that I purport is that it sees society as relational in the double sense: (1) relations transcend the specifics of social interactions and are seen as what comprises and transmits more or less stable facets of social life, which play a decisive role in moulding individual action and consciousness—‘society’, ‘social structures’, ‘norms’, ‘economies’, ‘political ideologies’ and so forth; and (2) in the sense that individual action and practice is relationally moulded on the micro-scale of specific interactions. We act in relation to the particulars of the situation that we find ourselves in, which often entails the enactment or negation of norms or ‘structures’ that have shaped both us and the social situation in which we act. Relational sociology thus presents individual action as constituted in relations both in the immediacy of intersubjective interaction and in the broader relational entanglements and interdependencies that extend beyond specific interactions. When combined with the arguments for the relational constitution of subjectivities, relational sociology presents a picture in which individual action is embedded and entangled with both the relations that have moulded our understanding of, and engagement with, interaction, and with the relations immediately present in an interaction to which we respond (Burkitt 2016), meaning that ‘virtually all intelligible

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action is born, sustained, and/or extinguished within the ongoing process of relationship’ (Gergen 2009: xv). I consequently argue that relational sociology provides the theoretical framework to facilitate an understanding of how fuzzy and indeterminate social practice is engaged with in a way that is ‘oriented neither to the attainment of externally determined goals, as in the rationalist means-end model of action, nor to the carrying out of rules of action, as in the normative model of Parsonian structural-functionalism’ (Joas 1996: 158). Relational sociology allows us to recognise that individual engagement in social practice is not directed by structure; neither is it the product of an independent will. Rather, engagement in social practice involves interdependent interactions within the vast dynamic networks of relations that constitute a particular interactional exchange. This gives us our main reasons for focusing on morality in terms of practice from a relational perspective. Firstly, moral practice, like all practice, is engaged with in the messiness of social life. Secondly, it is in practice, which is relationally constituted, that ‘morality’ is enacted, engaged with, sustained, and transformed. The next chapter will set out the reasons for seeing morality in terms of practice in more depth.

Note 1. Indeed, as Joas (1996: 147) comments, ‘The proponents of such conceptions are well aware that the preconditions assumed by the model of rational action are frequently not to be found in empirically observable action. However, these writers are forced to claim that the limited degree to which these preconditions obtain is not a deficiency of their particular theory but a fault with actors themselves.’

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Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berekeley: University of California Press. Bottero, W. (2009). Relationality and Social Interaction. The British Journal of Sociology, 60(2), 399–420. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01236.x. Bottero, W. (2010). Intersubjectivity and Bourdieusian Approaches to ‘Identity’. Cultural Sociology, 4(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1749975509356750. Bottero, W. (2019). A Sense of Inequality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1989). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Standford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1992). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Polity Press. Burkitt, I. (2008). Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London: Sage. Burkitt, I. (2016). Relational Agency: Relational Sociology, Agency and Interaction. European Journal of Social Theory, 19(3), 322–339. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1368431015591426. Burr, J. (2009). Exploring Reflective Subjectivity Through the Construction of the ‘Ethical Other’ in Interview Transcripts. Sociology, 43(2), 323–339. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0038038508101168. Calhoun, C. (2003). The Variability of Belonging: A Reply to Rogers Brubaker. Ethnicities, 3(4), 558–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796803003004007. Côté, J.-F. (2018). G.H. Mead and Relational Sociology: The Case of Concepts. In F. Dépelteau (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (pp. 101–117). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_5. Crossley, N. (2006). Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Crossley, N. (2013). Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes: Conceptualizing “Relations” in Relational Sociology. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 123–143). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342652_8. Crossley, N. (2015). Relational Sociology and Culture: A Preliminary Framework. International Review of Sociology, 25(1), 65–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03906701.2014.997965. Dépelteau, F. (2008). Relational Thinking: A Critique of Co-deterministic Theories of Structure and Agency. Sociological Theory, 26(1), 51–73. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00318.x.

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Habermas, J. (1995). Individuation Through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (pp. 149–205). Cambridge: Polity Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. London: Harper & Row. Hekman, S. (1995). Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hermann, J. (2015). On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice—A Wittgensteinian Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hilbert, R. (2009). Ethnomethodology and Social Theory. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (pp. 159–178). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hoffmaster, B. (1992). Can Ethnography Save the Life of Medical Ethics? Social Science and Medicine, 35(12), 1421–1431. https://doi.org/10.1016/02779536(92)90045-R. Holdsworth, C., & Morgan, D. (2007). Revisiting the Generalized Other: An Exploration. Sociology, 41(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038507076614. Hughes, J., & Sharrock, W. (2007). Theory and Methods in Sociology: An Introduction to Sociological Thinking and Practice. Basingstoke: Macmillan International Higher Education. Husserl, E. (1913). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Ignatow, G. (2009). Why the Sociology of Morality Needs Bourdieu’s Habitus. Sociological Inquiry, 79(1), 98–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X. 2008.00273.x. James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Cosimo Inc. Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action (1st ed.). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Joas, H. (1997). G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jones, G. (1999). ‘The Same People in the Same Places’? Socio-Spatial Identities and Migration in Youth. Sociology, 33(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/ S0038038599000012. King, A. (1999). The Impossibility of Naturalism: The Antinomies of Bhaskar’s Realism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 29(3), 267–288. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00102. King, A. (2000). Thinking with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu: A ‘Practical’ Critique of the Habitus. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 417–433. King, A. (2004). The Structure of Social Theory (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1888). Theses on Feuerbach. Retrieved 12 August 2019, from https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

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Marx, K. (1939). Grundrisse. Retrieved 12 August 2019, from https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/. May, V. (2013). Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave. Mead, G. H. (1925). The Genesis of the Self and Social Control. International Journal of Ethics, 35(3), 251–277. https://doi.org/10.1086/207491. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist: 1 (C. Morris, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mylan, J., & Southerton, D. (2018). The Social Ordering of an Everyday Practice: The Case of Laundry. Sociology, 52(6), 1134–1151. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038517722932. Powell, C. (2013). Radical Relationism: A Proposal. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 187–207). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342652_11. Powell, C., & Dépelteau, F. (2013). Introduction. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 1–12). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342652_1. Rouse, J. (2007). Practice Theory. Division I Faculty Publications, 43. Retrieved from https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div1facpubs/43. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. (2011). Where the Action Is (On Large Social Phenomena Such as Sociotechnical Regimes). Presented at the Sustainable Practices Research Group. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ f3ec/3188fdff5fb14c1d346d34c6b3f8a55bb265.pdf?_ga=2.220707345. 86323426.1565603078-1299447161.1565603078. Schutz, A. (1970). Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings (H. R. Wagner, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sie, M. (2014). Self-Knowledge and the Minimal Conditions of Responsibility: A Traffic-Participation View on Human (Moral) Agency. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 48(2), 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9424-2. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press. Simmel, G. (1990). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, C. (1999). To Follow a Rule…. In R. Shusterman (Ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (pp. 29–44). Oxford: Blackwell. Tsekeris, C. (2013). Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 87–104). https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137342652_6.

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CHAPTER 3

From Rationalism to Practices, Dispositions, and Situated Subjectivities: The View from Philosophy

The previous chapter offered an overview of interactionist-relational sociology, which is to be extended across this book. The aim from here on is to explore the relational approach as providing a guiding framework for addressing questions of morality from a sociological perspective. In this chapter, I carry forward the relational critiques of how social phenomena and social action have been conceptualised in social theory, and apply them specifically to a critique of how modernist philosophic traditions conceptualise morality. In the last chapter I briefly alluded to how the relational critique of individualism correlates with arguments as to why orientating morality in terms of the rational action of the disembedded subject is problematic. As was seen previously, many of the arguments for centring practice, intersubjectivity, embodiment, and situated subjectivity have been drawn from the prevailing movements of twentieth-century philosophy (such as Heidegger 1962; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Wittgenstein 1973; Dewey 1922). Despite this, moral philosophy has been largely unwilling to integrate such perspectives, and to move forward from the enlightenment notion that the detached, universalising rational subject provides the cornerstone of genuine morality (Hekman 1995; Dreyfus 2014; Hermann 2015; Sie 2014). The problems associated with such approaches will be discussed in the first section of this chapter.

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Philosophical morality is of course trying to do something quite different to the sociology of morality; often the former is much more concerned with how people should act, rather than, as is generally the case with the latter, how people do act. Differing ends of course require differing concepts. However, several key lines of critique from within moral philosophy have been levelled against the philosophic inadequacy of modernist conceptions of the subject, and of how moral action is conceptualised in general (see, for example, Gilligan 1982; Benhabib 1992; Dreyfus 2014; Habermas 1995; Taylor 1989; Hekman 1995). And so too has the assumption of universalism, which grounds much of Western moral discourse, been brought into question (see, for example, MacIntyre 1985; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004; Hekman 1995; Sayer 2005). Several of these critiques, particularly those of Alasdair MacIntyre, Hubert Dreyfus, and Carol Gilligan, will be followed up firstly in order to build on the arguments against modernist moral thought, but also in order to assess their contribution to a sociological account of morality, which itself tends to be suspicious of notions of universalism and detached rationality (Smart and Neale 1999; Abend 2013). Indeed, all three have been adopted as giving theoretical direction to the sociology of morality, and each offers a contribution that has specific relevance to the overall argument being made here: MacIntyre seeks to consider morality in terms of culturally specific practices, while Dreyfus aims to re-centre morality predominantly in terms of everyday intuitive responsiveness, and Gilligan offers an argument for deeply embedded moral subjectivity and relationally entangled moral action. Each of these will thus be used as a sounding board for extending a relational sociology of morality, for evaluating what it should and should not be doing, and for assessing the direction that its conceptualisations of the moral subject and moral action should take.

The View from Philosophy Moral philosophy, throughout much of the modern era, can typically be characterised as being unconcerned with how morality is engaged with in practice. As Peter Singer (1986: 2) commented, prior to the rise of applied ethics in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘moral philosophers limited themselves to the study of the nature of morality, or (in the heyday of linguistic philosophy) to the study of the meaning of moral judgements’, with little concern at all for how people actually acted or what the right course of action would

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be. Indeed, A. J. Ayer (1959: 246), champion of twentieth-century logical positivist ethics, lamented that ‘many people find moral philosophy an unsatisfactory subject [because] they mistakenly look to the moral philosopher for guidance’, which, he argued, was well beyond the philosophical remit of seeking to provide foundations to ethical thought. Ayers’ quip hints at what the study of ethics had become during the modern era, particularly via its union with the project of enlightenment philosophy (MacIntyre 1985; Bauman 1993; Williams 1985). Taking up the mantle set by Plato’s assertions towards the universality of justice, the enlightenment project equated itself with the pursuit of providing rational foundations to universalisable moral laws (Hekman 1995). The enlightenment philosophers strove to replace moral values based on superstition and tradition with a moral framework based on reason, in order to produce laws that no rational person—or rather man—could refute (MacIntyre 1998). Rational reasoning assumed the place of the vehicle through which universalism of moral thought was to be achieved. This in turn oriented moral thought around the entity construed as capable of the pursuit of reason: the autonomous, rationally self-legislating subject, whose definition as a moral subject rests upon the capacity to detach and abstract himself ‘from the particularity of his circumstances and to formulate the universal principles that define the moral sphere’ (Hekman 1995: 2). Although touted in terms of fundamental opposition (Kantianism versus utilitarianism, for example), the various systems of enlightenment moral philosophy, were adjoined in their argument that the qualification of what is moral lies in universalisability and impartiality, achieved through the application of systematic rational thought, to the end of formulating abstracted moral principles that were applicable over and against the particulars of empirical circumstance (Dreyfus 2014). In so doing, moral issues and judgements, social by their nature, were extracted from social context and were recast as being solvable via the application of the correct rational system of moral thought. The enlightenment stance, so typified by Kant (1785), sought to thoroughly abstract the rightness of moral judgements both from the situation in which they are made and from the moral traditions of the social context in which the judgement stands (Barnes 2000; Uleman 2010). The enlightenment stance on morality was indifferent to social context, and instead predominantly attended to ‘the ethical value of reasoned critical reflection’ upon any such contingencies and inconsistencies presented by social context and cultural tradition (Barnes 2000: 139).

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Moral judgements were oriented not by their rightness within the traditions of a social context, but in relation to the capacity of the self-legislating individual to rationalise and de-contextualise their position via formulated moral principles.1 This trend is certainly not alien to the rationalist moral theories that prevail today. Peter Singer’s (1993) utilitarianist applied ethics and John Rawls’s (1971) ‘theory of justice’ provide two notable examples of moral theorising founded upon the application of rational argument to demonstrate precisely what is right, without the necessity of recourse to how people actually act (Gergen 1992). Indeed, the programme of applied ethics engendered by Singer (1986, 1993) is a particularly interesting reification of the enlightenment tradition because it arose out of a distaste for what it saw as a sterile and esoteric disinterest with moral realities that dominated the philosophical study of morality (Singer 1986). It thus begins with the premise that ‘ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in practice’ (Singer 1993: 2). However, what is meant by this is that philosophically sound reasoning can be used to arrive at a higher plane of validity on actual moral debates by the application of reasoned first principles, and by highlighting inconsistencies and biases inculcated in certain positions (Hoffmaster 1992; Hedgecoe 2004). This is a sound endeavour of course, and it has allowed applied ethics to be successful in reinserting moral philosophy into dialogue with concrete moral problems. However, the starting point of applied ethics, interestingly, has problematic consequences specifically for its application to practice. Applied ethics seeks to justify its theories in terms of their rational validity, which is achieved through the formulation of a justified position, via the application of reasoned argument, in order to produce a theoretical proposition of what the best or right course of action should be, regardless of circumstance (Hedgecoe 2004; Hoffmaster 1992). The stance of applied ethics consequently assumes that good moral practice is achievable through ‘the application of pre-prepared ethical theories to specific situations’ (Hedgecoe 2004: 124). However, the universalism-rationalist basis of applied ethics means that social and cultural factors are rendered irrelevant to the ‘correct’ moral procedure, which in turn ‘presupposes that two situations can be the same in the relevant moral respects, and requires principles which treat the same type of situation in the same way’, regardless of the endemic variation between even similar types of moral situations, and between the contextual factors that frame how these situations are understood in moral terms (Dreyfus 2014: 198). In a rather standard modernist

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fashion, applied ethics thus tends to divest the moral from the practical and social realities in which it is formed and enacted. Unsurprisingly, such approaches provide a rather disassociated picture of how moral decisions and judgements are taken, as well as of what is relevant to their assessment (Fox 1999; Hoffmaster et al. 1991). This can be seen in Singer’s (1993) justificatory account of why abortion is not just permissible, but also why, regarding the moral question of abortion, ‘there is a clear-cut answer and those who take a different view are simply mistaken’ (Singer 1993: 137). It would be incongruous indeed to suggest that Singer has not provided a valuable contribution to the moral question of the permissibility of abortion. However it needs to be asked whether the application of abstracted rational argument can realistically provide a clear-cut answer to the moral questions surrounding abortion for application in practice. Applied ethics actively seeks to disembed moral reasoning from the obfuscating factors that may detract it from its rational course (Hedgecoe 2004), and the propositional rationality of Singer’s account is characteristically dissociative of such factors surrounding abortion. The approach is consequently unamenable to the concrete realities that shape how such moral decisions are taken. This can be compared directly with Carol Gilligan’s famous study, collected in In a Different Voice (1982), into the decision-making process of women who had been referred to abortion and pregnancy counselling services. Gilligan’s (1982) interview data illuminated how the decision-making process of the referred women was so thoroughly embedded with the social constitutions of moral subjectivities, the affordances of social context, and the entanglement with personal relations, that the application of procedural rationality in practice pales into insignificance. Gilligan’s arguments will be examined in more depth shortly. But it is necessary to note that this is not to make the banal point that the kind of arguments made by Singer scarcely get fully applied in practice. Rather, it is to say that the basis of detached abstracted reason is so decidedly dissociative from what makes moral decisions what they are that it provides a poor basis for understanding the concrete realities through which significant questions of morality are engaged with in practice. As well as being abstracted from how moral decisions are taken in practice, by casting morality in terms of detached rationalism, such an approach presents only a partial picture of what morality entails (Gilligan 1982; Benhabib 1992). Applied ethicists designate one picture of morality: that of rationality and justice that is produced by abstracted reasoning for an application that transcends the

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particular. But in so doing it cuts off a whole sphere and mode of moral judgement and action that is oriented in its course by an intersubjective awareness of the intersecting concerns of others with whom our lives our entangled (Gilligan 1982, 1988). The trouble is, as a number of empirical studies have identified (Hoffmaster et al. 1991; Hoffmaster 1992; Gilligan 1982; Hedgecoe 2004; Fox 1999), there is a clear disjuncture between theoretical ethics and how morality is done in practice. And the reason for this is simple: the ‘philosophical desire to portray such decisions as exclusively and prototypically moral is not faithful to the phenomena’ (Hoffmaster 1992: 1426). The moral decisions and actions of people in reality cannot be disentangled from the relations in which they are constituted and framed, both at the level of the moulding of moral dispositions and subjectivities, and the level of the practical and interpersonal in which they are enacted. A major part of the problem here is that rationalist accounts directed towards principles, no matter how ‘applied’ they may be to real life moral questions, are based on an inadequate theory of action ‘whereby human cognition is conceived of in terms of a contemplative relationship of a cognizing subject to a world of facts and in which it is taken to be the task of cognition to select and classify these facts’ (Joas 1996: 157)— something that was critiqued in Chapter 2. Indeed, such theories mistakenly presuppose the individual’s capacity for purposive action to be taken autonomously ‘vis-à-vis his fellow human beings and environment’: The proponents of such conceptions are well aware that the preconditions assumed by the model of rational action are frequently not to be found in empirically observable action. However, these writers are forced to claim that the limited degree to which these preconditions obtain is not a deficiency of their particular theory but a fault with actors themselves… Indeed, empirical knowledge of the capacity for action and its development can add nothing to an analytically defined and fixated type of rational action. (Joas 1996: 147)

Much of moral thought, including applied ethics, has remained resistant to the critiques of the rational actor and the detached subject levelled by the dominant modes of ‘continental’ philosophic thought in the twentieth century, seemingly in the belief that moral action, if it is to be considered as such, must reside on an entirely different plain to how the rest of human action is conducted2 (Hekman 1995; Sie 2014; Hermann 2015; Gergen 1992). Indeed, Singer’s decided rationalism follows from what he considers to be ‘the nature of morality itself’, the essence of which ‘is to somehow take a universal point of view, or to go beyond partial thinking and

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behaviour’, meaning that ‘ethical conduct is conduct which can be justified from this universal point of view’ (Sandberg and Juth 2011: 218). In this sense, the conception of moral conduct pre-defines the type of actor that is necessary to fulfil it. Put otherwise, recourse to the already problematised notion of the rational actor is necessitated by the employment of the modernist view of what constitutes moral conduct, under the assumption that a sound theory of action can tell us little about moral conduct itself. Applied ethics thus sits thoroughly within the modernist tradition of designating moral authority in terms of abstracted reasoning from the perspective of the autonomous, rational, disembedded subject (Hekman 1995), whereas the bulk of contemporary social and philosophic thought outside the sphere of moral philosophy has sought to disassociate itself entirely from the notion that the detached reason of the rationally construing subject is anything other than a misguided theoretical abstraction (Hekman 1995). However, the latter part of the twentieth century has also yielded a burgeoning recognition that by obviating moral judgements from context, modernist theories were problematically indifferent to the use of moral discourses in practice. Because these theories rested on, and functioned through, the ideal of decontextualised rationalism, they accrued an unworkable degree of detachment from the social embodiment of morality at the level of lived experience (MacIntyre 1985; Barnes 2000). A literature has established itself around the acknowledgement that the abstraction of moral thought and practice from cultural context and the particularity of social circumstance decontextualises it from precisely what is necessary for them to be constituted as such (Nussbaum 1999; Taylor 1989; Gilligan 1982; Hekman 1995; Finch 1989; Bauman 1993; MacIntyre 1985; Barnes 2000). This also divorces moral theory from the sphere where it has most transformative potential: the informing of the messy, emergent moral problems that arise within social and cultural contexts, which are engaged with by socially constituted and relationally entangled interdependent actors. Although all the permutations of this cannot be fully evaluated here, it should suffice to say that there are growing alternative perspectives within moral philosophy, which argue that it is precisely their cultural embeddedness and their entangled social enactment that makes moral judgements and action what they are, and if such judgements and actions are to be understood, then they need to be approached from a sound conception of how human agency is and how moral dispositions and subjectivities are formed.

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Practice and Virtue in MacIntyre Perhaps the most obvious source for relocating morality into practice is Alasdair MacIntyre. In his famous work After Virtue (1985), MacIntyre challenged the enlightenment tradition of seeking to provide decontextualised foundations to moral principles, and instead argued that the study of morality should seek to understand the use of moral discourses in practice, and how this relates to the pursuit and constitution of the unitary selfhood of the person (Barnes 2000). This has little to do with the formulation and application of abstracted moral rules. Rather, moral discourses are sustained and engaged with via the individual’s engagement with virtues in practices, the pursuit of which allows for a good life to be achieved. Importantly for MacIntyre, virtues of practices are contextualised by the traditions of the community of practitioners. MacIntyre (1985) argues that the enlightenment project’s drive towards decontextualised foundationalism was a mistake because traditions and context are fundamentally constitutive of what is considered to be right and good, and that it is within, and not without, the context of traditions that moral discourses can have coherence in their application in social realities (Barnes 2000). Indeed, MacIntyre continues, this drive towards decontextualisation was at least in part responsible for the irresolvability of moral issues in the post-enlightenment era, because moral issues can only be judged objectively within the context that they took their form (Gergen 1992). Contrary to this, MacIntyre (1985) seeks to recontextualise morality within practice by expounding a neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics, in which contextualised goods are achieved through the enactment of virtues in practice, which allows the telos 3 of the good life to be achieved, and thus sets the ground upon which moral standards can be judged (Beadle and Moore 2006). Practice consequently holds a particular place for MacIntyre as the intersection between contextualised moral standards and the pursuit of virtue. He defines practices as any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 1985: 175)

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‘Such types of activity as farming and fishing, the pursuit of the sciences and the arts, and the playing of games such as football and chess are practices’ (MacIntyre 1998: 71). Each of these practices allow for ‘internal goods’ to be achieved by the practice of virtues. However, the virtuous participation in such practices requires the practitioner ‘to enter into a relationship not only with contemporary practitioners, but also with those who have preceded us in practice’, which in turn allows internal goods to be achieved when we act in accordance with contextual standards of what excellence in a practice entails (MacIntyre 1985: 194). Practices are bound up with contextually specific ‘internal goods’, which allow the ends of the practice to be achieved in relation to the ‘standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity’ (MacIntyre 1985: 175). These practices are consequently associated with virtues, because a ‘virtue is an acquired human quality, the possession of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices, and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving such goods’ (MacIntyre 1985: 191). So ‘virtues are first of all those qualities without which human beings cannot achieve the goods internal to practices’ (MacIntyre 1998: 71). Herein lies the initial and vital link that MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian approach makes between practice and virtue. However, ‘this characterisation of the virtues in terms of practices is necessary, but not sufficient for an adequate specification. Virtues are also to be understood as qualities required to achieve the goods which furnish individual human lives with their telos’ (MacIntyre 1998: 70). He continues: The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good. (MacIntyre 1985: 219)

Also, virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia [the achievement of well-being through good action] and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos. (MacIntyre 1985: 148)

Practices thus hold an intersecting place for MacIntyre. They provide the point of mediation between cultural traditions and the enactment of the

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good in practice, which provides for the achievement of virtue, and thus allows for the realisation of human telos , which essentially exists in the pursuit of the good itself (Beadle and Moore 2006). In this way, the good is achieved by attending to ‘specific situated activities, not to universalisable abstract rules’, which allows MacIntyre to overcome the flaws he attributes to the decontextualised enlightenment approach to morality (Barnes 2000: 130). However, as Richard Bernstein (1984) identifies, MacIntyre’s account of practice in terms of ‘human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve… standards of excellence’ (1985: 175) is so broad and abstract that any consistent notion of virtue appears to be untenable, at least initially. While not everything is practice, activities from playing chess to ‘spying, smuggling, safecracking, and the art of the executioner’ satisfy MacIntyre’s definition of practice and allow for virtue to be achieved in the terms he sets (Bernstein 1984: 13). It seems that MacIntyre is aware of this (Bernstein 1984: 11), as he recognises that in his definition of practice ‘there are too many conflicts and too much arbitrariness’, as the ‘claims of one practice may be incompatible with another in such a way that one may find oneself oscillating in an arbitrary way’ (MacIntyre 1985: 187, 188). This of course seems fairly self-defeating to MacIntyre’s arguments that the enlightenment project and contemporary moral life have failed in their ability to eradicate arbitrariness by providing objective standards against which moral debates can stand (Bernstein 1984; Barnes 2000). But the real issue lies in MacIntyre’s resolution of this problem, which he tackles through the argument that ‘the goods internal to practice do after all derive their authority from our individual choices’, and that ‘the genuinely virtuous agent… acts on the basis of a true and rational judgment’ (MacIntyre 1985: 140, 188). This exhibits MacIntyre’s recourse to what is essential to enlightenment moral thought: individualistic rationalism. Although ‘MacIntyre stresses their embeddedness in cultural traditions, their limited domains of application, and how they may only be intelligible to culturally competent persons who encounter them in appropriate situations… standards must still be evaluated by those persons individually, and moreover, by the reason of those persons’ (Barnes 2000: 131). Indeed, as Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2004: 255) enjoin, ‘in MacIntyre’s account of the virtuous life, the moral agent is reduced to a competent performer deliberately choosing among maxims’:

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In practical reasoning the possession of [an adequate sense of the tradition to which one belongs] … appears in the kind of capacity for judgment which the agent possesses in knowing how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in particular situations. (MacIntyre 1985: 175–176, cited in Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 255)

While MacIntyre argues against the formation or fulfilment of rules in favour of contextualised standards, he fails to divest himself of the assumption that it is ultimately the autonomous individual who pursues virtue in relation to their reasoned engagement with objective standards of excellence in practice. This becomes particularly problematic because the reasoning pursuit of virtue occurs primarily via the achievement of ‘internal goods’ and ‘standards of excellence’ in practice, which ‘can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves to the best standards of practice so far achieved’ (MacIntyre 1985: 177). By orienting the moral life around the pursuit of virtue in these terms, and by squaring this responsibility upon the shoulders of the abstracted individual, the contextualisation of the facility for this pursuit to occur is ignored. It is hard to not draw a comparison between MacIntyre’s argument that standards of excellence are achieved in practice with Bourdieu’s (1984) arguments in Distinction that our position in social space is oriented according to our access to limited capitals, which subsequently moulds our habitus , both of which fundamentally shape how practice is engaged with and the likelihood of us being able to pursue practice in a certain way. While MacIntyre contextualises these standards, the social constitution of the individual’s capacity to pursue such standards is left unproblematised, both at the level of the formation of subjectivities and at the intersubjective interactional level that moulds practice in practice. This point is not merely incidental: if virtues are achieved by achieving standards of excellence in practice, but the capacity to achieve virtues in this way are unevenly distributed, then virtues themselves become vehicles through which social inequality is enacted. MacIntyre’s analysis seems unconcerned with both the role that social conditions play in engagement with practice, and with how the achievements of virtues in practice is inevitably bound up with relations of power and social inequality. In fact, his whole discussion of practice in terms of internal goods and the achievement of standards of excellence seems to be largely untenable in sociological terms, insofar as it is entirely detached from the social and interactional realities in which practice occurs, as set out in Chapter 2.

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Firstly, MacIntyre is not at all clear on the process through which traditions and ‘standards of excellence’ are sustained and transformed (Barnes 2000). Of course, it was not MacIntyre’s intention to provide a processual model of practice. However, his argument rests so heavily on the contextualisation of practices and standards in tradition that it seems odd to not inquire into the social process that founds this contextualisation. This absence runs against his own argument that ‘we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be’ (MacIntyre 1985: 23). Indeed, by conceptualising the social embodiment of ‘the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and action’ in terms of the individual’s rationalistic pursuit of excellence in practice, MacIntyre overlooks perhaps the key challenge to the mode of enlightenment thought that he seeks to critique: namely, that the bulk of our engagement in practice occurs as an ‘intuitive response to the concrete situation’ (Dreyfus 2014: 183), which is enacted ‘prior to the specifications of objects of knowledge’, such as intention, motive, or standards of excellence (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227; Dewey 1922). While MacIntyre attempts to argue for morality being lived out in practice, it is hard to not see his attempts to do so via the teleological pursuit of virtue as prioritising abstraction in a way that detracts from how practice is actually lived and experienced. MacIntyre’s abstracted view of practice, and his rationalistic account of the pursuit of virtues within it, also overlooks the social entanglements that constitute the formation and enactment of moral decisions. Sociological research into moral decisions in family life shows that the ‘right’ thing to do is not situated by objective (albeit contextualised) standards, but rather unfolds and shifts intersubjectively between mutually entangled actors, which moulds and redirects the parameters of moral decisions and how they are taken (Finch 1989; Smart and Neale 1999; Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003). For example, the conflicting decisions that divorced women faced in questions of reconciling their relationships with their estranged partners (Smart and Neale 1999) were contextualised in similar ways to MacIntyre’s description: the decisions were framed in relation to lay understandings of psychological discourses surrounding children and divorce, and by social and legal changes that made divorce possible and realistic as an option, through the provision of legal frameworks that stipulate custody rights for example, as well as broader trends towards social acceptability. However, to conceptualise this as the contextualisation in which virtue is pursued by the

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choices of the individual misconstrues the interdependencies, ambiguities, and social emergence that make the decisions what they are. For Smart and Neale’s (1999) participants, decisions to engage with an estranged husband after divorce were variously entangled with considerations of: the safety and wishes of the children and their emotional responses to the divorce (which occasionally led to the mother working against her ‘better judgement’); the reasons for the divorce and the way it continued to play out even post-divorce; ongoing feelings for (or towards) the estranged partner; pressure from the partner; concern for the partner’s well-being; judged improvements in the behaviour and efforts made by the partner; subjective positions on the ‘right’ course of action; issues of self-worth and dependency; familial pressures on both sides; self-interests regarding the pursuit of one’s own life under new conditions; as well as practical decisions, such as space in the post-divorce home of each parent to look after the children, working hours, financial independence, and geographic practicality. These are not decisions that involve the pursuit of standards of excellence in practice, or the subordination of oneself to the standards of excellence that precede such a decision in the pursuit of virtue. They are however, ongoing, lived decisions oriented by moral concern, which are intersubjectively emergent from entangled social relations that mould both the immediate contours of the social decision, and the life histories that shape the subjective dispositions of the inculcated actors themselves. What is problematic from a sociological perspective is that MacIntyre does not describe how morality is actually engaged with in practice, but rather offers a theory of the place of practice in morality that is ultimately directed towards upholding his arguments for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Because his arguments are directed towards expounding a theoretical model of what the moral life consists of, it is perhaps unsurprising that he arrives at the conclusion that such a life is untenable in the context of the contemporary social world. To loosely borrow a phrase from Bourdieu (1977), MacIntyre’s arguments are more concerned with the reality of his model than they are with providing a model of reality. The point of bringing morality into the realm of practice is to bypass theoretical abstraction, rather than add to it via conceptualisations of virtue and telos , which themselves are so distanced from the practical reality of contemporary life that MacIntyre (1985) himself finds them unworkable in our current era. By discussing practice in terms of virtues, standards of excellence, and internal goods, MacIntyre’s theory drags morality out of lived experience and strips moral decisions of their ambiguity and emergent

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nature. Morality is not achieved by living up to our telos through the achievement of virtues in practice, but rather is engaged with as various kinds of decent behaviour, which take account of the value of others and of how we should treat them (and be treated by them), are brought into the messy indeterminacy of intersubjective practice, to which internal goods may or may not be relevant (Sayer 2005).

Dreyfus and Ethical Comportment The work of Hubert Dreyfus brings us much closer to this latter view by taking as its starting point the question of how morality is actually engaged with in ordinary life, rather than from a concern for the theoretical consistency of moral abstraction. Dreyfus’s work insists that ‘objective description is the appropriate way to approach what human beings are and how their social practices cohere’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999: 85). From this perspective, Dreyfus (2014) is critical of enlightenment philosophy for overplaying the human capacity to engage in detached reason, and underplaying the fact that most of the time, we are able to engage with the world proficiently at a practical level that does not require detached rational judgement. Dreyfus’s work brings us towards a view of morality that coheres with the contemporary theories of practice outlined in Chapter 2, both in the sense that it sees the bulk of moral action as occurring as intuitive, ‘situation-governed comportment’ conducted through an embodied responsiveness in practice (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251)4 ; and in the sense that it specifically emphasises the ‘everydayness’ of our moral capacities (Dreyfus 2014: 183). His argument begins with a phenomenological account of how human agency is. Drawing predominantly on Heidegger (1962) and Dreyfus (2014: 81) argues that the capacity to navigate through the social world without discursive recourse is the ‘most basic’ element of human agency. This is because human beings are primarily in the flow of the world, dealing with what is in front of them with a pre-reflexive skilful precision (Dreyfus 2014; Schutz 1970). Rather than being necessarily deliberative, it is more the case that the basic capacity of agency is the capacity to engage with one’s world practically and proficiently, to be able to ‘skilfully cope’ with the world via an intuitive ‘know-how’, as oppose to the discursive ‘knowing-that’ (Dreyfus 2014: 95):

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We should try to impress on ourselves what a huge amount of our lives – working, getting around, talking, eating, driving, and responding to the needs of others – manifest know-how and what a small part is spent in the deliberate, effortful, subject-object mode of activity that requires knowing that. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251, emphasis added)

Our primary mode of being in the world predominantly entails a practical, intuitive responsiveness to the situation at hand. As such, rather than detached intellectual qualities setting the course of how we act, intentions and reasoned judgements arise in relation to our practical mode of being (Dreyfus 2014; see also Joas 1996). Detached, reasoned, reflective deliberations are secondary, both in the sense that they are a product of our practical engagement with the world, and in the sense that they are generally less efficacious upon our action than the practical circumstances in which agency is enacted. Or, as Dreyfus (2014: 112) puts it, ‘the explanatory grounds of intelligent activity lie as much in the world as in the agent’. However, because ‘deliberate action and its extreme form, deliberation, are the ways of acting we tend to notice… [they] are the only ones that have been studied in detail by philosophers’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251). However, because our ‘everyday coping skills usually function smoothly and transparently so as to free us to be aware of other aspects of our lives where we are not so skilful’, ‘philosophers overlooked them for 2500 years, until pragmatism and phenomenology came along’ (Dreyfus 2014: 189). This view, however, has proved to be particularly problematic in the sphere of moral philosophy, because the hegemonic dominance of rationalism and universalism as being definitive of the moral has meant ‘that everyday intuitive ethical expertise’ has ‘been passed over by philosophers or, if recognized, distorted by reading back into it the mental content found in deliberation’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251). This has led to the distinct incapacity of moral philosophy to accurately depict how morality is engaged with in practice, firstly because it looks past where the lion’s share of moral conduct is done, and secondly because it reads into moral action a necessity of reasoned deliberation for it to be constituted as such (Dreyfus 2014). The bulk of moral thought has concerned itself around purity of intention, reasoned judgement, principles, trolley-problems, universality, and justice. In so doing, it has neglected to consider that in everyday life, people are largely able to engage in morally decent behaviour as part of ordinary practice, in absence and ignorance of ‘correctly’ principled moral

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knowledges and considerations. Dreyfus thus applies his phenomenological view of agency to the moral sphere, via the argument that the traditional markers of moral judgement and action—detachment, rationality, universalism—are significantly less relevant to most of moral action than the capacity to practically engage with the moral expectations that we live within. Importantly, Dreyfus’s approach drags the locus of moral philosophy away from the abstract questions of moral rightness, justice, or theoretical consistency, and away from occasionally faced moral issues or seemingly intractable moral dilemmas, and relocates the moral within the everyday. This approach consequently argues in favour of centring ‘our everyday ethical comportment [which] consists in unreflective, egoless responses to the current interpersonal situation’ over the occasional role played by reasoned and reflective deliberation in the course of our moral thought and action (Dreyfus 2014: 185). The model he presents is a dispositional one: it is concerned with our capacity to comport ourselves towards ordinary moral considerations in a way that is responsive to the social world as it presents itself to us in everyday life without deliberative recourse. He recognises that most of our moral action does not occur in a detached process of deliberative reasoning, but rather occurs as ‘an intuitive response to the concrete situation’ (Dreyfus 2014: 183). This is made possible ‘after long experience’, in which ‘the ethical expert learns to respond appropriately to each unique situation’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251). It should be noted that the ‘ethical expert’ refers here not to the moral philosopher, but to the ordinarily competent moral agent, whose moral maturity means that they are generally capable of responding with a skilful and intuitive comportment to the multitude of variable everyday situations that social life throws their way. ‘Ethical expertise’ develops via a process of socially engaged experience, in which the individual arrives at a progressively nuanced understanding of normativity and permissibility, which can be applied in ever more diversified situations in an increasingly unreflective manner (Dreyfus 2014: 189). His explanation, in short, is that we become increasingly morally competent in the same way that we become increasingly competent with anything: we learn and practise with experience until we no longer need to refer back to instruction in order to make the right decision. Thus understood, the capacity for intuitively acting ethically is a skill that is developed in the same way as any other skill, and consequently can be described through a phenomenological picture of skill acquisition (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2014: 251).

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To borrow his examples, the skilled driver does not need to consciously reflect on what her driving lessons taught her prior to reacting correctly to a sudden hazard appearing in the road (in fact, they would hardly be considered proficient if they did). Likewise, the difference between the highly skilful and the moderately skilful chess player has a lot to do with the extent to which formulations of strategy and tactic have to be relied upon. Rather than referring to learned strategies and tactics, the highly skilled player is able to respond with an intuitive precision to how the game is playing out. Around these examples, Dreyfus builds a five-stage model of the phenomenology of skill acquisition, through ‘novice’, ‘advanced beginner’, ‘competence’, ‘proficiency’, and ‘expertise’ (Dreyfus 2014: 185–188), with each stage requiring increasingly less instruction, recourse to rules, or deliberative decision-making. While the proficient actor ‘sees what needs to be done, but must decide how to do it’, by the stage of expertise the person normally ‘does not solve problems. He does not reason. He does not even act deliberately. Rather, he spontaneously does what has normally worked and, naturally, it normally works’ (Dreyfus 2014: 188–189). Dreyfus argues that this is, for the most part, no different to how we come to be able to engage in much of moral practice with an intuitive, pre-reflective ease to which principles and precepts are increasingly surplus. This allows actors to be largely able to comport themselves with an intuitive responsiveness to the situation at hand in a way that is reflective of (although not delimited by) expectations of that context, prior to recourse to formalised ethical codes. This view, according to Dreyfus, turns moral thought on its head, because ‘an ethics based on principles corresponds to a beginner’s reliance on rules and so is developmentally inferior to an ethics based on expert response’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 251). Dreyfus qualifies this strong claim by saying that ‘[e]xpert deliberation is not inferior to intuition’, neither is it true that deliberation is ‘always disruptive and always produces inferior practice’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 255). We are routinely jolted from intuitive comportment, particularly when ethical quandaries are afoot, and even ‘an ethical expert, when confronted with cases of so-called lifeboat morality, may have to fall back on ethical principles’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 255). However, it seems clear that such deliberation is seen as being in some way less proficient in generating sound responses to the world: because principles were unable to produce expert behavior for the competent performer, it should be no surprise if falling back on them produces inferior

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responses. The resulting decisions are necessarily crude because they have not been refined by the experience of the results of a variety of intuitive responses to emotion-laden situations and the learning that comes from subsequent satisfaction and regret. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004: 256)

This seems to be something of a ‘valorisation’ of intuitiveness (Aboulafia 1999: 161), which will be discussed next. However, it is worth noting firstly that Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition and ethical expertise reads as a little thin, both within the phenomenological tradition in which it situates itself, and in comparison to the dispositional model of Bourdieu, in relation to which Dreyfus is keen to appraise himself (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999). The similarities with Bourdieu’s approach are obvious. Dreyfus even credits Bourdieu with drawing together the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty and ‘making these ideas concrete’ in a sociologically coherent picture of embodied, dispositional skills of practice that can be transposed across social fields (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999: 87). This is clearly on Dreyfus’s agenda also. However, while Dreyfus’s attempt to avoid unnecessary theoretical abstraction is admirable, the process of arriving at expertise is remarkably uncomplicated, particularly for something as socially variable as what he describes. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) own model of habitus depicts the formations of dispositions within a complex relational social space that engenders and negates the adoption of certain practices, as well as producing a social ‘fit’ between the dispositions that have been embodied and the fields in which we feel comfortable acting. Of course, Dreyfus does not argue that we are ethical experts across the board. But he is also fairly unconcerned both with the differential formation of ethical expertise and with the social circumstances and power relations that may problematise the transposition of expertise between situations. Indeed, although Dreyfus seeks to show ethical behaviour as emerging as ‘an intuitive response to the concrete situation’ (Dreyfus 2014: 183), very little is said about how social context and interaction produces, inhibits, and redirects how moral action occurs. His approach too suffers from the particularly philosophical flaw of failing to take seriously social context in relation to ethical comportment. Dreyfus’s (deliberately) reductive skillacquisition model of ethical expertise skates over the messiness and the intersubjectivity of the social processes of moral action, and consequently presents a somewhat rosy picture of how ‘ethical expertise’ allows actors to effortlessly wade through the quagmire of moral quandaries that social

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life produces. In so doing, and in his haste to orient moral action principally in intuitive terms, Dreyfus gives only partial (and largely inadequate) treatment to the place of reflexivity in moral action. While I agree with Dreyfus that we are indeed able to deal with many problems via intuitive dispositions that reflect our immersion in a social world that is thoroughly permeated with moral value, expectation, and judgement (Sie 2014), we cannot underplay the fact that social life routinely presents us with moral problems which, by their nature and to varying degrees, demand our mundane reflexive attention within the hurly-burly of practice—particularly if we are to consider ourselves to have a decent level of moral expertise. As Sayer (2005: 29) said of Bourdieu, in seeking ‘to correct for overly rationalised approaches which ignore embodiment’, Dreyfus bends the stick too far in favour of intuitive dispositions, and consequently overlooks how some degree of ordinary reflexivity is necessary for coping to occur in a world of complex intersubjective practice. As a result, Dreyfus overlooks vital aspects of how morality in practice is, or importantly is not, engaged with. For example, Dreyfus’s notion of skilful ethical comportment does not sit well with issues of how we may feel we should challenge a relative’s latent sexism, but decide it’s not worth causing tension at our family gathering, while on the other hand we may challenge a sexist joke told by our peers at work. As many have argued against Bourdieu (see, for example, Sayer 2005; Crossley 2006; Bottero 2009; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007)—and these arguments will be returned to in Chapter 6— engaging with the messy complexity of intersubjectively affective practice often engenders a mundane level of reflexivity in the moment of practice, which is necessary in order to ‘skilfully cope’ with the situation at hand. Similarly, even if we do decide that we want to deliver a challenge to a sexist remark, it is likely that this will be bound up with various relations of power and personal confidence, which may leave our desire to challenge such a remark regrettably unfulfilled. Dreyfus’s account says little about how we may get swept along with the situation by our intuitive responses, but then on reflection think that we should have challenged another’s actions, or that we could have acted differently. More generally, he says little about how circumstances may disrupt our ethical comportment, such as the knowledge that we may be late for an exam, as Darley and Batson’s (1973) famous ‘good Samaritan’ social experiment into the moral responsiveness of seminary students demonstrated. While Dreyfus argues that ethical comportment emerges as an intuitive response to the situation,

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he is unclear on how the situation may problematise, disrupt, and hinder our dispositional ethical responses. The dispositional emphasis also says little about what happens when our practical, pre-reflexive schemes breakdown. Dreyfus of course recognises that while moral practice does indeed occur as an intuitive response to the concrete situation in the moment of practice, a significant aspect of our moral action, by its nature, demands our careful reflexive (which is not to say detached or rationally principled) consideration. He is not arguing that ethical principles and rationalised moral judgements do not exist, nor that they are not drawn upon by most people at some point in their lives. Neither is he arguing that a ‘better’ course of action cannot be engendered by reasoned engagement with ethical principles and arguments. Rather, he follows the likes of Schutz (1970) in arguing that deliberative recourse usually only becomes necessary when our stream of practical agency is disrupted, when we are confronted with a problem that requires consideration. Naturally, big decisions surrounding family planning (Gilligan 1982), divorce (Smart and Neale 1999), cohabitation (Burkitt 2016), and social protest (Edwards 2014), by definition, are not dealt with in terms of a dispositional response of ethical comportment. However, Dreyfus gives little indication of how such practice is engaged with at these points where practical schemes are insufficient.5 In so doing, he bypasses a hugely significant aspect of how moral consideration is undertaken at important junctures in social life. But more importantly, he misses a vital point at which the enlightenment notion of the detached moral subject can be further undermined: at the point of the relational entanglement of our reflexive deliberations with moral decisions. Dreyfus (2014) takes Carol Gilligan (1982) as vindicating his arguments, as the intuitive, situated moral responsiveness of the participants in her studies (which she argues has typically been relegated in moral philosophy) reflects a ‘higher’ degree of moral expertise in Dreyfus’s terms than the traditional enlightenment moral subject, who needs to apply detached principles to arrive at morally sound action. However, while Gilligan (1982) does indeed illuminate the situatedness of the moral subject and endorses the morality of everyday relations of care, she hardly sees this as entailing the uncomplicated enactment of ethical expertise. Her work provides a clear exemplification of how this entangled situated responsiveness is productive of messy and often problematic moral decisions both at the level of everyday intuitive action, and during situations that demand our utmost reflexive moral consideration, such as abortion. Indeed, in her study of

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women considering having an abortion, Gilligan’s (1982) major challenge to enlightenment thought was not that her subjects acted intuitively, but rather that her participants’ reflexive consideration of the moral decisions in front of them were not ‘moral’ in the universalist sense that they privileged the most just or rational decision over the wants and needs of others. Instead, they were moral precisely in the sense that their reflexive consideration echoed a concern and responsiveness towards the lives of others with whom their decisions were entangled. Gilligan was using her argument to exemplify an alternative ‘moral voice’ that permeated through her participants, which challenged the enlightenment notion that moral rightness has to do with rational reasoning directed towards principled judgement. The voice Gilligan (1982) highlights was still moral, but it was moral in a different way. However, as Hekman (1995) and Smart and Neale (1999) have argued, Gilligan’s point can be used to represent a more general recognition that our engagement in moral practice, regardless of the reflexive level at which it is engaged, is always situated and entangled by the relations that constitute both the subject and their interdependent action. Before moving on to this argument, it needs to be made clear that I take Dreyfus’s underlying claim to be broadly correct: much of our moral activity occurs at the level of the practical enactment of intuitive responsiveness in relation to the situation at hand, which occurs at an everyday level. He is also right to critique the typical philosophic over-emphasis on the detached and deliberating subject as the centring point of moral thought. However, his argument is weak on the question of the formation of dispositions and subjectivities that are carried into moral comportment, and he misses out much of the messiness of the social process in the enactment of this comportment in practice. He gives us a clear and workable indication of the level at which much of moral action occurs, but he is less helpful for explaining how we are able to engage morally with practice in this way, or how this practice is messily entangled with the realities of practice itself.

Entangled Subjectivities and Entangled Action: Carol Gilligan We turn now, through Gilligan, to the argument that it is a mistake to posit the disembedded subject as the basis for moral argument because subjects and their moral decisions are always in some way relationally entangled. In her early work, Gilligan (1982, 1988) argued that two distinct modes

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of approaching moral problems can be detected. On the one hand, moral problems can be approached from a perspective oriented by justice. Moral problems, in this voice, are approached with reference to balancing, making the inequitable equitable. This tends to carry with it a notion of detached reasoning, a consideration of what the just outcome should be. On the other hand, moral problems can be approached via the perspective of care. This perspective emphasises responsiveness to the needs and the situation of the other, and the necessity for taking the initiative for the care and consideration of others (Gilligan 1988). These are essentially the characteristics of the two moral voices Gilligan discusses: that of justice, and that of care. One of the key contributions made by Gilligan (1982, 1988) is the argument that the justice mode of moral decision-making has dominated Western moral thought. By typically equating morality with the supposed universality of rationality, objectivity, and justice, moral philosophy has erroneously discounted ‘that obligations and relations of care are genuinely moral ones, belonging to the centre and not at the margins of morality’ (Benhabib 1992: 186). Not only does the emphasis on detached rationality and justice discount a significant aspect of what counts as morality, it does so in a way that has a tendency to designate the moral perspective of care as secondary.6 This is particularly problematic for Gilligan (1982, 1988) because, she argues, the likelihood of perspectives of justice or perspectives of care being favoured and applied was strongly gendered, which is a consequence of differential socialisation. Part of Gilligan’s point is that moral theory has generally been written from a masculine perspective, which claims to be universal, but in fact reflects and privileges a mode of moral action that men are more likely to be socialised into, which is why the moral views and arguments of women have either been overlooked or seen as inferior7 (Gilligan 1988). Gilligan’s argument is that moral subjectivities are inextricably bound up with gendered discourses that have notable and testable outcomes for how moral decisions are approached and enacted in relation to others within contextually defined circumstances (Gilligan 1982, 1988). Her studies, and many subsequent ones collected in Mapping the Moral Domain (Gilligan 1988), indicate that, although not all women followed a perspective of care when approaching moral problems, women were considerably more likely to favour a care perspective than men. But what is more striking is that, although a portion of women tended towards a justice perspective, virtually no men took a care perspective. This can be exemplified in one of Gilligan’s studies, which she argues is consistent with the general results of other

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similar research (Gilligan and Attanucci 1988). In this study, eighty ‘educationally advantaged adolescents and adults’ were asked semi-structured interview questions pertaining to real-life moral dilemmas and choices that they had faced (Gilligan 1988: xviii). It was found that, while all participants referred to both justice and care concerns in the interviews, most tended to strongly emphasise one perspective over the other. Of the thirty-four women involved in the study, twelve emphasised care, twelve had an even split between the perspectives, and ten focused on justice. Of the fortyfive men involved, only one focused on care, fifteen were relatively even, and thirty focused on justice (Gilligan and Attanucci 1988: 81). Gilligan described what these results demonstrate: Care focus, although not characteristic of all women, was almost exclusively a female phenomenon in three samples of educationally advantaged North Americans. If girls and women were eliminated from their study, care focus in moral reasoning would virtually disappear. (Gilligan 1988: xix)

Gilligan argues that this difference emerges because of deeply gendered relational processes of socialisation, in which girls get confronted with ‘the wall of Western culture’ that expects them to conform, submit, care, take account of others, and be dutiful as a ‘good woman’ (Gilligan 1992: 257). She argues that this manifests itself in the moral approaches taken by the participants in her studies. Rather than being primarily oriented by detached rationality and objective judgement of the ‘right’ course of action, the participants interviewed in In a Different Voice (1982) tended to exhibit a moral concern that was oriented by interconnectedness with, and care for, others. Precedence was given not to the rationality of the decisions surrounding abortion, but rather to the perceived responses of significant others, such as parents and partners, as well as the particular contours of these relationships which define this perception: whether they felt they would get support through the pregnancy or be shunned by ashamed parents, the extent to which the father of the child is able to emotionally pressurise the decision-making, the nature of the relationship in which the pregnancy occurred, etc. One of Gilligan’s subjects ‘Cathy’, sums this up in discussing how she thinks that having a baby would be terrible for herself, but her family and partner want her to have the baby anyway: ‘I think what confuses me is it is a choice of either hurting myself or hurting other people around me. What is more important?’ (Gilligan 1982: 80). This notion of care is key to what Gilligan sees as the different perspective that many

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women take towards moral problems. It is not necessarily a question of the rationally ‘right’ or most just decision, or indeed of the most just or rational decision being privileged over the wants and needs of others. Rather, it is a question of concern and responsiveness towards relationships. While empirically framed, her early work in particular has been variously criticised for the simplicity of the split between the justice voice and the care voice along the lines of gender, with the feminist literature bringing into question the strength and general applicability of the specifically gendered ‘moral voices’ (Hekman 1995; Senchuk 1990; Heyes 2008). Gilligan herself responded that ‘the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought’ ‘rather than to represent a generalization about either sex’ (Gilligan 1986: 327), and went on to acknowledge that although it is of considerable importance, formation of moral subjectivities ‘cannot be reduced to questions of gender’ (Gilligan et al. 1988, cited in Hekman 1995: 10). Indeed, her later work (Brown and Gilligan 1992) subsequently moved towards a more nuanced consideration of the multitude of factors that mould and constitute the formation and enactment of moral subjectivities. Alongside Hekman (1995), I argue that the value of Gilligan’s work lies not in the specific manifestation of how approaches to moral problems may be in some way gendered, but rather in the more general point that engagement with morality in practice is always bound up with the relational entanglements in which our subjectivities are constituted, and the situational entanglements in which moral decisions are formed and enacted. For example, if the implications of a distinctly feminine ‘moral voice’ are shaved away, Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) provides a clear explication of how the moral decisions of her participants are situated within the particular relationships that contour how questions of pregnancy and abortion are approached, and within broader relationally held discourses, such as expectations of womanhood and femininity as entailing a general expectation of subservience, a willingness to facilitate views which contradict the individual’s own, and a caring responsiveness to the needs and wants of other people at the expense of oneself. Gilligan (1982), alongside other empirical studies (see, for example, Harris and Mills 1985), also highlights the significance that social context plays both in the formation of subjective dispositions towards certain beliefs regarding ‘right to life’ or ‘right to choice’, but also in influencing how decisions regarding contraception and abortion are faced in practice, with concerns of shame and shunning in conservative social contexts negating the directionality of how the moral

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decision is faced even when choice is legal and practically available (Rapp 2000). Indeed, Gilligan is keen to point out that how subjectivity develops, and how this affects the individual’s engagement in moral decisionmaking, necessarily intersects with the practicalities of the moral decision at hand, which are framed broadly by the viability, legality, and availability of abortion. These overall practicalities of circumstance cast what the moral decision can be, and subsequently frame what subsidiary practical factors are considered to be relevant to it, with health advice, income, and career choices, inevitably bearing heavily on such decisions. For Gilligan, the practical aspects of moral decisions are faced in relation to wider beliefs and values regarding life and rights. And these beliefs and values intersect with those of the individual’s significant personal relations, and often have to be compromised on this front (Gilligan 1982). Part of my overall point is that all moral decisions are constituted and faced in this way, in the messiness of differentiated subjectivities and entangled practicalities of action. From a relational perspective, the attempt by philosophers to provide a clear-cut answer to moral dilemmas that is unbounded from such factors thoroughly misconstrues the social constitution of subjectivity and action. A key value of Gilligan’s work is that she builds her theory out of an empirical concern for how people actually do engage with moral questions in practice, which provides her with results that are at odds with the dominant philosophic modes of attributing moral action. The fact that the moral significance of entangled concern and responsiveness for others has been discounted from mainstream philosophic thought, she argues, is a result of the moral narratives of women being side-lined and disparaged (Gilligan 1988; Hekman 1995; Palmquist 2017). No doubt this is true. However, I argue that her findings were so at odds with the standard doctrines of moral thought not so much because they took the perspectives of women seriously (important though this is), but because they were concerned with providing an account of how morality was done in the messiness of relationally entangled practice, as opposed to seeking to affirm the assumption that the universalising rationalism of the detached subject was the hallmark of moral action, as Kohlberg’s studies had done (Dreyfus 2014; Hekman 1995; Gergen 1992). By aiming to take the narratives of women seriously, Gilligan took the entanglements that constitute moral subjectivities and action seriously also, meaning that she dispensed with modernist conceptions of detached, abstracted subjectivity and action that are firstly at odds with how the social world is engaged with in general (as so well described by the likes of Dewey [1922], Mead

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[1934], also Wittgenstein [1973], and Heidegger [1962]), and which secondly are based upon theoretical abstraction that is largely unconcerned with how morality is actually engaged with in practice (Dreyfus 2014; Hekman 1995). Numerous empirical studies, many of which will be detailed across the next two chapters, have demonstrated that understanding how moral decisions and actions are taken in practice means taking seriously firstly that moral perspectives are socially situated, and secondly that the enactment of moral judgements occurs, and is moulded within, the messy entanglements of social life (see, for example, Awad et al. 2018; Rapp 2000; Hoffmaster et al. 1991; Barnett et al. 2005; Smart and Neale 1999; Grauel 2016; May 2008; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). For example, similarly to Gilligan’s work, Reyna Rapp’s (2000) insightful study into amniocentesis (the prenatal test for genetic and chromosomal disorders in foetuses), details how relationally constituted and situated subjectivities of potential parents are brought to bear in the moral decisions posed by the routine offering of the test. She argues that, although the technology she was tracking ‘produces universal and uniform claims about the advantages of prenatal testing’, her ‘research increasingly revealed alternative and sometimes competing rationales through which members of different communities made sense of its burdens and benefits’ (Rapp 2000: 10). Rapp’s point is not to disparage those who fail to buy into the dominant scientific narrative, but rather to illustrate that individual consciousness is complexly forged and stratified across a plurality of life trajectories that pattern and mould how moral questions are faced in practice. ‘Matters of class, for example, figure large in problems of scientific literacy, confidence, and agency in medical settings’, and ‘culturally organized gender relations, kinship connections, and interpretations of what counts as illness and health’ oriented not only attitudes towards disability and abortion, but also how the decisions and consequences of prenatal testing were understood and faced (Rapp 2000: 10, 13). Rapp is quick to emphasise that the complexity of both individual subjectivities and situational circumstance means that the directionality of moral decisions cannot be reduced to analytic categories, such as class or ethnicity. Indeed, her research is awash with individual narratives that bucked trends, subverted expectations, and challenged their own beliefs. However, such categories do provide ‘sign posts on the way to understanding socially significant differences’ in which subjectivities are constituted and entangled, and which have bearing on how moral decisions are encountered in practice (Rapp 2000: 10). A key aspect of Rapp’s

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argument is that the subjective positions from which moral quandaries are approached are always in some way situated within a complex nexus of relational entanglements, which variably range across intersecting discourses of social differentiation, such as class, ethnicity, cultural heritage, educational background, religious beliefs, family ties, and gender norms. It is necessary to stress that thoroughly situating moral subjectivities within the relational context in which they are constituted does not in any way discount the individual’s capacity for individuated and dialogic consideration of their own moral action. Indeed, contrary to rigorously dispositional models, a key aspect of my argument is that a full sociological account of engagement in moral practice requires individuated reflexive consideration of moral decisions to be taken as having efficacious potential. Reflexive deliberation with one’s own individuated subjectivity has a substantial role to play in how significant moral decisions are approached. This is something that is readily exemplified in the research conducted by Gilligan (1982) and Rapp (2000). The decisions that their participants took and the standpoints they assumed reflected both the immediate context of their moral choices, the intersubjective influence of others, and the broader relational contexts within which their subjectivities were constituted. Nonetheless, these actors arrived at their own standpoint and decision upon the moral problem at hand; decisions over which they assumed ownership and responsibility, and which occasionally challenged the expectations of their social position (Rapp 2000). However, the argument continues that this subjectivity and our dialogue with it, while individuated and potentially efficacious to the course of individual action, must necessarily be seen as a product of the social relations in which it is formed and situated (Crossley 2006). As I will argue in Chapter 6, this notion of individuated subjectivity forming within socially situated bounds is something that Mead’s (1925) theoretical perspective, when appropriately brought forward, is best placed to address.

Summary The position being extended here is summed up well by Seyla Benhabib (1992: 189): Modern moral philosophy, and particularly universalist moralities of justice, have emphasized our dignity and worth as subjects at the cost of forgetting

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and repressing our vulnerability and dependency as bodily selves. Such networks of dependence and the web of human affairs in which we are immersed are not simply like clothes which we outgrow or like shoes which we leave behind. They are ties that bind; ties that shape our moral identities, our needs, and our visions of the good life. The autonomous subject is not the disembodied self; universalist moral theory must acknowledge the deep experiences in the formation of the human being to which care and justice correspond.

A vital difference between moral philosophy and the sociology of morality is that the former has typically pursued the formation of moral rules and principles with the specific aim of contravening the particulars of individual subjective dispositions and beliefs in the course of moral action, whereas the latter is concerned with the constitutive role that the social plays in how moral judgements are formed and engaged with in practice (Gergen 1992). The sociological view is that action and judgement, moral or otherwise, cannot realistically be unravelled from the relational context in which they are constituted, and the attempt to do so inculcates at best a partial picture of how morality is ordinarily approached in practice, and at worst a contention that is dismissive of the capacity of ordinary people to form and engage with moral judgements and action within the contours of their daily lives (Bauman 1994; Finch 1989; Smart and Neale 1999). It is the reliance on the disembedded rational subject, who is able to abstract herself from the particulars of context, as the locus of moral action that results in enlightenment traditions of moral thought sitting so uneasily with the social sciences. Like homo economicus, this view of the moral subject is a theoretical abstraction only. The sociologically sound view, presented here in relational terms, is that by virtue of being social actors, individuals are embedded in complex webs of social relations at levels that are both deeply personal, such as familial relationships, and highly abstract, such as the expectations of gender, the role of religion, and the advancement of technology, within a particular social context. It is within these relational entanglements that the individual’s dispositions, subjectivities, and actions (moral or otherwise) are formed, situated, and enacted in relation to others from the perspective of an evaluative and reflexively-capable intersubjective actor (Calhoun 2003). The rest of this book sets out to provide a coherent sociological theory that is able to facilitate such an explanation. The task begins in the next chapter by outlining the flaws in two dominant modes of theorising morality within sociology, and by establishing a relational framework as the ideal means to overcome the flaws in these approaches.

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Notes 1. This is perhaps the most famously encapsulated by Kant’s (1785: 421, emphasis original) categorical imperative: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. 2. Martha Nussbaum (1999: 163–164), for example, describes the notion that we should turn away ‘from an ethics based on Enlightenment ideals of universality’ and ‘ahistorical detached ethics’ ‘to an ethics based on tradition and particularity’ ‘practices’ and ‘affiliation and care’ as ‘confused’. 3. Telos here basically refers to what the purpose of human life, specifically a good human life, is taken to be. In MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian approach, the human telos exists as the pursuit of the good life, in the pursuit of living life well, the conditions of which are defined by the community of which the individual is part. 4. It should be noted that while Hubert Dreyfus co-authored several of his key works on morality with his brother Stuart E. Dreyfus, it is built out of a body of philosophical thought that coheres around phenomenology and ‘skilful coping’, which belongs more to Hubert Dreyfus’s overall philosophical project (Wrathall 2014: 3). 5. Further on in the book, I will argue that it is in providing an explanation of how such impasses are dealt with dialogically that necessitates a Meadianbased explanation in order to fully account for our capacity to engage with morality in practice at various levels of deliberation. 6. As Gilligan (1982, 1988) points out, Lawrence Kohlberg’s highest stages of moral maturity consists in the capacity to detach oneself from circumstance and to universalise one’s moral judgement. 7. Kant (1785) famously excluded women as being fully capable of moral judgement due to their lack of rationality (Hekman 1995), and the Kantian basis of Kholberg’s studies cast women as typically being less able to achieve the higher stages of his model of moral maturity—something that Gilligan (1982) points out is because his model privileges a masculine perspective of what morality entails.

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Hedgecoe, A. M. (2004). Critical Bioethics: Beyond the Social Science Critique of Applied Ethics. Bioethics, 18(2), 120–143. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14678519.2004.00385.x. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. London: Harper & Row. Hekman, S. (1995). Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hermann, J. (2015). On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice—A Wittgensteinian Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heyes, C. J. (2008). Anti-Essentialism in Practice: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Philosophy. Hypatia, 12(3), 142–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001. 1997.tb00009.x. Hoffmaster, B. (1992). Can Ethnography Save the Life of Medical Ethics? Social Science and Medicine, 35(12), 1421–1431. https://doi.org/10.1016/02779536(92)90045-R. Hoffmaster, C. B., Stewart, M. A., & Christie, R. J. (1991). Ethical Decision Making by Family Doctors in Canada, Britain and the United States. Social Science and Medicine, 33(6), 647–653. https://doi.org/10.1016/02779536(91)90018-8. Holdsworth, C., & Morgan, D. (2007). Revisiting the Generalized Other: An Exploration. Sociology, 41(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038507076614. Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action (1st ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1998). The Claims of ‘After Virtue’. In K. Knight (Ed.), The MacIntyre Reader (pp. 69–72). Cambridge: Polity Press. May, V. (2008). On Being a ‘Good’ Mother: The Moral Presentation of Self in Written Life Stories. Sociology, 42(3), 470–486. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038508088836. Mead, G. H. (1925). The Genesis of the Self and Social Control. International Journal of Ethics, 35(3), 251–277. https://doi.org/10.1086/207491. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist: 1 (C. Morris, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category? The Journal of Ethics, 3(3), 163–201. Palmquist, S. R. (2017). Egalitarian Sexism: A Kantian Framework for Assessing the Cultural Evolution of Marriage (I). Ethics & Bioethics, 7 (1–2), 35–55. https:// doi.org/10.1515/ebce-2017-0009.

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Rapp, R. (2000). Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Ribbens McCarthy, J., Edwards, R., & Gillies, V. (2003). Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting. Retrieved from http://www. socialpsychologyarena.com/books/Making-Families-isbn9781903457054. Sandberg, J., & Juth, N. (2011). Ethics and Intuitions: A Reply to Singer. The Journal of Ethics, 15(3), 209–226. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schutz, A. (1970). Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings (H. R. Wagner, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Senchuk, D. M. (1990). Listening to a Different Voice: A Feminist Critique of Gilligan. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 10(3), 233–249. https://doi. org/10.1007/BF00367746. Sie, M. (2014). Self-Knowledge and the Minimal Conditions of Responsibility: A Traffic-Participation View on Human (Moral) Agency. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 48(2), 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9424-2. Singer, P. (1986). Applied Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, P. (1993). Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Uleman, J. K. (2010). An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell. Wrathall, M. R. (2014). Introduction: Hubert Dreyfus and the Phenomenology of Human Intelligence. In M. R. Wrathall (Ed.), Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (pp. 1–24). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

From Holism and Individualism to a Relational Perspective on the Sociology of Morality

The contention of Chapter 2 was that relational sociology provides a persuasive and sweeping sociological means for understanding and analysing social phenomena. It was contended that relational sociology considers social phenomena in terms of ‘fluid social process, rather than solid, determining social substances’ (Dépelteau 2018: 8). Such phenomena do not exist on a ‘separate order of reality’, but rather ‘are constituted by flows of action and interaction, which operate imminently’ in the lives of interdependent individuals, whose action and subjectivity are themselves variably constituted and enacted within these complex webs of interaction (Powell and Dépelteau 2013: 2). Beginning with a critique of some of the dominant modes of viewing morality in the traditions of Western thought, the last chapter tracked the course and value of recent reassessments of moral philosophy, which have challenged the capacity for rationalist and universalist-based moral theorising to accurately account for how morality is done in practice, and thus have sought to overhaul the orthodoxy of how morality is understood. There is a distinctly sociological feel both to the renewed concern for building moral theory out of how morality is engaged with in social life, and to the reorientations of morality in terms of practice (MacIntyre 1985), everyday

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embodied comportment (Dreyfus 2014), and situated subjectivities (Gilligan 1982). As such, these approaches have both mirrored and informed the recent reinvigoration of sociological concern with morality. The contention of the rest of this book is that this relational perspective can be applied in order to provide a sociologically rigorous account of how morality is engaged with in practice. In this chapter I firstly outline the arguments for the value and necessity of a sociological view of morality, before moving into the argument that the relational-interactionist approach set out in Chapter 2 can and should be used to guide thinking in this area. The chapter consequently begins by explicating the renewed interest in the sociology of morality, and argues that the general positions of contemporary theory and research in this area lends itself to a relational approach. There is a particular value to the relational approach in this sphere because debates within the sociology of morality, particularly concerning how morality should be conceptualised and understood, have often reflected some of the tendencies of social theory more generally, which were problematised by the relational critique set out in Chapter 2. Indeed, two of the guiding lights of the sociology of morality—Emile Durkheim and Zygmunt Bauman—fit, to a large degree, within the dividing lines of holism and individualism in their approaches to morality.1 Applying the relational critique of these positions directly, it will be shown how holist and individualist approaches are markedly problematic for understanding how morality is lived out in interaction. Into the next chapter, the arguments for orienting morality predominantly into everyday practices will be extended before setting out how such practice is engaged with.

The Sociology of Morality: From the Old to the New After an extended hiatus, recent decades have witnessed a renewed sociological interest in morality. Recognising morality as a purely social phenomenon, and subsequently providing a sociological explanation of the moral order of society, lay at the heart of the early incarnations of sociology under Emile Durkheim (1984) and Jane Addams (1902) in particular. However, the movements of sociology in the latter part of the twentieth century led to the sociological consideration of the constitution of morality becoming marginalised (Shilling and Mellor 1998). While loosely Durkheimian functionalism, with its associated emphasis on shared norms and values as the foundation of social order, ‘reigned supreme’ through

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the 1940s to 1960s, the expansion of more critical and complex perspectives of social thought (particularly through neo-Marxist and Foucauldian arguments for the centring of discourse and power relations) meant that ‘explanations of social phenomena were increasingly couched in terms of power’, and from this perspective morality came to be conceptualised as ‘at best an ideological reflection of power relations’ (Stivers 1996: 4, 11). This, coupled with the cultural and practice ‘turns’ developing in 1970s social theory, fatally undermined the dominance of functionalism, as well as the communitarian and substantive picture of morality it produced (Giddens 1979). Functionalist theories faltered on ‘assumptions about universal internalization and unproblematic consensus’, which were implicit in the designation of the moral in terms of the binding force of the dominant collective norms of a holistically construed society (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013: 53). Several key lines of critique highlighted the problems of such an approach, which ranged from the invalidation of ‘outsider’ norms, ignorance towards the intense moral variation and conflict within a particular social context, an inability to effectively explain moral change, and, from a normative perspective, the risk of equating the moral with the affirmation of deeply problematic institutionalised norms (Bauman 1989; Junge 2001; Hookway 2015; Rawls 2013; Sayer 2005; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; Morgan 2014). This inevitably led to questions of ‘morality’ being treated with a general sense of suspicion, as sociologists came to view social life as much more diffuse, conflicted, and heterogeneous than the functionalist traditions could plausibly account for (Giddens 1979). Suspicion towards sociological consideration of morality was also not helped by the study of morality being so swathed in the traditions of philosophy (Smart and Neale 1999). As has been discussed, Western moral philosophy has typically been concerned with the nature of morality, the status of moral judgements, and the provision of rational foundations to universalisable principles (Hekman 1995; Singer 1986; Barnes 2000). As well as seeing moral foundationalism as being well beyond the remit of sociology (Bellah 1973), sociologists are rightly averse to the modernist philosophic pursuit of moral abstractions via conceptions of universalism, decontextualisation, and the pristine reason of the disembedded, rationally construing subject (Murdoch 1983; Gilligan 1982; Hekman 1995). The terms in which morality had been typically understood (from detached rationality, universal justice, and imperatives for right action on the philosophic side, to the holistic and substantive view of morality as definitively binding a society together on the early sociological side)

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resulted in the sociological study of morality being considered largely untenable. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, sociology consequently skirted around questions of moral values and the pursuit of moral action, or reframed these in terms of cultural practices or political activism (Smart and Neale 1999). This led Steven Lukes to argue that ‘the sociology of morality’ had become ‘the great void in contemporary social science’ (Lukes 1973: 432), an absence that represented ‘one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology’ (Stivers 1996: 1). For the most part, as Craig Calhoun (1991: 232) put it, ‘sociologists have not carried forward Durkheim’s task of creating a sociology of morality’, and, as these authors identified, ‘this situation left sociology in danger of relinquishing the possibility of offering any authoritative insights into the nature of human experience’ (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 193), because it foreclosed sociological discussion of the ordinarily moral and evaluative terms through which people make sense of their lives (Sayer 2005; Smart and Neale 1999). Sociological interest in morality did begin to reassert itself somewhat into the 1990s, particularly through the proliferation of grand theoretical analyses into (post)modernity and its apparently ambivalent character, notably through the quasi-prophetic diagnostic accounts of contemporary social existence provided by Bauman (1993, 1997), Giddens (1991), and Beck (see for example, Beck and Willms 2003). However, as well as being fairly ungrounded to say the least (Skinner et al. 2016) an ‘air of pessimism pervades many of these writings which is summed up by Stivers’s (1996: 12) suggestion that this renewed academic interest is coterminous with the social disappearance of morality’ (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 207). The polemic lamenting of a new era of anomic moral decline and pervasive uncertainty (Bauman 1997), as well as the insistence of the necessity and facility for the perpetual re-negotiation of the moral parameters of our social world (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001; Giddens 1991),2 did little to enhance a research agenda around the recapitulation of morality as a social phenomenon, and contributed only opaquely to questions of how people draw upon and encounter moral perspectives in their daily lives. It was thus only really at the turn of the twenty-first century that the sociology of morality properly re-inserted itself as ‘a legitimate subfield of sociological research’ (Abend 2013: 562), in the sense that ‘the nature, causes, and consequences of people’s ideas about the good and the right’ have been reasserted as an object for sociological inquiry once more (Abend 2008: 87). Indeed, as Abend (2008: 87) identifies,

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investigations of this sort stand at the core of several subfields, such as gender, culture, theory, and religion. In fact, most if not all sociologists – be their interest the family, organizations, social movements, inequality, etc. – have asked why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do, and what are the effects of these views on behavior, interaction, structure, change, and institutions.

However, there is now a renewed willingness to discuss and assess these pervasive features of social life in moral terms, and this allows the sociological interpretation of such beliefs, dispositions, and actions to extend beyond the restrictive and euphemistic frames through which they had formally been understood (Smart and Neale 1999). This represents a trend towards what has been termed the ‘new’ sociology of morality (Abend 2013: 562; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013: 54). ‘The new sociology of morality looks beyond just norms and values, casting a broader net that includes narratives, identities, institutions, symbolic boundaries, and cognitive schemas’; it explores ‘social and historical variations in what gets classified as moral’, while seeking ‘to understand how morality affects strategies of action over time’, and simultaneously investigating ‘the social processes that create and sustain particular conceptions of morality’ (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013: 54). What is more, it takes the endemic variation in morality both within and between different times and places in relation to shifting social circumstance as a starting point, and seeks to understand the reasons for moral variation, the reasons why moral change occurs, and the consequences that this has (Abend 2013). Consequently, recent studies into how moral action is conducted have sought to expound how the variability of moral understandings between individuals and groups affects and reorients moral meanings, and how this is brought to bear in how action is conducted and understood (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). Such analysis is conducted at the level of what people actually do in the entangled messiness of their everyday lives, rather than at the level of what should be done or what the correct procedure for dealing with abstracted moral problems should be (Abend 2013). As such, the sociological approach tends to assume a broad, non-substantive understanding of morality, which refers to understandings of good and bad, right and wrong, worthy and unworthy that vary between persons and between social groups. Here, morality is usually about more than helping or harming others; it encompasses any

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way that individuals or social groups understand which behaviors are better than others, which goals are the most worthy, and what people should believe, feel, and do. (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013: 55)

The sociology of morality’s view on the moral is generally circumspective and perspectival, and it is so because it seeks to investigate and account for how moralities are understood by social actors, rather than to posit concrete postulations of what morality is as such (Abend 2013). Indeed, the production of moral formulations and propositions is generally considered to be outside of the remit of what a sociological approach to morality can be; the primary task of the sociological perspective is to look, understand, and explain, rather than to prescribe, and ‘this sort of position represents the current orthodoxy in the sociology of morality’ (Abend 2013: 566; Morgan 2014). In that the sociological perspective considers morality to be a social phenomenon in need of a sociological explanation, it is no different to the basis of the ‘science of morality’ developed by Durkheim (Bellah 1973: xxviii). However, what does tend to be different in the new sociology of morality are the ontological assumptions that are made about how morality should be approached and the ‘epistemic strategies’ through which it is explained (Powell 2013: 35). The Durkheimian approach, which will be expounded more fully below, explains morality as it explains all social phenomena: it is a social fact that has an existence ‘independent of their individual manifestations’ (Durkheim 1982: 59), and it is the obligatory nature of ‘moral facts’ which provides the authoritative force that binds society together (Powell 2013; Giddens 1972). However, as it was (to some degree at least) the decisiveness of the critiques levelled against this functionalist-holism perspective that led to the decline in sociological interest in morality, it is no surprise that the new sociology of morality frames its approach to moral phenomena in a very different way. The emphasis put on understanding moral phenomena in terms of plurality, subjective variability, diffuse and intersubjectively entangled practices, and the continual processual emergence at the level of interaction is resolutely un-Durkheimian. As Hitlin and Vaisey (2013: 53–54) put it, ‘[i]f the old sociology of morality was Durkheimian – seeing morality as a property of entire societies and binding its members together – then the new sociology of morality is more Weberian. Morality belongs more to cross-cutting groups and less to society as a whole’. The argument I want to make, however, is that the new sociology of morality, while arguably

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Weberian in spirit insofar as it does not conceptualise moral phenomena as realities that exist external to the interaction of individuals, should stand against the more resolutely Weberian position that moralities only properly exist within the subjectivities of individuals, and thus ultimately should be considered as the property of individuals themselves (Powell 2013). The relational approach detailed in Chapter 2 seeks to skate between the problems caused by the approaches of holism on the one hand and individualism on the other, which it does by relocating relations as the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding social phenomena (Crossley 2011). The argument that follows is that such approaches are also problematic for understanding moral phenomena, and examples of these problematic approaches can be seen respectively in the moral theories of Durkheim and Zygmunt Bauman. Through critique of Durkheimian holism and Baumanian individualism as a means for providing a sociologically sound picture of morality, the rest of this chapter argues that the relational approach can offer direction to the new sociology of morality, by providing a suitably consistent and dynamic theoretical framework within which it can work. Indeed, an argument to be made across the next few chapters is that the claims and empirical findings from contemporary moral sociologies point towards an interactionist-relational approach as the best means for explaining moral phenomena.

Two Grand Positions on the Sociology of Morality: Durkheim and Bauman Durkheimian Holism The sociological consideration of morality takes its initial impetus primarily from Durkheim (Bellah 1973). For Durkheim, because ‘morality was perceived to be the bonding agent of society and because sociology was to be the science of society, the sociological study of morality would at once be the cornerstone of sociology and the most important approach within descriptive ethics’ (Stivers 1996: 2). What Durkheim sought to do was, at least at the time, comparatively radical in that it located morality squarely upon the social. ‘Kant was the first secular philosopher in the West to reject the possibility that criteria for the good are grounded in the natural properties of humans’, and while Durkheim agreed with the sentiment that morality could only be achieved if individuals surpassed their ‘natural’ impulses, he challenged Kant’s argument that this overcoming was achieved through

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the rational self-legislation and enactment of universally valid moral rules on the part of the individual (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 195). Instead, Durkheim argued that moral rules are social phenomena in that they arise and are given both form and force as a result of the collective functioning of social life, meaning that the establishment of a rational position on moral law is itself an outcome and function of the societal structures in which it is achieved (Shilling and Mellor 1998). Furthermore, Durkheim (1972: 90) argued that ‘it has certainly never been demonstrated that the whole of morality can be reduced to a single rule, and comprised within a single concept. When one thinks of the prodigious complexity of moral facts… one cannot help but find too simple and narrow any formula which claims to govern ethics as a whole’. This is something that Durkheim sees both the Kantian and utilitarianist manifestations of enlightenment thought as being guilty of, as these approaches reduce the moral world to a collection of individual wills and interests, and consequently overlook that the force and nature of morality comes from humanity’s existence within society (Durkheim 1984). Such approaches bypass the embodiment of morality in the social, which, Durkheim argues, is precisely what affords morality its ‘obligatory’ force in conduct (Giddens 1972). Durkheim’s science de la morale both builds a sociological picture of what morality is and how it should be studied, which is based on, and conjoined through, his broader ontological and epistemological arguments regarding what social phenomena are and how they should be considered (Abend 2008). Durkheim argued that morality exists as binding ‘rules which actually govern conduct’ within a society (Durkheim 1895, cited in Brodbeck 1968: 252), and the sociology of morality should analyse these concrete forms that ‘moral reality’ takes at a societal level ‘as it appears to observation, whether in the present or in the past, just as physics or physiology deal with the facts they study’ (Durkheim 1979a: 92). For Durkheim, this expressly means morality exists as a ‘social fact’ and it should be analysed as such. The consideration of moral phenomena as ‘social fact’ reflects the sociological method that Durkheim sets out, which ‘rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual’ (Durkheim 1979b: 37–38). Durkheim’s explicitly externalist and substantialist position that social facts exist ‘independent of their individual manifestations’ and thus ‘must be studied from the outside, as external things’, leads him to conclude that ‘the determining cause of a

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social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of individual consciousness’ (Durkheim 1982: 59, 70, 134). These are the terms through which Durkheim conceptualises morality. ‘Moral facts’, Durkheim argues, ‘are phenomena like any others. They consist of rules for action’ that constitute ‘the totality of ties which bind each of us to society’ and thus allow for the formation of ‘a unitary, coherent aggregate of the mass of individuals’ (Durkheim 1984: xxv, 398). Societies themselves are formed out of the binding force of moral rules, and the consciousness of the individual is formed as a product of the social and moral facts that comprise the society of which they are part (Durkheim 1984). The sociological perspective on morality Durkheim engendered thus argues that moral rules command our action and have authority over us not necessarily because of positive or negative consequences, but rather because we are compelled to follow them as a result of our existence within a collective in which these rules take an institutionalised form (Hookway 2015). Indeed, Durkheim argues that the rules of morality within a society should be considered obligatory: While one might perhaps dispute the statement that all social facts, without exception, impose themselves from outside upon the individual, it is hardly possible to doubt that this is the case with… the rules of morality… All these are expressly obligatory, and this obligation is the proof that these modes of action and thought are not the creation of the individual but come from a moral power above him. (Durkheim 1953: 33, emphasis added)

Durkheim saw these obligatory rules of conduct as being a fundamental necessity to the functioning of society. ‘The purpose of the morality practised by a people is to enable it to live’, by engendering the degree of social solidarity necessary to the operative survival of the society (Durkheim 1979c: 131). The function of morality lies no less than in ensuring the functionality of social life as a whole by compelling obligations that moderate against the pre-social urges of human nature (Hookway 2017). Durkheim’s arguments for the functional necessity of socially instituted morality arises from his homo duplex view of humanity, which conceptualises human life as a constant struggle between ‘sensations and the sensory appetites, on the one hand, and the intellectual and moral life, on the other’ (Durkheim 1973: 162). Indeed, Durkheim (1984: 331) refers to ‘that which is moral [as] everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to

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take account of other people, to regulate his actions by something other than the promptings of his own egoism’. However, the individual is only able to act morally, contrary to natural egotistical urges, because social existence constitutes them as ‘the servant of a being superior to himself and to all other individuals’ (Durkheim 1925: 61). Thus, ‘in order to fulfil one’s obligations and to act morally… it is necessary that the person be so constituted as to feel above him a force unqualified by his personal preferences and to which he yields’ (Durkheim 1925: 34); ‘society alone can play this moderating role, for it is the only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of which he accepts’ (Durkheim 1979b). Put otherwise, it is the social that contains and imposes intellectual and moral conscience upon the base impulsions of the pre-social individual, which it does through a ‘voice which speaks to us in such an imperative tone, which enjoins us to change our own nature [that] can only derive from a being which is distinct from ourselves, and which also dominates us’, which for Durkheim, is society (Durkheim 1900, cited in Giddens 1972: 133). Durkheim affirms and reifies the externality of society as the source of morality further still by arguing that ‘since moral requirements… determine conduct imperatively from sources outside ourselves’, ‘one must have some appreciation of the authority sui generis that informs morality’, and subsequently reject ‘the classical and widely held view, that society is only a collection of individuals’ (Durkheim 1925: 34, 60). For Durkheim, viewing society in terms of a collection of individuals, rather than as a binding force with the externalised authority to transform the will and intentions of individuals against their nature, would ultimately result in ‘the collective interest’ being ‘only the sum of self-interests’, which firstly ‘is itself amoral’, but more importantly is inadequate to engender the binding solidarity that is necessary for society to function (Durkheim 1925: 34, 60). Durkheim continues: If society is to be considered as the normal goal of moral conduct, then it must… constitute a being sui generis, which has its own special character distinct from that of its members and its own individuality different from that of its constituent individuals. In a word, there must exist, in the full meaning of the word, a social being. On this condition only is society able to perform the moral function that the individual cannot. (Durkheim 1925: 60)

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Society exists as an objective and substantive ‘organically unified system’, comprised of integrated social structures, which produces the concrete moral realities of a society, and thus determines the form that moral rules by which people live their lives take (Powell 2013: 36). These moral facts are imposed upon the individual through the integration of individual consciousness into rules of conduct that bind people to their society, thus ensuring the continued functioning of the social whole (Powell 2013). Because morality exists and functions as the holistic and binding rules of behaviour in a society, imposed upon the individual by virtue of their social existence, it can and should be considered as a social fact, which has empirical effects on individual lives as institutionalised norms and values compel action to be conducted in a certain way (Junge 2001; Hookway 2015). Durkheim set the ground for morality to be studied as a social phenomenon that cannot be understood in abstraction from the societal context from which it takes its force (Junge 2001). However doing this from a holist position in which morality exists as institutionalised rules of conduct, set over and above the consciousness and interaction of individuals that our social existence obliges us to follow, clearly has a number of problematic implications. Firstly, Durkheim’s reliance on a firmly objectivist picture of society, coupled with the functionalist conceptualisation of morality in terms of transcending social facts that play an imperative role in the social cohesion of that society, depicts a level of moral ‘conventionalism [that] simply cannot begin to understand the extent or profundity of the normative contestation of social life’ (Sayer 2005: 47). While it is true that Durkheim’s ‘descriptive relativism’ is insistent on staunch moral variation between societies according to their structural make up, his depiction of morality as the obligatory and binding rules of conduct of a society looks past the diverse, contested, and shifting nature of moral beliefs and values within a social context (Abend 2008: 92). This in itself reflects the profoundly differential positions through which individuals and groups stratify the social world, histories of social division in how certain groups have been allowed to treat others and how certain groups have been treated, and the intensity of interactional variation in which individual dispositions and beliefs are formed (Sayer 2005). This moral variation does not exist as inconsequential banalities, but often takes the form of deep-seated contestations of what a society is and what it should be. As Durkheim’s own writings on the anomic nature of modern life attest, this is particularly true in modern society, the pervasive features of which render the collision of variable cultural standpoints ever more likely, and

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thus results in an opening up of ‘more and more circumstances in which one’s own ethical framework might be brought into question’ (Morgan 2014: 132). However, it is perhaps unsurprising from his definition of morality as the binding force of the collective whole that Durkheim could only conceptualise this as a problematic unwinding of authoritative moral solidarity and certainty (Hookway 2015). Indeed, Durkheim argued forcefully that individualism was rapidly disintegrating the ‘boundary between the permissible and the prohibited, between what is just and what is unjust’ (Durkheim 1984: xxxii). A major aspect of the problem here is that Durkheim’s ‘unequivocally top-down’ and one-way functional determinist view of morality negates the possibility of differentiated individual consciousness being morally significant, or as being a potentially causally efficacious force of variable moral action and moral transformation in itself (Hookway 2015: 278). On the more basic level, individual moral consciousness, for Durkheim, exists as the social assimilation of the individual into the obligatory rules of conduct in their society. The shape of a society determines its moral realities, and these moral realities determine the consciousness and action of individuals. Because moral facts of a society exist ‘independent of their individual manifestations’ (Durkheim 1982: 70), moral variation and challenges to the current order must necessarily be seen as a result of structural changes in society in a way that obfuscates the role of individual moral consciousness and action in this process. Thus, for Durkheim, moral ‘dissent requires showing that the organic constitution of society is changing so as to make existing functional structures obsolete’ (Powell 2013: 48). A crucial aspect of the argument of this book is that, from a relational perspective, individual moral consciousness and action is thoroughly relationally constituted and entangled, and so it would indeed be a mistake to overlook the formative role of the social. However, the key advantage of the relational approach is that the transformative power of social relations is formative of the conscious capacities of the individual to develop and enact moral judgements, which, relatively regularly, can challenge and deviate from social imposition (Crossley 2006). Moral autonomy should not be seen as socially detached, but neither should it be dispensed with entirely in favour of societal domination. Rather it needs to be seen that social existence provides the ground on which moral autonomy develops. Durkheim’s determinism on this front represents what Habermas (1995) identified as a fundamental limitation of his work. Indeed, as Habermas (1995: 149) notes, ‘Durkheim was the first to observe the connection

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between societal differentiation, or what he calls the “division of labor”, and progressive individuation’. However, the one-wayness of Durkheim’s framework means that even this individuation ‘is described deterministically… as a new normative expectation – as an institution’. Much better placed to understand ‘the entire significance of social individualization’, Habermas (1995: 151) argues, is ‘initiated in the social psychology of George Herbert Mead’. This is because ‘Mead makes the connection between differentiation within the structure of roles, on the one hand, and the formation of conscience and gain in autonomy by individuals who are socialized in increasingly differentiated conditions, on the other hand’. For Mead, it is in the process of differentiated socialisation that the ‘growing subject… arises as an internal centre for self-steering and individually accountable conduct’ (Habermas 1995: 152). As we shall see in Chapter 6, this allows a Meadian-based relational approach to skate between moral consciousness as being socially constituted and embedded on the one hand, while being an efficacious source of individuated decisions and action on the other. In addition to this, from the point of view of sociological description, Durkheim provides an unwieldy conception of how morality is engaged with because the morality of an act is conceptualised as being external to the interactions of individuals in which it is constituted. For example, Durkheim argues that ‘when I fulfil my obligations as a brother, husband or citizen… I perform duties which are defined externally to myself and my acts’ (Durkheim 1895, cited in Brodbeck 1968: 245). While it is true that moral norms and expectations of something like brotherhood or marriage are, by their nature, socially constructed, Durkheim’s externalist view unduly reifies such phenomena as having an existence and form that is detached from the interactions through which they are in fact constituted. The obligations associated with brotherhood and marriage do not just hang there as a substantive form, either to be lived up to or not. Not only does the meaning of such obligations vary considerably between social groups and actors, but also how they are understood and enacted emerges intersubjectively across time at an interpersonal level (Finch 1989; Smart and Neale 1999). Indeed, Benhabib (1992) exemplifies this point through a situation in which a brother finds himself in financial trouble, and in which there is an obligation on older brothers to help. Benhabib argues that it may transpire that not fulfilling this obligation might prove to be the morally ‘correct’ decision. ‘Her point is that we can know that it is right only by understanding the relationships between the brothers and their past history. Giving financial help might appear to be benevolent, but in some

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circumstances it might just continue an oppressive relationship of dependence. On the other hand it might simply be the result of callousness and self-interest’ (Smart and Neale 1999: 116–117). By conceptualising morality in terms of the obligating force of the social whole that manifests itself as rules of conduct, Durkheim is unable to account for the variability of how morality is applied and moulded in social practice. Obligations, intentions, and the ‘right’ course of action emerge over time between actors (Finch 1989), and the enactment of norms, values and expectations variably occurs in relation to both the formation of subjectivities (Gilligan 1982; Hekman 1995) and the social and practical realities of the situations in which they may be enacted (Smart and Neale 1999). It is not at all clear how this variance and transformation would be possible if such obligations are conceptualised as external to actors and their interactions. The relational approach, as set out in Chapter 2, thus argues that it is in the course of intersubjective interaction that moral meanings and obligations are sustained (and transformed), and this is only possible insofar as they are brought into the experience of relationally moulded individuals and enacted in interdependent interaction. Bauman’s Moral Individualism Zygmunt Bauman (1989, 2005) also critiques Durkheim for excluding the individual as a source of morality, and for equating morality with the dominance of authoritative social structures (Hookway 2015). Specifically, a major trouble for Bauman is that Durkheim essentially ‘merged social and moral integration’, taking them to ‘mean the same fact’ (Junge 2001: 107). Not only does this mean that the ‘moral’ in Durkheim loses its distinctiveness as the assumption of personal responsibility for the other, often against prevailing social pressures, but it also means that society assumes the position of engendering and securing the individual capacity to act morally (Bauman 2005; Junge 2001). From a normative perspective, Durkheim’s equation of the moral with the social, and the consequent designation of society as the arbiter of what is morally right, overlooks how society often functions as ‘morally silencing’ and oppressive of individual moral consciousness (Bauman 1989: 174; Hookway 2015). In some respects, Bauman ‘approves of Durkheim’s critique of the moral fragility of modern society’ (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 198), and he mirrors Durkheim in arguing that modernity has entailed ‘the ruthless assault of the profane

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against the sacred’ (Bauman 1993: 135). However, contra Durkheim, Bauman argues that this moral fragility is caused not by the disintegration of societal norms in the face of rising individualism, but rather by the totalising domination of modern society over individual moral impulse. Far from being anomic in the Durkheimian sense, modern society is problematic for Bauman (1993: 135) precisely because it has set ‘reason against passion, norms against spontaneity, structure against counter-structure, socialisation against sociality’. Indeed, Bauman (1989, 2005) challenged the notion that obligated conformity to supra-individual structures can be held up as the hallmark of a morally healthy society. In this Durkheimian picture, morality becomes ‘synonymous with social conformity and obedience to the norms observed by the majority’ (Bauman 1989: 172). In his celebrated Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman (1989) puts Durkheim to task on precisely this point, arguing that Nazi Germany provides a ‘monstrous anomaly in the Durkheimian model of socially injected morality, showing how following the moral code of a society can be synonymous with carrying out the most morally depraved of human actions’ (Hookway 2015: 280). The holocaust exemplifies how obligated deference to the collective can expropriate the moral responsibility of the individual via authoritative commands, while suppressing alternative moral perspectives and fostering intolerance of moral variation (Bauman 1989; Hookway 2015). Within this argument are the beginnings of Bauman’s ‘inversion’ of Durkheim’s view of morality, which is based on a complete departure from Durkheim’s arguments regarding the source of moral action: While Durkheim (1995 [1912]: 209) locates the source of morality in society’s collective engagement with the sensory and cognitive capacities of people, Bauman (1993: 13, 35) rejects modern society as a source of moral action and posits the individual’s sensual, emotional body as a bulwark against the immoral, rationalizing impulses of totalizing social orders. (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 195)

Bauman’s (1993) critique of Durkheim arises out of a more general critique of how morality had been conceptualised throughout modernity, which, he argued, had disastrous consequences for social life in the twentieth century. Bauman (1993) argues that the problems with the modernist position on ethics is represented most completely in Kant’s categorical imperative. This represents something of an ‘ideal type of a modern ethics’ in that it

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engendered a rule-guided, universalistic, and unambiguous prescription of what moral action entails, which consequently instates a formulable system of order to moral decisions that could be pursued by any rational person, providing it is appropriately adhered to (Junge 2001: 108; Bauman 1993). From its Kantian heritage, ethics became a task of formulating ‘a code of law that prescribes the correct behaviour ‘universally’ – that is, for all people at all times; one that sets apart good from evil once for all and everybody’ (Bauman 1994: 2). For Bauman (1993), this is indicative of how morality was approached in the modern era: the achievement of morality meant wresting it from human frailties and dispensing with any sort of ambiguity in favour of an authoritative moral certainty that surpassed particulars and overcame ambivalence. With Durkheim, authority lay in the moral rules of one’s society. In the enlightenment project, authority came from the application of rational reason in the formation of ‘mutually coherent precepts that ought to be obeyed by any moral person’ in the course of ‘laying firm and unshakeable foundations of morality binding all human beings together’ (Bauman 1993: 21, 25). Indeed, on this front, despite their notable differences, Bauman is critical of both Kant and Durkheim on similar grounds. Bauman argues vehemently that each of these approaches subjugate precisely what gives morality its force and essence. Whereas Kant and Durkheim inhabit, albeit in different ways, a modernist view of morality that reduces it to the following of rules and norms, Bauman argues that morality exists as the autonomous assumption of individual responsibility, undertaken irrespective of, and often in opposition to, prevailing social prescriptions of conduct (Crone 2008). In fact, Bauman (1993: 4) turns these modernist approaches on their head entirely by arguing that the availability of supra-individual moral rules provides the conditions for the de facto abdication of conscientious moral responsibility to potentially ‘coercive normative regulation’. For Bauman, it is precisely in the conditions of surety, ‘where right action appears unambiguous to us’, that morality itself is absent, ‘for either we are not encountering a true moral dilemma or else we have deferred the responsibility of choice for that dilemma onto ethical systems outside our moral selves’ (Morgan 2014: 133). It is in this ‘opacity in moral choice’ that individual moral impulse is stimulated and laid bare to face its responsibility to the Other (Morgan 2014: 133). An essential aspect of Bauman’s (1993) argument is that certainty in moral terms is neither possible nor desirable within a complex social world

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of intersecting and conflicting ideals, and in which the fulfilment of responsibility invokes a plethora of often contradictory demands of action. His critique of modernist thought on this front is exemplary, as is his willingness to take ambiguity seriously as a condition of, rather than a hindrance to, moral decision-making. Importantly also, Bauman directs a number of challenges against the Kantian tradition of orienting morality purely in terms of detached rationalism, arguing that ‘morality is and is bound to remain irrational’ as ‘moral responsibility is a mystery contrary to reason’ (Bauman 1993: 13). For Bauman, morality exists as an infinite responsibility, which the individual must bear in the face of the other (Bauman 1997; Crone 2008). Morality for Bauman ‘is then neither a question of social compulsion, nor of the rational formulation of universal laws, but a question of feelings, i.e. a pre-social, irrational instinct that is activated in the meeting with the Other’ (Crone 2008: 65). It is driven by a spontaneous and unorderable impulsive responsiveness to the alterity of the other, which provokes within the person a wellspring of responsibility, an indubitable ‘being for the other’, which is in fact suppressed, rather than augmented, by rational calculation and social conformity (Bauman 1993: 13; Junge 2001; Hookway 2017). Indeed, this is a key aspect of Bauman’s (1989, 2005) critique of Durkheim, in which he challenges the Hobbesian nature of Durkheim’s homo duplex argument that without the social imposition of morality, humankind would be egotistical and morally baron. As we have seen, Durkheim’s homo duplex view is that the self is in need of moral tutorage and obligation in order to stave off base impulsion and self-interest. This leads to his position that locating morality within the autonomy of individuals would lead to egotistical social fragmentation (Hookway 2015). Quite the opposite of this, Bauman (2008) argues moral impulse and moral concern for the other is prior to social norms and rules: the self is moral before it is anything else, prior to the imposition of the social, and it is in fact rule and norm laden sociality that hinders moral impulse. Bauman (1993) thus seeks to reinsert affected moral impulse as being the source from which moral action springs, an argument that he bases upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, which claims that the individual’s existence is called forth into being as a result of our moral obligation to the other (Hookway 2017). Building on and redrawing the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas argued that ‘man’s ethical relation to the Other is ultimately prior to his ontological relation to himself’ (Levinas and Kearney 1986). This is because, for Levinas, it is the awareness of the

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fundamental otherness of the other, the realisation of the alterity of the ‘other’ outside of and beyond our own consciousness, that firstly provokes and awakens our being (Bauman 2008). It is the ‘irreducible otherness of the Other that awakes the self to its own unique responsibilities and thereby assists, even if obliquely, at the birth of subjectivity’ (Bauman 2008: 40). As the source of our being, the ‘the original encounter with the Other’ calls up the realisation of its uncompromising otherness, which springs within us the implicit (and apparently unlimited and ‘infinite’) demand for our responsibility, thus triggering an ‘innate’ moral impulse of affected concern (Bauman 1998: 15). For Bauman, then, morality is based ‘on the very brute fact of our existential condition as being in some sense always “for one another”’ (Hookway 2017: 359). Bauman thus posits a pre-social, ontologically situated individual impulse of being for the other as the source of moral action (Shilling and Mellor 1998). It needs to be stressed that Bauman (1993: 35) explicitly argues that this moral impulse is ‘primal’ and pre-social: ‘well before we are told authoritatively what is “good” and what “evil” (and sometimes what is neither) we face the choice between good and evil; we face it already at the very first, inescapable moment of encounter with the Other’ (Bauman 1995: 2). Upon the basis of pre-social impulse, Bauman builds a very particular view of how morality is made manifest. Because the individual’s subjectivity is constituted through responsibility to the other as the other calls our being into existence, our moral impulse ‘is triggered off by the mere presence of the Other as a face’, which provokes within us the demands of a boundless responsibility to that other (Bauman 1991: 143). What is more, because the other stimulates this innate impulse, which is constituted in ‘the original encounter with the Other’ as an ‘infinite’ responsibility (Bauman 1998: 15), this responsibility to the other is ‘non-reciprocal’, and its fulfilment depends entirely upon its infinite demands being taken up within the isolated consciousness of the individual (Junge 2001: 112). As Bauman puts it, the ‘indispensable, defining traits of a moral stance’ is ‘one-sidedness, not reciprocity; a relation that cannot be reversed’ (Bauman 1993: 48). Bauman of course does not argue that the endowment of a pre-social facility for moral concern necessarily results in the individual enacting their innate impulse in practice, quite the contrary (Crone 2008). The moral impulse needs to be taken up and actualised in terms of non-reciprocal responsibility, often in opposition to social pressure or moral norms, in a way that fulfils the demands that the ‘face’ of the other puts upon us. However it is seldom the case that the demands of the impulse are wholly met, or

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that the response to the impulse is not in some way hindered or diluted by the social conditions in which the individual resides (Bauman 2008; Junge 2001). Indeed, in stark contrast to Durkheim, Bauman argues that the ‘process of socialization consists in the manipulation of moral capacity – not in its production’ (Bauman 1989: 178, emphasis original). The impulse of which Bauman talks is not the result of socialisation; if anything, ‘Bauman views socialization as a deformation of the innate impulse, as domestication and dressage to conformity, destroying the inborn capacity for moral responsibility’ (Junge 2001: 109). It is clear to see that Bauman’s arguments represent a ‘systematic inversion of Durkheim’ (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 195) as his arguments challenge the primary Durkheimian assumption that individual morality is a consequence of society, and reverses this into ‘the idea that moral action is connected with the ultimate and indispensable responsibility of the person’ (Junge 2001: 109). Bauman extends this point further still into what Shilling and Mellor (1998: 202) equate with a ‘methodologically individualistic’ explanation of the source of moral existence: Bauman argues that ‘[i]t is the primal and primary “brute fact” of moral impulse, moral responsibility, moral intimacy that supplies the stuff from which the morality of human cohabitation is made’ (Bauman 1993: 35). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘[i]t is society, its continuing existence and its well-being, that is made possible by the moral competence of its members – not the other way around’ (Bauman 1993: 32). Bauman’s inversion is clear: it is not the society that makes the moral individual, but rather the innate morality of the individual that makes society (Shilling and Mellor 1998). Through this reversal, Bauman (1990: 33–34) sought to develop an ‘inherently consistent sociological theory of morality’ that overcame the Durkheimian problem of equating morality with the suppressive power of an external and totalising moral system. However, as several commentators have contended (Shilling and Mellor 1998; Junge 2001; Crone 2008; Morgan 2014), it is hard to see how a ‘consistent sociological theory of morality’ can be founded upon a basis of pre-social impulse. In some respects at least, Bauman’s work has given impetus to many important features of current sociological thinking on morality, for example through its critique of the necessity of foundational rules of moral action, and through the re-centring of the role of individual consciousness, impulse, and affected emotion in moral action (Hookway 2017). However, there are a number of reasons why he fails to deliver a sociological alternative to the modernist and Durkheimian approaches to morality that he critiques so thoroughly.

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A few fairly general points can be briefly made. For example, it is an understatement to say that notions of innate moral impulse and calls to infinite responsibility by the face of the other are hardly sociological. Indeed, the Levinasian basis of ‘ethics before ontology’ are speculative even in philosophic terms (Shilling and Mellor 1998; Morgan 2014). Likewise, how Bauman then builds this into an argument that action is moral when the innate moral impulse is enacted to a degree that fulfils our unbounded responsibility to the other seems to establish an unattainable level of ‘moral sainthood’ as the basis for moral action (Hookway 2017; Wolf 1982). Indeed, this raises a more specific problem from the relational perspective given in this book, because equating the source of moral action with pre-social impulse ultimately fails to account for the role that complex social relationships play in the constitution of what moral action entails and in how it is enacted (Shilling and Mellor 1998). Of course, Bauman does argue that moral impulse is stimulated intersubjectively, and that responses are both emotion-laden and undertaken in the opacity of social encounters. However, the major problem here is that, by conceptualising morality in terms of the unbounded, non-reciprocal response to the triggering of our innate impulse by the other, acts that properly fulfil Bauman’s conditions of being a moral act are presented as being in some way beyond the social, as being beyond the histories of interactions that constitute what defines a moral action, as well as beyond the specific interpersonal relations that orient a moral action in its course. Bauman’s approach to morality has been equated with methodological individualism on precisely this point (Shilling and Mellor 1998), and his theory can be criticised on the same terms as the critique of methodological individualism given in Chapter 2—namely that action is constituted (1) within broad, historically moulded networks of interaction at a cultural and institutional level, and (2) at the level of intersubjective interaction, through which broader social understandings and expectations are sustained, transformed, and brought into the experience of the individual. On the former, it is one thing to critique Durkheimian and communitarian approaches for equating morality with conformity to social norms; it is quite another thing to argue that social life is only inculcated in the ‘manipulation of moral capacity – not in its production’ (Bauman 1989: 178, emphasis original). By locating the source of moral action proper within the pre-social impulse of the individual, Bauman is necessarily arguing that ‘[t]rue morality is outside society’ (Junge 2001: 109), which means that normative expectations, socially guided values, and learnt wisdom cannot play a constitutive role in

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what moral action entails. As Morgan (2014: 136) points out, the primary sociological objection to Bauman’s statement that ‘well before we are taught and learn the socially constructed and socially performed rules of proper behaviour, and exhorted to follow certain patterns and to abstain from following others, we are already in the situation of moral choice’ (1995: 1), consists in simply asking where this primal choice to do either good or bad (morality) – and indeed the specification of what in fact constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (ethics) – come from. (Morgan 2014: 136)

Indeed, aside from anything else, as Taylor (1989) and MacIntyre (1985) have argued, our capacity to articulate, understand, and actuate our moral responsibility is ‘unavoidably contingent upon our habits, traditions, customs, and the means of justification and resolution accepted in the communities we recognize as our own’ (Morgan 2014: 136). It seems abundantly clear from a sociological perspective that understanding and participating in moral action, rather than being dependent upon a pre-social impulse, presupposes ‘histories of networks of interaction that have generated the morals’ in question (Crossley 2011: 2). By arguing that ‘morality comes into being only if someone takes up pre-social responsibility and the innate moral impulse’ (Junge 2001: 109), Bauman is ultimately unable ‘to explore how the construction of morality is thoroughly sociological, in that it is dependent on collective experiences which shape both the emotions and the thoughts of human agents’ (Shilling and Mellor 1998: 195). Bauman’s individualistic conception of the source of moral action also fails to consider that moral actions, what they are and what form they take, are at least to some degree constituted within the intersubjective situations in which they occur. We can refer back to Benhabib’s (1992) example regarding how we can only appreciate what the right course of action for giving financial aid to one’s brother might be if we consider the history of the relationships between the relevant parties. Bauman is of course not arguing that moral impulse dictates what the correct course of action should be for all people in all circumstances, quite the contrary. For example, he would by no means argue that responding to moral impulse means always giving financial aid to a sibling in need. However, by designating morality as being prior to social relationships, prior to social discourse, and prior to dialogic consideration, Bauman overlooks the fact that we may indeed feel an irrepressible urge to give aid to our brother, but decide,

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upon deliberation, that this is not the correct course to take because we have learnt from experiences of our brother’s habit of expecting to be bailed out after poor choices, and from social discourse into interventions and research into dependency relationships, that the moral thing may be to let them struggle in the present in the hope that they learn to stand on their own two feet in the future, being ‘cruel to be kind’, as it were. The point here is not just that such action is unlikely to cohere with the unbounded fulfilment of responsibility that Bauman sets out, but also that what the ‘moral action’ is, what the correct course might be, does not arise from pre-social impulse, but rather is constituted within a nexus of interpersonal relations and circumstances, which interact with variably held and enacted social discourses. The contention of this book, and surely the contention of any properly sociological theory of morality is that moral phenomena are social phenomena, and like all other social phenomena are constituted through social life. What constitutes a moral action does not derive from the extent to which demands of an infinite responsibility have been lived up too, but rather is constituted in the unfolding interactional relations between actors (which is true at both a societal and personal level). In opposition to Durkheim, Bauman sought to instate individual moral consciousness as the force that could resist the tyranny of social imposition. However, in order to do this, he sees it as necessary to designate moral consciousness in terms completely unlike any other aspect of social consciousness, by arguing that it is based upon an impulse that is not a product of socialisation, since socialisation provides a manipulation and degradation of the impulse from which moral action springs (Junge 2001; Bauman 1989; Shilling and Mellor 1998). Accepting Bauman’s arguments would mean accepting the thoroughly unsociological ‘notion that an abstract ready-made conscience exists in individuals’ (Dewey 1922: 319). A properly sociological stance on morality must surely be oriented by the argument that even ‘the most private and personal moral endeavour is based on judgments and sentiments that have been developed through social experience and spread by social contacts’ (Hayes 1918: 296). Socialisation needs to be seen as formative of moral consciousness, rather than as necessarily obstructive of it, and when properly construed, it can be argued that interactional socialisation provides the conditions in which an individuated moral consciousness, with a degree of autonomous agency and responsibility, forms. Rather than innate impulse, the sociologically tenable argument for maintaining an efficacious place for individual moral consciousness lies in the postulation that

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moral consciousness—which includes capacities for a degree of individuated responsibility and autonomy that has the potential to stand against and reconsider social norms and domination, as people do fairly often—arises and develops socially. Finally, it is also not clear how Bauman is able to reconcile his Levinasian points about ‘infinite’ responsibility with his argument that ‘most people, most of the time’ are able to ordinarily ‘behave… as decent, moral people should’ in the course of everyday life (Bauman 1994: 2–3). While in places Bauman (1993, 1994) exalts the moral capacity of ordinary people living ordinary lives, the non-reciprocal and unbounded terms in which Bauman designates morality means that he does not account for the role of moral practice at an ordinary level (Crone 2008). Conceptualising the ‘defining traits of a moral stance’ as ‘one-sidedness, not reciprocity; a relation that cannot be reversed’ (Bauman 1993: 48) means that ‘nothing seems to be expectable’ in Bauman’s definition of the moral (Junge 2001: 112). And this means that much of ordinary moral practice can no longer be conceptualised in terms of the moral, because such practice tends to be bound up with ordinary expectations of behaviour, such as reciprocity, mutuality, respect, expectations of care, of family, of what it means to be a good friend. For Bauman (1998), expectations and norms of behaviour tend to obscure the extent of our responsibility, rather than as being constitutive of what moral behaviour might be. Such is the purity of Bauman’s definition of the moral that the realm of ordinary practice is excluded. In a fashion that is typical of the universalistic ethics based on detached rationalism that he himself sought to undermine, Bauman depicts morality in terms of the unattainably abstract and mysterious, and thus turns attention away from the moral as an ordinary and routine aspect of action undertaken in everyday intersubjective practice.

Summary: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena The new sociology of morality proposes that we look at morality more in terms of diffuse and variable practices, enacted in daily life. I argue that the relational-interactionist approach set out in Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework within which these arguments can be made. The relational approach sees morality as being constituted, sustained, and transformed in interaction, and it is in interaction too that morality develops in the individual (Simmel 1950). This relational view points us between the holism

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of Durkheim and the individualism of Bauman by arguing that moral phenomena are ‘of course held by individuals, but they do not originate with the individual. They are intersubjectively constructed in communicative interaction’, which moulds both the action and consciousness of individuals, meaning that moral phenomena are maintained and transmitted as they are variably enacted in complex webs of interdependent interactors, which sustains and gives rise to social forms and figurations of moral meaning and behaviour (Luckmann 2002: 19; Tsekeris 2013). This approach has the advantage of being able to view morality as a properly social phenomena, similarly to the Durkheimien arguments about how sociology should view morality, without designating morality in externalist and substantive terms, as having a reality outside of the relationally oriented interactions of individuals. This removes the stasis and structural determinism of Durkheim’s framework, and allows morality to be seen—as Simmel (1950) saw it through his concept of sociation—as something that is done, that is variably and intersubjectively participated in by individuals in the course of interdependent interaction from innumerable subjective standpoints, which have themselves been moulded through relational interaction. As I see it, making the case for relationalism as providing the most appropriate frame through which moral phenomena can be understood requires two supporting arguments. Firstly, it needs to be shown that morality is something that is done in interaction, in practice. As alluded to above, and as will be discussed in more depth subsequently, it has largely been through a reorientation of the focus of studies into morality towards the everyday, towards morality as a phenomenon that is ordinarily carried through in practice, that the resurgent sociology of morality has coalesced (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). The next chapter will be concerned with showing that morality is indeed something that is done in interaction, as an ordinary facet of ‘practical intersubjectivity’ (Joas 1997: 14), and also to show the ways in which morality is done in practice. Secondly, it is necessary to make the argument that it is through interaction that moral capacities and consciousness (variably) develop, which in turn shapes the individual’s participation in indeterminate interactional practice. It will be argued in Chapter 6 that Mead’s approach to the relational emergence of the self details the interactional mechanism through which morality develops in the individual, both as the capacity for moral proficiency in routine and habituated practice, and also in the interactional development of a consciousness capable of ‘confronting itself, as a knowing subject, with itself as a known

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object’, able ‘to place itself in contrast to itself’, and thus being able to take a standpoint on its own action, and upon shared objects of moral concern (Simmel 1950: 99). Meadian-relationalism, as I will go on to argue, allows us to reserve a place for socially constituted individuated and dialogic moral consciousness, without seeing this consciousness as entirely socially determined on the one hand, and without resorting to Baumanian arguments of pre-social impulse on the other.

Notes 1. Although Abend (2008) identifies Bauman’s moral theory as ‘Durkheimian’ in terms of its stance on moral truth, from the perspective of the relational critique of how moral phenomena are conceptualised, Durkheim and Bauman assume opposing positions on the question of what constitutes morality. 2. For critiques of these perspectives, see Skinner et al. (2016), Shilling and Mellor (1998), and Smart and Neale (1999).

References Abend, G. (2008). Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality. Theory and Society, 37 (2), 87–125. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9044-y. Abend, G. (2013). What’s New and What’s Old About the New Sociology of Morality. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 561–584). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_30. Addams, J. (1902). Democracy And Social Ethics. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing LLC. Barnes, B. (2000). Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action (1st ed.). London: Sage. Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1990). Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity. Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (1), 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 026327690007001001. Bauman, Z. (1991). The Social Manipulation of Morality: Moralizing Actors, Adiaphorizing Action. Theory, Culture & Society, 8(1), 137–151. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/026327691008001007. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1994). Morality Without Ethics. Theory, Culture & Society, 11(4), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327694011004001. Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bauman, Z. (1998). What Prospects of Morality in Times of Uncertainty? Theory, Culture & Society, 15(1), 11–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 026327698015001002. Bauman, Z. (2005). Durkheim’s Society Revisited. In J. C. Alexander & P. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (pp. 360–382). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Z. (2008). Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2001). Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage. Beck, U., & Willms, J. (2003). Conversations with Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bellah, R. N. (1973). Introduction. In R. N. Bellah (Ed.), Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (pp. ix–lv). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brodbeck, M. (1968). Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New York, NY: Collier Macmillan Ltd. Calhoun, C. (1991). Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self. Sociological Theory, 9(2), 232–263. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/202087. Crone, M. (2008). Bauman on Ethics—Intimate Ethics for a Global World? In The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critique (pp. 59–74). New York: Routledge. Crossley, N. (2006). Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Dépelteau, F. (2018). Relational Thinking in Sociology: Relevance, Concurrence and Dissonance. In F. Dépelteau (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (pp. 3–33). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_1. Dewey, J. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company. https://doi.org/10.1037/14663000. Dreyfus, H. L. (2014). Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (M. R. Wrathall, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, É. (1893/1984). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, É. (1925). Moral Education. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc. Durkheim, É. (1953). Sociology and Philosophy. London: Cohen & West. Durkheim, É. (1972). Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings (A. Giddens, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, É. (1973). Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (R. N. Bellah, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Durkheim, É. (1979a). Introduction to Ethics. In W. S. F. Pickering (Ed.), Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education (pp. 79–96). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, É. (1979b). A Discussion on the Effectiveness of Moral Doctrines. In W. S. F. Pickering (Ed.), Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education (pp. 129–139). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, É. (1979c). Suicide: A Study in Sociology (G. Simpson & J. A. Spaulding, Eds.). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, É. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes, Ed.). New York: Free Press. Finch, J. (1989). Family Obligations and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1972). Introduction: Durkheim’s Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. In Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1995). Individuation Through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (pp. 149–205). Cambridge: Polity Press. Hayes, E. C. (1918). Sociology as Ethics. The American Journal of Sociology, 24(3), 289–302. Hekman, S. (1995). Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hitlin, S., & Vaisey, S. (2013). Back to the Future. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 3–14). https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4419-6896-8_1. Holdsworth, C., & Morgan, D. (2007). Revisiting the Generalized Other: An Exploration. Sociology, 41(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038507076614. Hookway, N. (2015). Moral Decline Sociology: Critiquing the Legacy of Durkheim. Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 271–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1440783313514644. Hookway, N. (2017). Zygmunt Bauman’s Moral Saint: Reclaiming Self in the Sociology of Morality. Acta Sociologica, 60(4), 358–367. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0001699316688947. Joas, H. (1997). G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Junge, M. (2001). Zygmunt Bauman’s Poisoned Gift of Morality. The British Journal of Sociology, 52(1), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00071310020023055. Levinas, E., & Kearney, R. (1986). Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. In R. A. Cohen (Ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (pp. 13–34). New York: State University of New York Press. Luckmann, T. (2002). Moral Communication in Modern Societies. Human Studies, 25(1), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014838423896. Lukes, S. (1973). Individualism. London: Harper & Row. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Morgan, M. (2014). The Poverty of (Moral) Philosophy: Towards an Empirical and Pragmatic Ethics. European Journal of Social Theory, 17 (2), 129–146. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1368431013505016. Murdoch, I. (1983). Against Dryness. In S. Hauerwas & A. MacIntyre (Eds.), Revisions, Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Powell, C. (2013). Four Concepts of Morality. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 35–56). https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4419-6896-8_3. Powell, C., & Dépelteau, F. (2013). Introduction. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 1–12). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342652_1. Rawls, A. W. (2013). Social Order as Moral Order. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 95–121). https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4419-6896-8_6. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. A. (1998). Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action. The British Journal of Sociology, 49(2), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.2307/591309. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press. Singer, P. (1986). Applied Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skinner, D., May, V., & Rollock, N. (2016). Self-Identity and Its Discontents: Sociology in the 1990s. Sociology, 50(6), NP13–NP23. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0038038515621245. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press. Stivers, R. (1996). Towards a Sociology of Morality. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb013238. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tsekeris, C. (2013). Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology:

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Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 87–104). https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137342652_6. Wolf, S. (1982). Moral Saints. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2026228.

CHAPTER 5

The New Sociology of Morality and Morality in Practice

Following on from the critiques of substantive and individualist approaches to the sociology of morality offered in the last chapter, this chapter explores in more depth contemporary approaches to the sociology of morality, which tend to conceptualise morality as an ordinary facet of everyday life, carried out in variable ways in the messiness of practice itself. This emphasis on morality as a phenomenon that is predominantly engaged with in everyday life has been successful in re-rooting considerations of morality and its associated notions in the sociological research agenda. But it has also guided thinking, in line with the practice theories described in Chapter 2, towards the notion that it is in everyday interaction that morality and moral phenomena as we know them are enacted, sustained and transformed. The main purpose of this chapter is firstly to establish that people do ordinarily engage morally in everyday practice, and secondly to assess the ways in which they do so. The first half of this chapter thus expounds the arguments for seeing morality as an ordinary aspect of intersubjective life. Building upon this, it is argued in the second half that, because morality is oriented by and carried out as part of routine participation in social life, it is engaged with in interaction in ways that cohere with the relationalinteractionist theory outlined in Chapter 2. The second task of this chapter is thus to evaluate how morality is engaged with in everyday practice, which is done by assessing empirical evidence into the various ways in which moral action is conducted. © The Author(s) 2020 O. Abbott, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31822-2_5

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In so doing, the argument will be made that viewing morality in these terms leads into the subsequent point, drawn from theories of practice, that it is in the doing of morality that moral phenomena—expectations of conduct and decency, terms of evaluation, justifications of behaviour, and so forth—are sustained and moulded as they are brought into the experience of the individual, and as they intersubjectively orient how interaction is conducted. From the perspective of theories of practice, it is above all in interactional performances at a micro level that the social world is formed and sustained, and this is the same with morality (Harré 1998). Our interactional induction into the social world embeds us into orthodoxies of how everyday life is done, both in terms of ordinary expectations of conduct, and into the terms of judgement and evaluation that ordinarily pervade interactional practice. It will thus be argued that our moral understanding lies within, is drawn from, and is predominantly oriented towards, practice, and thus it is within the sphere of relational practice that morality is embodied, enacted, and ultimately sustained and transformed. The next chapter will then set out to argue that a Meadian-based relational sociology provides a sound means to explain how individuals come to be able to engage with moral practice in this way.

Morality and the Realm of Ordinary Practice In line with recent movements in moral philosophy (see, for example, Gilligan 1982; Dreyfus 2014; MacIntyre 1985; Taylor 1989), sociological interest in morality has re-emerged as ‘fixed, substantive definitions of the moral’ have rescinded in favour of morality being reconceptualised as something that is both variably and ordinarily enacted in everyday participation in social life, and as being of palpable significance to the narrative accounts that people give of themselves and their action (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013: 54; May 2008; Burkitt 2008; Finch 1989; Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003). A notable moment within this reinvigoration has been the broadened view of what constitutes moral actions and decisions to be inclusive of routine care and consideration for others, concern for relationships, situated responsiveness to interpersonal interactions, and an enactment of what is subjectively perceived to be the ‘proper’ thing to do within the circumstances at hand (Benhabib 1992; Finch 1989). As described in Chapter 3, this is arguably the most significant contribution of Carol Gilligan’s (1982, 1988) challenge to the orthodoxy of moral philosophy. Much more than objective universals, detached impartiality, and the enactment of abstract principles,

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this broadened ‘care’ perspective seeks to reflect the ordinary moral experiences of people in everyday life. In turn, this has allowed the sociology of morality to move beyond the straightforward depiction and analysis of institutionalised norms and values, and into the empirical investigation of the intersubjective emergence of moral decisions in practice (Finch 1989); the socially situated nature of moral subjectivity (Rapp 2000; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Gilligan 1982); ordinary embodied comportment towards moral norms and expectations in practice (Low 2009; Synnott 1993); and the formation and maintenance of moral selves and identities (Goffman 1959; May 2008). As was alluded to in the previous chapter, the recontextualisation of the moral into the everyday lives of ordinary actors has been key to bringing morality into the domain of sociological consideration once more (Smart and Neale 1999; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). It has been commented that this resurgence is not simply a case of furnishing sociology with rare (yet sociologically significant) examples of altruistic deeds, but rather is something that is strictly necessary for providing a full account of social action (Joas 1996; Sayer 2005). By skirting around questions of morality, sociology has closed itself off for too long from a vital aspect of how social life is engaged with and understood by actors. Sociology builds a picture of how people act, and an integral aspect of this description is the recognition that much of social practice is permeated with inflections of ordinary moral value, expectation, and judgement, which are thus ordinarily engaged with in everyday life. As Joas (1997: 121) commented in discussion about Mead, ‘his ethics cannot be separated from his fundamental premises for a theory of action and from his social-psychological conceptual framework’ precisely because the ethical and the moral are essential to achieving a complete picture of the ‘practical intersubjectivity’ of social life. Practical intersubjectivity may be directed towards egocentric competition, collective self-interest, or driven by situational influence. Yet, because a significant amount of our intersubjective practice is conducted alongside some degree of embedded moral concern, a complete view of practical intersubjectivity must be inclusive of the moral (May 2013; Burkitt 2008). Indeed, the contemporary revival of pragmatism has provided an instructive basis for explaining why morality should be seen as an ordinary part of intersubjective action: our social existence embeds us into a social world that is permeated by more or less formalised normative and evaluative expectations and judgements, which variably pervade and mould practices and shared ways of understanding the world and interpreting behaviour, and

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thus become integral both to our participation in, and our understanding of, the social world of which we are part (Morgan 2014; May 2013; Burkitt 2008). The extent to which social contexts are pervaded by ‘codes for acceptable and “moral” behaviour’ means that ‘being able to present oneself as a “moral” actor is an important part of being’ able to participate in social life (May 2008: 471; Goffman 1959), and indeed we readily question the character and integrity of a person who routinely commits violations of decent and considered social conduct (Low 2009). In this view, as several key perspectives within moral philosophy have argued (see Taylor 1989; Hekman 1995; Herman 2000), the induction into the ordinary facets of moral practice within one’s social context, far from being an optional aspect of social integration, is in fact central to the development of the capacities that are commonly taken to be indicative of sound personhood. In the earliest processes of socialisation, we are embedded into moral norms and behavioural expectations of the social world into which we are being integrated. Initially by rote, we are taught what behaviours are good and bad, what actions are wrong, and what actions we need to fulfil if we are to be accepted within our social group (May 2013; Burkitt 2008). As we develop, we are integrated into more complex evaluations of behaviour— pride, shame, fairness, empathy—that firstly reflect generalised expectations and values of our world, and subsequently translate into a more nuanced and specified evaluative consideration of social action: what it means to be a good mother, a good friend, to take responsibility for one’s action, to recognise that others are less fortunate than ourselves (Sie 2015). From a sociological perspective, any explanation of the moral rests primarily on the fact that we are ordinarily habituated into norms, expectations, and evaluative terms of what is generally considered to be good, decent, considered, worthwhile, and acceptable within a social context (Addams 1902; Cooley 1902; Hayes 1918; Dewey 1922; Mead 1934). In this sense, morality is not something that we opt to or avoid, but rather something that we are inducted into from the earliest age as we learn to engage with the social world into which we are thrown1 (Burkitt 2008; Sayer 2005). That the evaluative and normative character of social life has so often been overlooked in social theory reflects sociology’s understandably predominant concern with conflict, oppression, and deviance (Sayer 2005). The recognition that societies are founded upon inequalities, violence, and oppression implies that we should be suspicious of the rigid equation of the social order with a substantive definition of what morality is (Rawls 2013;

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Bauman 1989). However, it also cannot be forgotten that everyday social life is normative and evaluative to the degree that people ordinarily frame their understandings of much of the social world in moral terms (Sayer 2005). For Charles Taylor (1989: 59), we ‘cannot help’ drawing upon socially derived terms of normative evaluation in the course of doing social life, in ‘deliberating, judging situations, deciding how [we] feel about people’, in our assertions of what matters to us, in our assessments of how we, or how others, are being treated, in how we seek to remonstrate with those who disagree with our values, and in the apperception of the behaviours that cause us guilt or shame (see also Sayer 2005). What is more, people routinely assume moralised positions towards multifarious social issues— property ownership, racism, sexism, drug use, religion, respect towards elders, charitable giving—and they enact their moral understanding of the world by going for a drink with a friend in need, acting with appropriate solemnity for a funeral, encouraging children to learn and to travel, protesting against injustice, volunteering for a political party, keeping in regular contact with parents, not spoiling a child at Christmas, avoiding certain shops or activities that they consider to be ethically dubious, and not voicing an opinion in order to avoid upsetting a relative even when they disagree with them (Sie 2015; Grauel 2016; Sanghera 2016; McNay 2000). Indeed, when properly considered, it is quite clear that much of the practice that we undertake routinely is embedded with moral relevance in how it is enacted and understood. Further still, people routinely value certain practices and ways of being ‘because they come to see them as valuable in themselves, sometimes regardless of any [instrumental] benefit’, and actors also habitually ‘value others and their conduct in terms of their goodness or propriety’ (Sayer 2005: 40, 42). It should go without saying that a sociological approach to morality is thoroughly socially constructionist: it sees even our most deeply personal and strongly valued moral principles and judgements as fundamentally not reflecting anything ‘deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built in human solidarity’, nor indeed do they gain their significance in relation to a priori truth; instead they reflect nothing ‘except what has been socialised into [us]’, as Richard Rorty put it (1989: 177). This does not mean that we experience our own beliefs as necessarily arbitrary. Taylor (1989) and Rorty (1989) argue alike that our social existence integrates us into strongly valued terms that are integral to how we understand the social world and the place of our self within in. However, it is nonetheless the case that even the moral judgements and sentiments we hold most dear need

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necessarily be seen as having been oriented by our participation in social life, through which they have emerged and proliferated (Hayes 1918). What is more, from a sociological perspective, it is ‘only within the arena of cultural intelligibility’ that such sentiments can possibly accrue their significance and meaning, personal though they may be (Gergen 1992: 17). Indeed, in taking this perspective as a basis, it becomes possible to extend the arguments of practice theory, which ‘set the primary locus of the agent’s understanding in practice’ (Taylor 1999: 34), into the argument that the primary locus of our moral understanding also resides in practice (Hermann 2015). One of the defining features of Wittgenstein’s (1973) arguments, which have lent so much impetus to practice theories, is his ‘radical undercutting of… foundationalism’ (Taylor 1999: 31). He argued that founding convictions and justifications on philosophic propositions take us beyond how such convictions and justifications tend to be understood by individual actors. Indeed, ‘Wittgenstein stresses the unarticulated – at some points even unarticulatable – nature of this understanding’ (Taylor 1999: 31), favouring instead the argument that more often than not, we proceed ‘without reasons’, and when justification for our understanding is demanded, ‘If I have exhausted my justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (Wittgenstein 1973: 211, 217). Several authors have successfully sought to move these arguments into the sphere of moral theory (see, for example, Hekman 1995; Pleasants 2008; Hermann 2015) by arguing that our understanding of the moral and our participation in moral life is neither conditioned by, nor generally concerned with, ‘the nature of the ethical’ or ‘the epistemic status of ethical propositions’ (Pleasants 2008: 255). Because they are formed within contextually bounded practice, and because they are generally lived out in practical activity, our moral understandings and justifications tend to precede foundations, meaning that the bedrock of our explanatory justification is soon reached when it is sought in terms of rationalist exposition. Hermann (2015: 3), for example, builds on Wittgenstein’s arguments to make the point that Our everyday practices reveal that in justifying our moral convictions, we sooner or later run out of reasons. At some point we cannot do more than repeat – though this time with a stronger emphasis – a moral conviction the truth of which seems to be most obvious to us.

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Part of the trouble is that ‘when abstract principles are defined, their definitions are also in the abstract – themselves failing to indicate when, where, and how they apply in particular circumstances. When one consults abstract principles, their explications are also in the abstract, and as well the explications of the explications in an infinite regress – from which there is no exit to action’ (Gergen 1992: 17). The important point to be followed through here, however, is the argument that to situate the locus of our understanding (moral or otherwise) in practice is to argue that the basis of this understanding is formed through our practical activity. Because the bulk of our moral understanding is oriented by and directed towards practice, our moral activity ‘flows from an understanding’ that derives from our participation in practice, meaning that any justifications and rationales that we give are themselves derivative of the ‘context within which alone they make the sense that they do’ (Taylor 1999: 34). By recognising that morality is a thoroughly integrated facet of ordinary living, it becomes clear that the rationale for acting morally ‘is thus not about duty for its own sake, nor about the ends or purpose of morality’, but rather derives from ‘the open-ended texture of everyday moral life’ (Herman 2000: 30–31). Put otherwise, ‘we do not encounter morality as a conjunction of discrete rules of duty and obligation’ but rather experience it in terms of the practice that constitutes and facilitates our ordinary participation in social life (Herman 2000: 31). From this perspective, concern shifts from a conceptualisation of moral competence given in abstracted terms, and turns towards a picture of ‘moral competence as it is revealed in practice’ (Hermann 2015: 121), which is displayed, for example, in the practices of good motherhood (May 2008), in the actions of step-parents taken to avoid encroaching too heavily upon parental relationships (Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003), in tactful decisions of how much information to divulge to a child when they ask about the reasons for their parents’ divorce (Smart 2011), or as we put our pressing workload to one side in order to console a friend in need (Hermann 2015). In this view, morality is seen as ‘a condition of normal living’ and ‘moral abilities are exercised as a matter of course’, through an embodied and intersubjective responsiveness ‘to what is morally salient in the routine circumstances’ that the individual encounters (Herman 2000: 31; Dreyfus 2014). While morally pertinent expectations, concerns, and competencies that direct conduct arise with regularity, the variability of expectations and perspectives, as well as the sheer complexity and fuzzy indeterminacy of intersubjective interaction, means that tensions, conflicts, and negotiations also

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abound (Herman 2000). Hermann (2015), for example, illustrates the moral tensions that exist for a parent who has cause to be concerned for their child’s mental welfare, but who is also trepidatious about encroaching upon their child’s privacy by looking for clues in the child’s belongings. Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2003) and Smart and Neale (1999), respectively, highlight how negotiating responsibility for step-parenting and post-divorce relations is fraught with emotional ambiguities, unfolding circumstance, genuine concerns about welfare, and variable considerations of what the ‘proper’ thing to do entails. Likewise, the moral expectations that we have of relationships means that even the maintenance of friendships engender interpersonal conflicts, which stem from differentiated expectations and ideals about what ‘friendship’ both in the abstract and in the specific interpersonal relationship entails, which itself produces cascades of intersubjectively affected action, as the parties act towards and evaluate the conduct of the other in light of the variable expectations that they have of the relationship (Keller 1984). Indeed, the deeply complex and emergent nature of human interaction, not to mention the variability of moral expectation that exists between individuals and across different situations, means that knowledge of moral precepts is insufficient for knowing how ‘to deal with the indeterminacy and multiplicity of contexts and life-situations with which practical reason is always confronted’ (Benhabib 1992: 3; Hermann 2015). Far from providing a clear procedure for practice, the attempt to consistently align one’s action with moral principle in the face of the ‘manifold contingencies and unanticipated circumstances’ endemic in even routine social life, would rather mean that little would get accomplished in terms that make sense to the situation at hand (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 242). Instead, appropriate and morally decent action requires a responsive know-how that exceeds the formulation or enactment of moral rules that are fitting for all circumstances (Dreyfus 2014; Herman 2000). This is not to suggest that articulated moral reasons are unimportant, but rather to suggest that they are ‘less essential to the cohesiveness of ordinary moral practice’ than has often been implied by moral thought (Herman 2000: 45). Indeed, by arguing that it is towards practical activities that the bulk of our moral competence is directed and conducted, it becomes clear that the cohesiveness of ordinary moral practice relies upon moral understandings and actions being conducted predominantly through an embodied ‘practical sense’, which allows us to grasp and evaluate variable and indeterminate situations in moral terms, and to respond to them accordingly (Hermann 2015). In

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this view, moral agency exists as a complex responsive competence that is developed through and directed predominantly towards practice, which is why the locus of our moral understanding should be seen as lying in practice, and as being sustained and enacted within it (Dreyfus 2014; Hermann 2015). What is more, the re-centring of morality as being predominantly an ordinary and fundamental aspect of routine practice, and recognising that moral principles ‘have a limited role both in the acquisition of moral competences and in its exercise’ (Hermann 2015: 164), underpins the argument for reconstituting morality, including moral principles, justifications, identities, sentiments, deliberations, and so forth, as ‘forms of social practice’ (Gergen 1992: 17), which are engaged with as part of our participation in social life, as a result of our embeddedness within it. As Gergen (1992: 17) explicates, From the present perspective, accounts such as “I feel this is right,” “That would violate my principles,” or “I think this is immoral” are in their very saying constitutive features of everyday life. Such sentences are used by people in carrying out various social rituals, patterns of interchange, or cultural projects… They operate within relationships to prevent, to admonish, to praise, and to invite various forms of action; they may also establish one’s public identity, furnish others with a guide to one’s future conduct, and achieve unity within a group. In effect, moral and ethical languages are among the resources available for playing the games and participating in the dances of cultural life.

The renewed sociology of morality has tended to follow, and has greatly facilitated, the drive towards the re-platforming of everyday practices as the level at which morality is predominantly engaged with. Consequently, it has thus set the everyday as the level at which the majority of analysis of moral action should be conducted. A wealth of sociological research, which is to be followed up in the next section, has highlighted both how alive everyday practices and decisions are with some sort of discernible moral content, and how moral sentiments, norms, and values are used in practice in various ways, from the facilitation of routine participation in interaction, to the accounting and justification of our action, the challenging of others, the sustainment of relationships, and the construction of identity (Burr 2009; Scott and Lyman 1968; Sterponi 2003; Varul 2009; May 2008). Having established morality within the sphere of everyday practice, the task of the rest of the chapter is to assess how such practice is engaged with, and to

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show how it is in this interactional engagement that morality is sustained, transmitted, and transformed.

Ordinary Moral Concern in Habituated Interaction By reorienting morality into the realm of everyday practice, as an ordinarily engaged with facet of intersubjective conduct that is predominantly orientated and understood in practice, it becomes clear that our theories of how moral action is conducted should adhere to a coherent theory of social action in general. As was commented in Chapter 3, part of the reason why rationalist accounts of morality cohere so poorly with practice is that the rationally based pursuit of action, in which ‘action is initiated only after meaningful goals have been set’, are seldom ‘to be found in empirically observable action’ (Joas 1996: 147, 157), because the predominance of practice is conducted beyond ‘the terms of a “means-end” mode of theoretical reasoning’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 240). The relational practice-based account of action set out in Chapter 2 argues that the bulk of our action is carried out habitually, ‘without resort to conscious planning or deliberative following of instructions’, which is made possible through acquired dispositions, and that ‘enables one to react in real time to the changing vicissitudes of social situations’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227). However, while the bulk of our action may be nondeliberative, this view also posits a responsiveness to the situation that cannot be enacted entirely ‘pre-reflexively’. The fuzzy indeterminacy of intersubjective interaction means that a degree of ‘mundane everyday reflexivity’ (Reay 2004: 437) is necessary in order to evaluate situations and to align and calibrate action at the moment of practice (Bottero 2010; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). It is also true that our participation in social life often engenders a deeper level of dialogic renumeration as we are confronted with questions of how we should proceed and how we should judge certain situations (Mead 1934; Aboulafia 1999; Joas 1997). The aim of the rest of this chapter is to show that our engagement with morality in practice coheres with this pragmatist-based relational interactionist theory of action, as we engage morally in practice at varying levels of habitude and reflexive rumination. It should briefly be noted that aversion towards rationalist theories of action should not lead, as arguably it did with Bourdieu (1977) and Dreyfus (2014), to an ‘underestimation of the implications of the fact that subjects continually interpret and understand various discourses’ and ‘come

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to grasp the complex evaluations of their culture’, which are often discursively engaged with in relation to their daily experiences, in order to make sense of and to mediate their own action and sensibilities, as well as those of others, within the social world (Sayer 2005: 28, 44). The important differences from theories that presuppose the rational actor in their construction of moral action, however, are that the theory of action posited here sees reflexive deliberations as always situated, firstly in the sense that such remuneration arises as an ‘intermediary’ response to the ‘continuous cropping up of unanticipated problems’ (Joas 1990: 186), and secondly in the sense that the subjectivity with which we dialogically engage is itself produced in interaction, and is consequently populated by the voices and attitudes of both generalised and specific others that we have taken on in the interactions through which individuated subjectivity develops. This argument will be expounded more fully in the next chapter. The important point to acknowledge for now, however, is that we as sociologists cannot fail to take seriously the deeply entangled moral judgements and evaluations that people make in the course of their lives. As will be demonstrated shortly, reflexive remunerations have been shown to form an important aspect of how people approach moral decisions in practice, and they play an important role in assessing and accounting both for their own action and the action of others. However, as was discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to the work of Dreyfus (2014: 183), the lion’s share of our moral action, as with our action more generally, is conducted through a predominantly nondeliberative and ‘intuitive respons[iveness] to the concrete situation’,2 and it thus makes sense to begin our exemplification of the various ways in which morality is engaged with in practice here. Although the interactional process through which it occurs will not be detailed until the next chapter, it is important to initially recognise that our capacity for intuitive responsiveness, our practical sense of sound moral comportment, is founded upon our thorough habituation into generalised expectations of action (Sayer 2005). Jane Addams (1902) recognised over a century ago how a vast degree of social practice is embedded with moral components, which are not fulfilled out of a definite sense of right and wrong but are instead enacted as a habitual execution of what is expected of us within a particular social context (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2014). For her, it is not the strength of a formal code of ethics that provides evidence of morality, but rather evidence lies in the fact that components of morality are pervasive enough to be enacted as routine practice. Goffman’s (1959, 1967, 1968) work is instructive here also, as he highlights the extent

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to which the order of social practice is pervaded by moral norms and expectations that need to be applied correctly if we are to present a self that is taken to be acceptable by those we are interacting with. ‘Behaving in a morally acceptable way’, for Goffman, is necessary to ‘being accepted as a member of a social group’; and behaving in an acceptable manner, presenting oneself as being of sound character, ordinarily means engaging with norms and expectations through ritualised orders of practice, into which we have been habituated (May 2008: 472). While Goffman’s work is more generally associated with impression management, and has been accused both of providing ‘only a cynical account of motivation’ (Jenkins 2014: 93) and of illustrating the ‘profane’ (for example the self-interested, the goal-motivated, and the transgressive) ‘far more vividly and effectively than he does the sacred’ (e.g. the cooperative, supportive, and the dignified) aspects of social interaction (Barnes 2000: 144), his work nonetheless highlights in minute detail the myriad of nuanced actions that are routinely conducted in order to align the performance of the self with ordinary moral expectations of behaviour that define an interactional context. Goffman (1959), for example, outlines orders of conversation that are engaged in order to avoid rudeness, the distance that is kept between actors in public in order to prevent discomfort, the ‘tactful blindness’ that is shown to avert causing embarrassment to others, the spontaneous formation of queues, as well as the ‘preventive practices’ that are undertaken to avoid the transgression of norms, and the sanctioning and corrective practices that are conducted in response to transgression (Donnelly and Wright 2012; Low 2009). Of course, this is not to say that all social practice is moral practice, quite the contrary. But Goffman’s analysis reflects how social interaction flows along a continuum between ritualised social niceties and the expressive controls we exercise to maintain face on the one hand, and the morally oriented actions taken in the moment of practice on the other (Jacobson and Kritsiansen 2015). In Stigma (1968), for example, Goffman describes how ordinary expectations of front and expressive control are magnified as people set their face and direct their gaze when they encounter somebody with a marked physical abnormality in order to avoid causing offence. Similarly, applying Goffman’s work to how disruptions to the expressive order are responded to in church services, Donnelly and Wright (2012) show how careful tactful blindness (as opposed to cursory challenges) is favoured when disruptions are caused by a churchgoer with a disability.

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A key aspect of Goffman’s arguments, and the arguments of practice theories more generally, is that such performances are not conducted in isolation. As discussed in Chapter 2, these performances are the product of, and only make sense in relation to, a ‘more or less stable background of other performances’ (Rouse 2007: 505–506), which engenders the ‘impression that there are proper ways to go about the business of everyday life’ (Warde 2016: 152). The practice view argues that the ‘social world is constructed above all by the innumerable repetitions of small-scale social interactions, constrained by all sorts of almost unnoticed normative constraints’, and the sphere of the moral is no different (Harré 1998: 47). Importantly, the orthodoxies of conduct that are sustained and learnt in interaction allow us to understand and engage with the ‘seemingly infinite’ varieties of ‘concrete occurrences’ within defined terms (Goffman 1974: 21). These interactionally produced and sustained orders of practice afford directionality and intelligibility to our own action and the action of others, and it is from our immersive participation within them that our nuanced sense of moral comportment develops. Bringing morality into the sphere of practice thus not only indicates that the background of our moral understanding lies in, and is drawn from, practice, but it also allows us to see practice as being constitutive of what moral meanings and phenomena are. We would be incorrect, however, to suggest that practices are straightforwardly maintained through a tacit enactment of the moral order. While Goffman sought to illuminate the ritualised nature of routine patterns of interaction, he also argued that social life, rather than having a unified structure, is made up of individual performances and interactions. What is more, although orthodoxies of practice are generally available, because ‘the circumstances and contingencies’ of our interactional performances are interminable, order is ‘ever in a process of being achieved’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 239, 245). From this view, the social rituals that engender and sustain orthodoxies of conduct depend ‘for their survival’ upon the enactment of ‘micro level norms’ and performances (Donnelly and Wright 2012: 1). This includes not just the enactment of appropriate conduct, but also small-scale practices such as the sanctioning of untoward behaviour through expressive challenges and apologies for transgression (Donnelly and Wright 2012). While interactional orders are ‘predicated on a large base of shared cognitive’ and ‘normative’ presuppositions, which precipitate ‘self-sustained restraints’ (Goffman 1983: 5) and ‘mutual obligations to the orderliness of interactional sequences’ (Bottero 2019: 200), practical

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activities must also be coordinated and managed through the constant ‘correcting, sanctioning, criticizing [and] approving’ of others (Frega 2015). Goffman (1959: 141), for example, details the interactional ‘team’ work that goes into the maintenance of tact and the avoidance of ‘destructive information’ that is liable to ‘disrupt’ the fragile stability of the moral order of the interaction, or ‘discredit’ fellow actors in a way that is morally problematic. For example, while secrets are often maintained for egotistic or selfish reasons, the tactful ‘under-communication’ of certain facts often also reflects a concerted moral concern for protecting the ‘face’, welfare, and interests of others (Goffman 1959: 141). An exemplification of this can be drawn from Smart’s (2011: 540) research into the prevalence and moral significance of family secrets. Such secrets, Smart argues, are commonplace to nearly all families in some form, and they may prove to play an important role in ‘sustaining kinship relationships’, as well as the narratives we tell about our family and its members. This works at a number of levels, as ‘keeping illegitimacy secret could be a means of defending from outside scrutiny and adverse judgement’, but equally ‘the telling or not telling of secrets can defend an individual against other family members… e.g. keeping secret one’s sexual orientation in order to maintain relationships’ (Smart 2011: 540). The content of such family secrets, and the reasons for their maintenance, of course reflects ‘both the micro workings of power’ and ‘also the macro context in which the micro struggles are located’. However, what is key to the present argument is that such secrets often provide a ‘practical bridge’ for sustaining relationships in certain ways and avoiding causing damage to others, as the ‘discovery of such things as adoption, premarital sex and even criminality can lead to a rewriting of the family’ and the identities and welfare of its members (Smart 2011: 540). Keeping such matters quiet can thus be seen as often reflecting a concern for the well-being of affected parties and the desire to avoid conflict within complexly entangled relations (Smart 2011). To a large extent, we are able to comport ourselves in a morally sound way to such situations by embodying learned moral experience via an ‘unreflective, egoless response to the current interpersonal situation’: ‘I sense the embarrassment of a person, and turn the conversation aside’ in the same way as ‘I see [a] child in danger and catch hold of its hand’; similarly, we tend to know already, without having to decide, that we should not discuss in front of a friend’s child that they were adopted without first establishing how the friend has decided to approach the topic with the child (Mandelbaum 1955: 48–49).

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‘Actions such as these (of which our daily lives are in no small measure composed)’ are representative of where and how the bulk of our moral action occurs (Mandelbaum 1955: 48). It is at this level of intuitive know-how that the majority of our everyday ethical comportment is conducted (Dreyfus 2014), and it is in virtue of our habituated integration into the social world that people are able to ‘produce moral responses spontaneously, without reflection; indeed, it is interesting that we would have doubts about the moral character of someone who couldn’t respond morally to events without first deliberating on them’ (Sayer 2005: 42). However, it is of course not the case that all members of a performance have the same knowledge of what is off-bounds; nor will they necessarily have the same willingness to maintain a secret or to acquiesce to not ‘call someone out’, nor indeed the same degree of tactful appreciation of the situation. As Goffman (1959: 88) argues, ‘any member of the [performance] has the power to give the show away or to disrupt it by inappropriate conduct’, so the maintenance of the current order will often require some degree of work in the immediacy of interaction, for example through the diversion away from certain topics, ‘pretending not to hear’, the cautionary glances and the rebuking of certain awkward questions, and indeed the moral discrediting of those who raise out-of-bound topics for not being appropriately tactful. Such action itself draws upon socially ordered ‘methods for sanctioning and modifying our individual dispositions to keep them in line’, which are ‘mediated by verbal commentary, criticism, and evaluation, e.g., by saying “you can’t” and “you must”’ (Bloor 2001: 101). Such preventative and sanctioning practices establish and sustain permissibility, and they hold people to account within interaction. Indeed, such ‘discursive practices of accountability’, which demand explanations for untoward action and engender exchanges of excuses, justification, and admonishments, have been shown to be routine in interaction and thus provide ‘an avenue for understanding the making of morality in everyday interpersonal interaction’ (Sterponi 2003: 80; Scott and Lyman 1968). The pervasive role that such practices play in interaction highlight how ‘in actual social life, even predictable activity requires judgemental work’ that is necessarily contextualised and realised within the interaction itself (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 239). Ethnomethodological research into the action of health and welfare providers has illuminated the wealth of situated responsive practices and mundane considerations that are necessarily undertaken by these workers in order to deal with the emergent indeterminacy of their task, while also fulfilling the explicitly codified aspects of their

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role (Zimmerman 1970; Heritage and Sefi 1992; Maynard 2003). While the tasks and duties of welfare officers (Zimmerman 1970) and health visitors (Heritage and Sefi 1992) are directed by ‘explicitly stated policies and procedures designed to advance formally defined goals’ (Zimmerman 1970: 221), their capacity to fulfil their defined role and tasks effectively relies upon a situational, evaluative attentiveness through which official rules are bent, suspended, or redirected in response to the variable and fluid presentations of the case at hand. Often this involves a nascent moral responsiveness, as, for example, the need for questions regarding a difficult pregnancy or the health of the baby gets inferred conversationally or rephrased in qualitive, open-ended terms in order to ameliorate embarrassment or the perceived suspicion of the recipient to the prying of authority (Heritage and Sefi 1992), or as the delivering of bad news is deferred until either the arrival or departure of company, depending on the features of the situation and the perception of how the recipient would best cope with the news (Maynard 2003). The enactment of rules, norms, and codes of conduct can prove to be problematic precisely because they are decontextualised, whereas effectively coping with the moral fissures that arise in the fluid complexity and contingency of interaction in real time requires a responsiveness to the situation, which follows an evaluative although largely pre-discursive logic. The point here is not about the moral credibility of people’s actions in an abstract sense, but rather is to recognise that moral proficiency often functions at the level of interactional responsiveness to the situation at hand, both through the enactment of behavioural expectations and in the coordination of interaction. While this coordination is often active, it is not conducted through detached reflective engagement with oneself, or in deliberative discourse with others, but rather is enacted within the situationally specific interaction with a practical responsiveness, ‘prior to the specifications of objects of knowledge’, such as intention, motives, or principles (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 227; Turowetz and Maynard 2013). This depicts at least certain facets of morality as being an interactionally situated activity, which is oriented by habituation into orders of practice and enacted and calibrated across intersubjective interactional situations (Sterponi 2003).

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Reflexivity, Relational Entanglement, and Morality in Practice That being said, the inflection of moral concerns in the intersubjective practice of ordinary people clearly extends beyond habituated interactional responsiveness. Not only is it the case that the alignment of action in practice ‘depends upon people being able to view their actions from the viewpoint, and expectations, of others - a process of both socialised subjectivity but also of reflexive monitoring, of self and others’ (Bottero 2019: 197), but also moral decisions, by their nature, are often taken with a degree of cautious consideration as people negotiate their way through questions of what the correct thing to do is (May 2013). Unlike many of the traditions of philosophy, however, the sociology of morality emphasises that such decisions cannot be properly understood as the actions of detached, rationally construing moral subjects in the pursuit of principled judgement. Rather, the moral decisions and actions that we take need necessarily be seen as being formed and taking their impetus within complex networks of relational interaction, at both an interpersonal level and the level of broader orders of practice and social discourses within which such actions are inextricably constituted. On this latter point, a rich literature has arisen around ‘ethical consumption’ as being indicative of the capacity for people to ordinarily and actively engage in moral practices, but which is explained in terms that subvert canonical philosophic conceptions of the demarcations of how such judgements and actions are formed and conducted. While those who participate in ethical consumption can be seen as ‘enacting their political and moral concerns through consumer choice’ (Varul 2009), it is generally contended within the ethical consumption literature that such practices can seldom be understood as the self-reflexive translation of moral principles into practical action (Barnett et al. 2005). Research in this area has shown that it is commonly facetious firstly to present intentions in purely moral terms, and secondly to assume that any such intentions can be detached from ‘highly mediated strategies for governing complex assemblages of individual conduct [and] collective action’ that are ‘differentially mobilised, negotiated, and enacted across diffuse networks of social interaction’ (Barnett et al. 2005: 30). Empirical research into contemporary practices of thrift, for example, illustrates how motivations for such practices vary and intersect across a

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continuum of extremes between financial necessity, conscience, and enjoyment (Holmes 2019). Motivations of financial necessity clearly undermine the purity of intentions for engaging in ethical consumption, but even motivations of conscience (and enjoyment) are themselves bound up with a certain contemporary trendiness, the production and maximisation of value, as well as narratives of moral fulfilment and the presentation of a caring self within social spheres where such practices are endeared (Holmes 2019). Engagement with other varieties of ethical consumption, such as ethically minded food consumption, is also bound up with questions of affordability, necessity, and indeed tastes,3 which are themselves tied to cultural and economic capital (Grauel 2016; Bourdieu 1984), the social networks in which people engage (Sanghera 2016; Halkier 2010), and consequently classed and gendered expectations of the performance of self and the meeting of the needs of others (Barnett et al. 2005; Grauel 2016). Likewise, the fulfilment of ethical aspirations through consumption is tied to availability, incentives and disincentives, technologies of consumption and production, and socially prevalent discourses (Lichenberg 2010; Varul 2009), which allows everyday practical moral dispositions to be ‘re-articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change’ (Barnett et al. 2005: 23). Indeed, various authors (for example, Barnett et al. 2005: 28; Varul 2009: 183; Grauel 2016) refer to conscientious consumption as ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ ‘selving’, as ethically minded consumption practices, founded upon a genuine ‘ethically driven desire to be responsible’ (Brinkmann and Peattie 2008: 29) are integrated into a person’s self-image and their presentations of self to others (Varul 2009). Negotiations of self-identity thus coincide with and inform the practical choices that people make about their conduct, which are carried out in relation to discourses and practices of what ethical consumption entails (Barnett et al. 2005; Grauel 2016). The moral aspect of the motivation for ethical consumption should not in any way be discounted because ‘ethical consumers often do not see morality and selfhood as competing or conflicting, but as integrated’ (Varul 2009: 183). Indeed, one’s sense of moral obligation and self-identity do not simply influence how practices are engaged with in a one-way process, but rather such obligations and identities are formed and sustained through the enactment of the practices themselves (Varul 2009). Indeed, in her illuminating research into food consumption, morality, and the presentation

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of self, Grauel (2016: 852) highlights how social discourse around ethical consumption almost necessitates that conscientious consumers present their moral motivation in ‘authentic’ terms, however ‘they also have to communicate their actions as morally valid according to socially established “vocabularies of motive”’, and ‘these vocabularies frame the presentation of moral motivation’. The point is that this ‘ethical selving’ is only made possible and intelligible by drawing on cultural contexts and bodies of practice in which moral motivations, justifications, and actions are constituted (Varul 2009). One of the key points of relational sociology is that the action and agency of individuals are always constituted within broad, flowing networks of interaction that firstly mould and orient the course that our action can take, and secondly differentially situate the context in which moral subjectivities and dispositions are formed and enacted (Burkitt 2016; Dépelteau 2008). However, while our actions, evaluations, and subjectivities are framed within broader cultural contexts and practices, our lives and our actions are entangled and moulded predominantly at the level of interpersonal interaction, through which these wider relational entanglements manifest themselves (Dépelteau 2008). The lives we lead and the actions that we take are deeply entangled and moulded in interpersonal interaction, and the moral questions that we face—as well as the way that such questions are approached—often reflects this entanglement. Indeed, a notable wellspring for the emergence of the renewed brand of sociological consideration of the moral has been oriented around family and personal life precisely because this facet of social existence routinely necessitates moral concern at an everyday level, often in a way that reflects socially orientated expectations and obligations on the one hand, and the intersubjective emergence of action on the other. This area thus provides a fount of empirical evidence of how people ordinarily engage with moral decisions in practice (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). The cultural context of family life enshrouds the meaning of familial relationships with deep-set expectations of moral obligation (Finch 1989), meaning that the status and success of these relationships are frequently judged according to the fulfilment of such obligations (May 2008). In their research into motherhood and step-parenthood, respectively, May (2008) and Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2003) identified a ‘strong moral imperative of putting their children’s needs first and that making moral choices was itself seen as indicative of caring about children’ (May 2008: 473). These moral obligations proved to be vital both to the narratives that parents told about

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themselves and how familial decisions were approached and accounted for. However, while voiced in terms of imperative, in practice the obligations themselves and their enactment are far from clear-cut (Finch 1989). What obligations entail are subjectively understood and emerge in relation to others over time in light of changes in circumstances and attitudes, which mould assessments of what the ‘proper thing to do’ is: Even in situations where rights and duties seem more fixed, we see that they are open to considerable negotiation in practice and that the outcome of these negotiations will be an interplay between, on the one hand, ideas about moral obligations derived from wider culture, and, on the other hand, very personal assessments about the circumstances of one’s own relatives. (Finch 1989: 143)

Finch (1989) argues that the inherent sociality of the circumstances in which moral decisions are faced ensures that the ‘right’ thing to do is situated by normative standards. However, these mainly provide touchstones and frames for considering and negotiating moral issues and decisions, which themselves emerge intersubjectively over time as mutually entangled actors mould the directionality of the decisions that are taken. Similarly, Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2003) highlight how obligations of stepparenting vary considerably depending on issues such as circumstances of previous relationships and the attitudes of estranged partners, as well as those of step and biological children, which continue to unfold over time. It is of course true that ‘concern for families are animated by and linked to wider notions of right and wrong’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 405). But such studies show that rather than determining conduct, these broadly construed notions are woven into the emergent practical decisions and negotiations that are undertaken within familial relationships, which feed ‘into the accounts that family members provide when describing their family practices’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 405). As well as reorienting moral consideration and judgements into everyday practice and assessing how such judgements are formed within intersubjective contexts, much of the empirical research into family life ‘demonstrate that individuals need to be able to make judgements about differing situations and calibrate accepted practices for individual cases’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 413). Indeed, recent sociological research has investigated how the reflexive process of articulating a position on a structurally embroiled and intersubjectively emergent moral decision occurs

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(Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). Part of this body of literature has cohered around how the moral decisions associated with moving away from home are constructed and negotiated (Jones 1999; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). Jones’s (1999) research situates the tendencies of young people to stay or migrate from small communities firstly within broad social realities, such as local youth employment rates and generational flight, and secondly within more nuanced interpersonal relations, such as whether the participant’s parents had been local to the community or whether they migrated to it, which intersected with complexly formed subjective senses of acceptance and belonging. Jones (1999) moves between the veracity of macro-level social realities in giving rise to morally significant decisions, and the role the formation of socio-spatial identities within interpersonal relations plays in populating how such decisions are faced. Indeed, while macro and meso-level social factors are of testable significance, morally significant decisions are faced at a micro level by reflexively capable actors whose subjectivities are inextricably entangled with others. This point is well made by Holdsworth and Morgan (2007), whose study into the morally entangled decisions of young people to move away from home found that the reflexive consideration of these decisions were populated by the voices of both specific and ‘generalised’ others, which were operationalised and capitulated against in the course of the decisionmaking process. Holdsworth and Morgan (2007) detailed how their participants habitually referenced the voices of variously specified others firstly in order to construct what is ‘normal’ for their family, friends, and community more broadly, and secondly to negotiate perceived expectations and sensitivities that friends and family may hold towards the departure of their kin. The generalised perceptions of others were utilised not only to orient the decision and pre-emptively allay any concerns, but were also used as the interlocutors against and through which the participant assumed their own stance on the choice they had to make. These choices were of course framed by ‘more structured determinants of young people’s choices, such as differences in welfare policy’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 414). However, what is key is that choices associated with leaving home were taken from the perspective of relationally entangled actors with reflexive reference to the perceived expectations and judgements of others, which were operationalised and negotiated in the course of arriving at a subjective standpoint upon the overall decision. In this way, a ‘sense of ‘the right thing to do’ is both owned by the individual as a moral actor while also referring to some wider level of generality’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 405).

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In a similar study into the attitudes of recipients of donor sperm towards donor anonymity, Burr’s (2009) participants reflexively negotiated their moral concerns over revealing that their child was conceived via donor insemination in relation to the perceived negative attitudes of others, and the subsequently perceived vulnerability of those inculcated in decisions— notably the child and the partner involved. Both Burr and Holdsworth and Morgan depict the enactment of relationally moulded subjective reflexivity as being necessary to negotiating the ‘ongoing mixture of simultaneous values that individuals must navigate in day-to-day ethical decision-making’ (Burr 2009: 337). Indeed, what is key here is that such reflexive consideration is ordinarily engaged with in the moral evaluations and judgements that people necessarily make at the everyday level of life (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007).

Summary Part of recognising that the social world is permeated by ordinary moral values, expectations, and vocabularies of judgement, is the corollary recognition that assessment, evaluation, and reflection are an ordinary facet of how social practice is conducted (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Bottero 2010; Reay 2004; Sayer 2005). Sayer (2005: 45) enjoins that the evaluative and mutually self-monitoring character of participation in social action is enacted ‘not only in confronting serious moral dilemmas but in the most ordinary situations, such as conversations, where we have to evaluate how we are being treated and how we are treating others’. Recognition of this means acknowledging also that ‘ethical comportment’ should not be seen as resting on pre-reflexive dispositional responses alone. While the dispositional approaches of Dreyfus (2014), for example, rightly identifies the occasional nature of detached rational judgement, he mistakenly discounts the frequent role that intersubjectively entangled reflexivity plays in the skilful enactment of ethical comportment in the moment of practice. This is not to say that individuals do not habitually enact ordinary moral standards and expectations pre-reflexively. Rather it is to recognise that effective social actors are able to seamlessly slip between intuitive pre-reflexive response and differing degrees of reflexive evaluation in the flow of practice in response to the variable demands of the situation at hand (Mead 1934; Aboulafia 1999). This is the preliminary picture of how morality is engaged with in practice: it is engaged with by relationally constituted and inextricably entangled

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subjects, whose intersubjectively emergent action falls somewhere along a continuum between intuitive responsiveness, mundane reflexivity in the moment of practice itself, and ‘concentrated reflections’ on more occasional moral quandaries that social life throws our way (Sayer 2005: 29). This, I argue, is how everyday morality in practice is conducted. The next chapter will seek to explain how people come to be able to engage with morality in practice in this way. Additionally, the present chapter has argued that it is in the intersubjective enactment of moral awareness and concern, conducted at its various levels of deliberative engagement, that moral phenomena—what decent and considerate conduct entails, the expectations of care in relationships, the terms of evaluation and judgement we apply to ourselves and to others, the reasons for and means of sanctioning, the ethical practices through which we enact our beliefs, and even our more broadly construed understandings of what is just, fair, and right—are sustained, moulded, and transformed. The view from relational sociology is that social phenomena do not just hang there with a meaning that exists beyond interactional relations. Rather they are formed and constituted within socio-historic processes of interaction within which the actions and subjectivities of individuals are themselves constituted, meaning that phenomena have a continued regularity and significance (which can be historically and culturally vast) insofar as they continue to be done in practice. It is at the level of interactional, relationally moulded doing that the significance of moral meaning and actions are sustained, transmitted, and redirected as they are variably brought into the intersubjectively emergent practice of interdependently related and disposed interacting individuals. At a socio-historical level, the complex figurations that are formed out of networks of interaction produce normative restraints that manifest in orders of practice and intersubjective sanctioning, and cultural and legal frameworks and restraints of permissibility and value that inextricably mould the consciousness, understanding, and action of individuals. However it is in interaction that these are brought into the experience of the individual, and they are brought to bear insofar as they are enacted, and variably employed and utilised in practice. The next chapter will expand on these points by showing how broadly construed moral meanings are brought into the experience of individuals in the social formation of the self, and how this differential process is productive both of our moral habituations and of our concerted capacities for individuated and dialogic consideration of action in moral terms.

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Notes 1. This pragmatist stance is largely mirrored in the contemporary communitarian moral philosophies of MacIntyre (1985) and Taylor (1989), however these positions vary in the extrapolations that they draw from this share basis. 2. The more theoretical parameters of ‘everyday ethical comportment’ were detailed in Chapter 2, and questions of how the process of moral habituation occurs will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter. As a result, these aspects of debate will not be rehearsed in this section, which will instead seek to illuminate the role of habituated moral responsiveness in practice. 3. Indeed, Grauel’s (2016) research found that taste was often applied either as an additional justification of ethical consumption or as a legitimising factor in not adopting certain practices. Grauel reminds us alongside Bourdieu (1984) that tastes are tied to class, which adds to the situated entanglement of moral decision-making.

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of Consumer Studies, 33(2), 183–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-6431. 2009.00762.x. Warde, A. (2016). The Practice of Eating. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell. Zimmerman, D. H. (1970). The Practicalities of Rule Use. In J. D. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge (pp. 221–238). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

CHAPTER 6

The Self and a Relational Explanation of Morality in Practice

The last chapter firstly sought to exemplify that people ordinarily engage with morality in practice in their everyday lives, and secondly sought to outline how this engagement should be understood and characterised from a perspective of sociological description of such action. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an explanation that accounts both for people’s ordinary engagement with morality and for their capacity to engage with morality in practice at the varying levels of habituation and reflexivity described. Here, I extend the argument that a relational approach is best equipped for this task. However, I make this argument from a particular perspective within relational sociology, which takes as its basis Meadian pragmatism, rather than Bourdieusian praxeology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The analytic and descriptive power of Bourdieu’s oeuvre has been rightly acclaimed (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999; Sayer 2005a). However, Bourdieu’s work has attracted an abundance of critiques (for example, Aboulafia 1999; Lamont 1992; King 2004; Bottero 2010; Crossley 2006; McNay 2000; Archer 2003; Lahire 2003), several of which specifically compel me to take a more Meadian approach to explaining engagement with morality in practice in relational terms. Firstly, Bourdieu himself scarcely considered the moral aspects of life, sticking predominantly to aesthetic and strategic matters (Sayer 2005a; Lamont 1992; Ignatow 2009). But more importantly, the framing of his key concept of habitus makes explaining many aspects of the engagement © The Author(s) 2020 O. Abbott, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31822-2_6

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with morality in practice problematic. Sayer (2005a: 23), for example, argues that ‘his emphasis on the adaptation of the habitus to actors’ circumstances exaggerates actors’ compliance with their position and makes resistance appear to be an anomalous form of behaviour occasioned only by special circumstances’. Likewise, his strident emphasis on the pre-reflexive and the dispositional means that Bourdieu struggles to account for how everyday moral actions often engender at least some degree of ‘mundane’ reflexivity, whereas more complex forms of moral action require a degree of selfreflection that Bourdieu resists (Sayer 2005a; Aboulafia 1999; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). Attempts have been made to add a greater degree of reflexivity to Bourdieu’s habitus precisely for the end of explaining moral action (Sayer 2005a). However, I argue that a more concerted theory of self and reflexivity in action, of the kind expounded by Mead (1934), is necessary to such an explanation, not least because it allows us to account for how engagement in morality in practice is on occasion enacted in relation to individuated dialogic subjectivity, which, as exemplified previously, is necessary to fully account for how such action is approached. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate why Mead’s theoretical framework provides a sound basis for a relational sociology of engagement with morality in practice. I argue that there are several reasons why his work is wellsuited to this task. Firstly, Mead’s theory emphasises the necessity of moral integration and habituation as an inherent aspect of the emergence of the self, something that Bourdieu largely overlooks. Secondly, Mead’s theory has the additional advantage on this front of explaining how the interactional process of socialisation brings generalised moral expectation into the experience of the individual. Thirdly, Mead’s theory accounts more directly for the place of ‘mundane’ reflexivity in interaction, which I have argued is necessary to the responsive enactment of moral concern in practice. And finally, Mead’s theory of the self is based on a simultaneous process of socialisation and individuation, which provides a processual explanation of the relational emergence of the dialogic capacity to engage with one’s own subjective positions on moral issues in a manner that has the potential to be transformative of action. Furthermore, a notable value of taking Mead’s work as a basis is that it means we do not need to look beyond interaction for an explanation of how moral phenomena are sustained and transformed across a social context. It allows individual moral actions and subjectivities to be conceptualised as interactional products that reflect, refract, and variably constitute the relational context that moulds the interactions in which these actions and subjectivities are formed.

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Habitus and Moral Dispositions As was argued previously, a coherent theory of how morality is done in practice necessarily rests on an account of dispositional comportment towards ordinary moral expectations within a social context. This is because, as Dreyfus (2014) has highlighted, the bulk of our moral action occurs at the level of responsive ‘ethical comportment’, which is performed predominantly through the enactment of habituated dispositions sedimented into us socially a long time prior to our discursive capacity for formulations of moral worth. This habituation allows us to embody informal moral typifications in response to the social situation at hand with an intuitive ‘feel’ rather than a pre-formed plan (Burkitt 2008). Our social habituation produces a background of taken-for-granted understandings and responses, and is demonstrated in ordinary normative terms as we comport and modulate our body to generalised behavioural expectations, in our manners, in politeness, as we inhabit social space respectfully, as we don’t lash out, yell, and intimidate to get what we want as we go about our day (Burkitt 2008; Sie 2014). These aspects of behaviour are enacted so routinely and so unthinkingly that it is easy to forget that they reflect the normative expectations of our social world most completely, and that our capacity to enact these standards (and indeed that we would often consider it implausible to not enact them) is itself a product of intricate social integration. It is for this reason that some authors have sought to utilise a modified version of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to explain ethical dispositions (see, for example, Sayer 2005a; Ignatow 2009). Bourdieu’s (1992: 53) concept of habitus, defined as ‘[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions’, expressly emphasises habitual, dispositional, pre-reflexive engagement in practice via practical schemes of how to behave, over reflexive, conscious deliberation on the part of the individual (Bottero 2010). Habitus describes the deeply entrenched dispositions, ‘inculcated in the earliest years of life and constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group’ (Bourdieu 1977: 15), which fundamentally orient our ‘prediscursive capacities’ of action and thought ‘at a subconscious level’ (Wacquant 2005: 445; Sayer 2005a: 24). These dispositions are sedimented into us through reiterated practice, and thus reflect the social fields through which we most consistently move. Habitus patterns our dispositions both for understanding the world and acting within it, providing practical bodily and cognitive schemes that are so deeply engrained within us that they are experienced as

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second nature and enacted subconsciously, without deliberation (Bourdieu 1984; May 2013). Our sedimented dispositions allow us to respond to the social environments in which we have been habituated with a ‘feel for the game’, in much the same way that the skilled tennis player responds to a shot with a prereflexive immediacy that embodies their acquired experience and training without conscious recollection and planning (Bourdieu 1992: 56). Habitus provides ‘objectively organized’ ‘strategies’ for action, but the strategy employed for a particular interaction is one among many possible strategies made available by the habitus, which are differentially utilised in relation to the social fields in which they are enacted (Bourdieu 1977: 73; Thorpe 2013). Habitus engenders within us both cognitive frames for understanding the world and practical schemes for acting within it, which reflect the social context in which they are formed and thus allows us to respond with a degree of transposable comportment to the situation at hand without discursive recourse (Sayer 2005a). It is in similar terms that Dreyfus (2014) describes the skilful embodied ethical comportment through which the majority of our moral work is done, as described in Chapter 3. Yet, while the analytic depth with which Bourdieu’s oeuvre scrutinises the differentiated formation and enactment of habituated dispositions in practice is exemplary, Bourdieu seldom considered the implications of the habitus for moral dispositions (Sayer 2005a; Ignatow 2009; Lamont 1992). Bourdieu’s extensive works on action and struggle within social fields ‘pay little attention to their moral aspects, tending instead to emphasise their habitual and instrumental character, as if a combination of habit and the pursuit of status and power animate everything’, which tends to present moral action and consideration as being in some way anomalous (Sayer 2005a: 16). Lamont (1992) similarly argues that because Bourdieu’s arguments rest on the core postulation that social attitudes are governed predominantly by an actor’s relational position within a social context, determined by their relative ability to operationalise degrees of capital, the arrangement of his theoretical stance means he ‘vastly underestimates’ the crucial ‘role of moral criteria in social judgments’ (Lamont 1992: 181; Ignatow 2009: 99). While the likes of Sayer (2005a), Lamont (1992), and Ignatow (2009) are critical of what they see as Bourdieu’s notable undervaluing of the role of the moral in social life, they argue that this does not mean that his theory of habitus is entirely incompatible with notions of normative evaluation, nor does it mean that Bourdieu’s concepts are not of great value

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to explanations of moral dispositions. Because so much ‘of our normative orientation to the world is at the level of dispositions and emotions’, which are ‘acquired through practice as intelligent dispositions which enable us often to react appropriately to situations instantly, without reflection’, Sayer (2005b: 951) argues that when further extended to be inclusive of ordinary normative and evaluative modes of thought and action, habitus allows us to explain how and why ‘lay moralities’ that underpin so much of social interaction can come to be embodied pre-reflexively in practice. Similarly to Mead (1934), Bourdieu saw dispositions as being formed within relations. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, Bourdieu (1984) prioritises ‘structural relations’ over interactional relations in the formation of habitus. A particular strength of Bourdieu’s framework is that it is based on a dynamic picture of society as being comprised of intersecting socially ranked fields, which are made up of different eclections of modes of practice. Habitus forms within the social fields through which we move, and the social fields through which we are most likely to move reflects our social position within society. The complexity of Bourdieu’s habitus model means that it is adept at explaining dramatic variation in moral dispositions according to social context and relative social positioning (Sayer 2005a). However, as even the authors who seek to extend Bourdieu’s work into the moral realm acknowledge, notable limitations in his framework present real difficulties for its application to questions of how the normative and evaluative aspects of social life are engaged with in practice (Sayer 2005a; Lamont 1992). The major reason for this is that Bourdieu overplays the influence of habitus in regimenting action and emphasises the dispositional in a way that dilutes the significance of the role played by reflexivity in social life (Sayer 2005a; Bottero 2010; Crossley 2006; King 2000). Importantly, Bourdieu emphasised the ‘priority of originary experiences’ in orienting habitus, and consequently in orienting dispositions of thought and action. To Bourdieu, this produces a rather decided ‘closure of the system of dispositions that constitute habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). As Bourdieu puts it: Early experiences have a particular weight because the habitus tends to ensure its own constancy and its defence against change through the selection it makes within new information by rejecting information capable of calling into question its accumulated information… Through the systematic “choices” it makes among the places, events and people that might be frequented, the

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habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges. (Bourdieu 1992: 61–62)

It was highlighted in Chapter 2 that Bourdieu expressly locates ‘interactional relations’ as secondary to ‘structural relations’ in the formation of dispositions. This is because, for Bourdieu, the habitus sediments within us modes of action and thought that reflect our position within structural relations and subsequently dispose us towards interacting with those with whom our habitus coheres (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Bourdieu 1989; Crossley 2011). It is of course largely fair to say that people tend to associate with people similar to themselves, as social positioning renders us more likely to come into contact and feel comfortable with those similar to ourselves (Crossley 2011). However, by relegating interactional relations as epiphonema on the one hand, and by overemphasising the priority of early experiences on the other, Bourdieu has been accused of underestimating ‘the way agents modify and reconstruct their dispositions throughout their lives, as they traverse different social contexts and contacts’ (Bottero 2009: 409). At least in part, this reflects the fact that in a complex social world, multitudes of perspectives continually collide, which ‘unsettles the taken-for-granted feel of the world which the habitus otherwise furnishes’ (Crossley 2006: 90; Lahire 2003). By orienting practice around the early formation of dispositions in relation to aggregated positions within social space, any such transformations in dispositions and perspectives are presented by Bourdieu as being in some way mysteriously ‘scholastic’, rather than as being a relatively ordinary outcome of direct interaction with the multiple and varying perspectives engendered by complex social life. The sedimentation of our habitus in our early experiences, coupled with the underplaying of interactional relations, leads Bourdieu’s work to present agents as generally being able to reside ‘naively within their own habitual perspective, taking it for granted’, which underestimates the extent to which ‘perspectives are constantly coming into contact, affording agents a new viewpoint on themselves and generating hybrid cultural forms which can never achieve complete taken-for-grantedness’ (Crossley 2006: 90). Indeed, Bourdieu’s relegation of the transformative influence of direct interactional relations is tied to his concurrent undervaluation of the necessary role played by reflexivity in social life (Crossley 2006; Sayer 2005a; Archer 2003). Bourdieu has a tendency to not just emphasise but also to ‘valorize’ the pre-reflexive (Aboulafia 1999: 161), elevating dispositional practice to being the medium through which the agent expresses

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‘the truth of the practical relation to the practice’ (Bourdieu 1992: 91), while reflexivity is cast as playing a ‘subordinate’ and even disruptive role: [T]here is every reason to think that as soon as he reflects on his practice… the agent loses any chance of expressing the truth of his practice, and especially the truth of the practical relation to the practice… Reflexive attention to action itself, when it occurs (almost invariably only when the automatisms have broken down), remains subordinate to the pursuit of the result and to the search (not necessarily perceived in this way) for the maximum effectiveness of the effort expended. (Bourdieu 1992: 91)

Rather than presenting reflexivity and pre-reflexivity as integrated phases of experience that we variously shift between in interaction, Bourdieu bifurcates the two, depicting the invocation of reflexivity as problematic to the flow of practice, which is most effectively pursued and expressed prereflexively. However, as has been discussed, a growing trend within relational sociology argues that this view led Bourdieu to underestimate the degree of reflexivity that is necessitated in the course of even mundane interaction, and indeed the role that such reflexivity plays in the stabilisation and calibration of routine practice (see, for example, Lahire 2003; Sayer 2005a; Bottero 2010; King 2000; Donati and Archer 2015; Crossley 2006). While it is undoubtedly true that the bulk of our action is conducted at the level of the ‘tacit, habitual and taken-for-granted’ (Emirbayer and Maynard 2010: 239), and while reflexivity is viewed (in the pragmatist terms favoured here) as an ‘intermediary phase’ of action that is engendered by the ‘cropping up of unanticipated problems’, it is argued that the complex indeterminacy of intersubjective practice means that this ‘cropping up’ is a more regular feature of interaction, and thus demands a greater degree of reflexivity, than Bourdieu’s dispositional model tends to allow (Joas 1990: 186; Sayer 2005a; Bottero 2010; King 2000). This view, favoured by Mead (1934), does not see ‘reflective activities as somehow opposed to – and less authentic than – non-reflective ones, but as intertwined with them in our daily affairs’ (Aboulafia 1999: 161). The basis of the argument is that the complexity, variation, and ‘fuzziness’ of social practice—which Bourdieu himself accented—destabilises the comprehensive explanatory power of dispositional habitus that Bourdieu attributed to it. ‘To operate within the “rules of the game” is not just a question of acting upon embedded social instinct, nor of the interface of that instinct with

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objective structural relations; it also depends upon the active alignment’ of practical actions by interdependent social agents ‘who profoundly affect each other as they interact’ (Bottero 2009: 414). We reside and interact within a complex world of intersubjective (but highly variable) meaning that diverges and flows between actors and specific social contexts, and which thus requires at least some degree of ‘mundane’ reflexive calibration of action on the part of the individual in the moment of practice (Bottero 2009). Indeed, it was argued and exemplified in the last chapter that while the bulk of our moral action is conducted in terms of a habituated moral comportment, this itself frequently necessitates a degree of responsiveness to the vicissitudes of the situation at hand, the active alignment of conduct, the enactment of micro-practices of sanctioning, correcting and averting, as well as the measuring of our responses and the evaluations of the responses of others. Because Bourdieu loads so much on the dispositional, he overlooks the role of ‘mundane’ reflexive engagement in intersubjective practice. But he also effectively jettisons the more occasional role of tangible reflexive engagement with one’s own subjectivity in transforming the course of our action and the character of our perspectives (Archer 2003; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; King 2000): In bending the stick to correct for overly rationalised approaches which ignore embodiment, Bourdieu (like many other social theorists) ignores a mundane but critical aspect of our lives: ‘internal conversations’. Our stream of consciousness – ranging from day-dreaming, through more or less distracted ruminating, to concentrated reflections on particular problems – are central to our lives, going beyond thinking about what we are doing to other, often more serious matters. (Sayer 2005a: 29)

This in itself makes it hard to get Bourdieu’s theory to cohere with empirical research into how morality is done in practice because, while the lion’s share of our moral action is indeed conducted in terms of intuitive and intersubjectively emergent responsiveness, as described in the last chapter a notable aspect of our moral conduct in everyday life by its nature requires a degree of concerted dialogic rumination (Sayer 2005a; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). As has been illustrated through research into family and personal life, while familial and interpersonal relationships are oriented by socially held moral expectations and obligations, and while the way decisions are faced reflects our social positioning in relation to

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others as well as structural factors, complex considerations and decisions are frequently weighed up dialogically and negotiated in relation to both the perceived and actual views and responses of others, which is conducted in relation to the unfurling of circumstance (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009; Finch 1989; Smart and Neale 1999). The regularity with which everyday moral considerations leads to ‘relational subjects being reflexive about their social relationships’ (Archer 2013: 145) has been well-documented in empirical study (Gilligan 1982; May 2008; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009; Smart and Neale 1999). What is more, such research has pointed towards this reflexivity being conducted in terms of ‘internal dialogues’, in which we rehearse and orientate our positions in relation to the anticipated responses of both specific and generalised others, but also in which we ruminate upon our own views, upon what we think is right, on how we should have acted, how we intend to act in the future, on how our action affirms or disaffirms our view of ourselves, and so forth (May 2013: 56; Burkitt 2008; Crossley 2006; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007; Burr 2009). Our internal conversations can thus be seen as being had in reflexive dialogue both with the standpoints of others, but also with our own standpoints and perspectives, which allows a sense of ownership to be assumed by the individual as a moral actor over their assessment of what the ‘right thing to do’ is (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). As will be argued shortly, ‘the awareness I have of myself, my thoughts and feelings,… including the ethical judgements I make about myself’ emerge through social intercourse, which means that ‘the dialogue[s] I hold with myself’ reflect the relational entanglements in which they are constituted and enacted (Burkitt 2008: 74). Nonetheless, and importantly for the present topic, Bourdieu underestimates the reflexive capacities of the individual to engage with and articulate their understanding of the world, and construe their action within it (Crossley 2006; Sayer 2005a; Archer 2003). Moral understandings and decisions should indeed be seen as being framed by much broader networks of relations. However, at the level of experience, they emerge in practice through actual interactional relations, which often engenders a degree of dialogic consideration.

Mead and the Social Emergence of the Self While Sayer (2005a), for example, seeks to integrate moral dimensions into Bourdieu’s framework, in what follows, I argue that Meadian arguments

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for the emergence of self are better suited to tying together a relational explanation of how people come to be able to engage with morality in practice in the ways that they do.1 Indeed, I argue that taking a Meadian approach to the emergence of subjectivity, and utilising his arguments regarding the role that reflective consciousness plays in action, allows us to explain the key aspects of a sociological account of how morality in practice is enacted. There are three key aspects to my argument on this front. Firstly, in sociological terms, the primary advantage of Mead’s theory is that it provides an interactional account of how and why the individual self is necessarily socially constituted and socially embedded, and thus also how and why individual subjectivity is necessarily entangled in interactional relations. Significantly for the present topic, Mead (1925) describes the emergence of the self as primarily a communicatively mediated process of socialisation through which the person’s experience is integrated with the internalised attitudes of others, and through which ‘the behavioral expectations of one’s social surroundings… as it were, migrat[e] into the person’ (Habermas 1995: 179). I will argue that, upon this basis, Mead’s approach to the self is able to provide an interactionist account of the moral habituation of subjectivity (Bottero 2019; Aboulafia 1999). However, and secondly, a notable advantage of Mead’s work lies in its description of the emergence of the self as a process of habituated internalisation of generalised expectations that concurrently engenders the development of a reflexively capable agent, who has at least some capacity to direct and rehash her action in relation to both the situation at hand and her subjective position on the world, which has itself been produced through the social emergence of the self. By foregrounding the role of reflexivity in the emergence of the self, and by maintaining a more efficacious role of reflexivity in interaction, much more so than Bourdieu, Mead is able to leave room for the dialogic processes in which the individual can engage with different perspectives on various issues and sound them off against each other, passing her own judgement and establishing her own perspectives (Crossley 2011). Thirdly, Mead’s work provides us with a description of how actors engage with practice as they do, at varying levels of habitude and reflexive deliberation, which coheres with the description of how morality in practice is engaged with, as described in the last chapter. Mead’s description of the social emergence of the self has become something of a touchstone in sociological theory, often as a conceptual byword for ‘socialisation’. However, what is often overlooked in its straightforward application is that Mead’s

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theory of the self is founded upon a complex depiction of how intersubjective action is conducted, which takes the capacity to view oneself and one’s action from the perspective of an other as fundamentally necessary to the coordination of practical activity (Bottero 2019). What is sometimes misconstrued is that ‘[i]t was not the relationship between… individual action and social order, but rather the relation between action and consciousness, that moved Mead’s thought forwards’, and this central concern was based upon his pragmatist ‘interpretation of consciousness as a phase of action that is functional for the successful continuation of the action’ (Joas 1990: 177). In what follows, I will briefly set out the general theoretical propositions of Mead’s arguments, before showing how they can be carried forward into a relational explanation of how morality is engaged with in practice. Self-Consciousness and Self The most basic and well-known feature of Mead’s work is his argument that we can only develop the capacities associated with selfhood through social interaction. He argued that having a self means having the capacity for self-conscious awareness of oneself as an object of reflexive consideration. However, in Mead’s view, self-consciousness, the ability to ‘reflect, and indeed reflexively contemplate ourselves’ are not a primordial capacity with which human individuals are imbued from birth, but rather ‘are secondary structures [of consciousness] that emerge out of our more primordial, practical engagement with the world from which we can never extract ourselves’ (Crossley 2011: 75). What is primary for Mead is our inherent embeddedness and practical involvement in the social world, and it is from this that ‘individual minds and selves’ form and develop within social relations through a ‘process of social experience and activity’ (Mead 1934: 135, 222). For Mead (1934: 194), while self-consciousness is underpinned by the basic human capacity for reflexivity, its development relies upon the individual being able to assume ‘a position of reacting in himself [sic]’ in the sense that the individual can respond to themselves as an object of their own consideration. Mead (1934: 69) argues that communicative interaction, particularly through language, is integral to this process: ‘the critical importance of language in the development of human experience lies in this fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other’. In the case of the vocal gesture, the individual is able

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to hear the words they speak as they are spoken and receive the response of the other simultaneously. It is within this process that ‘the capacity for responding to one’s own gestures as the other responds to them emerges, and with it there develops a consciousness of meaning based on a functional identity of responses’ (Aboulafia 1995: 98). This budding consciousness of meaning allows for gestures to become ‘significant symbols’, which are employed under the assumption that the gesture carries an affinity of meaning between the actor and the recipient of the action. For Mead (1912), the nascent understanding of shared meanings of gestures is integral to the development of self-consciousness because being able to respond to one’s own action as the other responds to it provides the basis for the individual to experience their action as an object of their own subjectivity. A classic example here is that a child’s increasing cognitive capacities allow her to recognise herself as the generating cause of certain noises and actions that she comes to identify as her vocalisations and actions (Burkitt 2008). As she develops, the child comes to understand certain actions, such as nodding or pointing, as eliciting certain responses from others. She begins to recognise the meanings that such noises and actions carry in relation to the responses of others—if she doesn’t say please then food won’t be given, or if she shrieks she will be told off. It is upon this basis that a subjective awareness of herself as an actor, who is able to recognise and respond to her own action as the other does, develops. This is where what Mead (1913) refers to as the ‘I’ emerges, which is to say that the child develops a sense of herself as a subject who acts, but who can also assume a perspective towards her action, having arrived at some degree of awareness of how her action will be received. The ‘I’, the ‘Me’, and the ‘Generalised Other’ For Mead, the ‘I’ is the ‘actor in the present tense’, in the process of doing the acting, doing the monitoring of action, and, as the self develops, doing the reflecting upon oneself (Crossley 2011: 94). Having assumed a position of being able to react to herself in terms of adjusting her own action to align with probable responses, the individual gradually develops a sense of the self as an object; firstly as an object for the consideration of others, and latterly as an object of her own reflective engagement (Mead 1934). Indeed, this process begins as the attitudes of others become internalised in relation to one’s own action: the parent explains to the child that she did not get what she wanted because she did not say please, which in time allows the child to

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self-referentially assert to herself that she should say please if she would like something (May 2013). In this way, the child is developing the capacity to assume the attitudes of others and to take them towards her own self, which is reflected upon as an object for self-referential consideration through the I. At its early stages, the child takes on, reflects upon herself, and acts in relation to the attitudes of specific others (most notably caregivers) in specific interactional settings. However, Mead commonly reserves the ‘me’ to refer to stages further on in the development of the self in which the individual has taken on the attitudes of more ‘generalised others’, which are engaged with more abstractly (Aboulafia 1999). As the child’s sphere of interaction increases, alongside the development of the child’s capacity for self-regulation, the sources of behavioural direction diversify from specific authoritative voices of primary caregivers into a more generalised understanding of the standards of behaviour expected by the broadly construed communities of which she is part. It is here that the ‘me’ aspect of the self develops as the collected attitudes of others, which the individual can take towards herself and utilise in her engagement with herself as an object; she develops a me that is formed from interactionally absorbed attitudes, and it is the collected attitudes of others that form the content of the me that is reflected on as an object by the I (Mead 1925). Mead (1934: 152) thus argues that ‘self-consciousness in the full sense of the term’ is attained as the individual is able to view themselves not just from the standpoint of a specific other, but also from the perspective of the generalised other, understood abstractly as generalised expectations, which are carried forth into interaction. This entails a more generalised understanding of the behavioural expectations of one’s social group, which come to be gradually integrated into the consciousness of the individual through their mediated socialisation into their social environment, to the extent that the individual is usually able to enact and engage with these generalised behavioural expectations in the flow of her action (Mead 1934; Burkitt 2008). As such, for Mead, the emergence of the self, the taking on of the attitudes of others, and the capacity to engage with the generalised other as part of self-conscious sociality, develop as part of our habituation into the behavioural expectations of our group, which in this process come to migrate into the individual’s consciousness (Mead 1925; Habermas 1995). The mediated socialisation that arises with the development of the me thus ‘proves to be a conservative force’ that functions largely as an instrument of habituation into conventionality, through the engendering of

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habits and dispositions that largely align with the group (Habermas 1995: 180). It is important to recognise, however, that the development of the socialised self does not mean that the individual merely and uncomplicatedly fulfils shared expectations of conduct in their embodied action. There are several reasons for this. Often, of course, the impulsive response of the I exceeds the me—the I may produce a response that we realise through the me was the wrong thing to say, or we get swept away in anger, and we come to lambast ourselves in relation to the me and perhaps seek to make amends (Mead 1925; Burkitt 2008). Relatedly, social interactions, while often standardised, are also minutely varied, and demand a flexible, adaptive, and often creative responsiveness that cannot be provided by a straightforward transposition of internalised social attitudes on to the present situation. What is more, the attitudes of others that comprise the ‘me’ are diverse, and form a generalised other that is polyvocal and situationally variable, which is experienced and dialogically engaged with from hugely stratified and individuated standpoints, meaning that the self (and the instilled modes and attitudes towards conduct that it comprises) is constructed and engaged with from a multiplicity of complex and variable perspectives (Mead 1934; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). But more importantly still, the development of the I as the thinking, acting, reflecting phase of subjectivity, also facilitates the capacity for critical and evaluative responses that allow us to assume a position that can be resistant to social pressure (Bottero 2019). It is through dialogue with the me conducted via the I that, for example, various factors get weighed up before deciding that moving away from home is the correct decision, even if family members may be hurt, or that allows us to arrive at the conclusion that our consumption practices need to change, or that may on occasion drive the remonstration to a senior colleague that ‘I feel the way you are treating your subordinates is very unfair’. Such views are personal, and they may be non-compliant to much of our habituation. However, they are socially constituted responses that are formed between a differentiated, reflective and actuating I, and a me that is constituted through the plurality of collected attitudes of others it encounters, which, combined, constitute the subjective positions and responses of the individual.

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Individuation and Dialogic Selfhood Thus, while it is the case that the social integration through which the self emerges profoundly habituates our social consciousness into our surroundings, this is not a process of indoctrination, and neither is the individual inactive within this process. Most significantly, the point to be followed up briefly here is that the emergence of the self is productive of an ‘intersubjectively mediated self-understanding’, which allows the individual to reflexively engage with herself through internal dialogue, and to assume standpoints that she recognises as being her own (Habermas 1995: 153). Indeed, one of the key advantages of Mead’s (1925, 1934) theory lies in its capacity to explain individuation as being an inherent facet of the social constitution of the self, in which interactional engagement within a complex social context is productive of a simultaneously embedded and individuated subjectivity, which the individual is able to reflexively acknowledge and engage with in the course of her existence. This process begins with the development of a reflexively capable mind through the taking of attitudes of others, which provide substance to the me, and means that the me ‘serves as a standard reference’ for myself within moments of evaluation (Joas 1997: 119). However, as this initiates within the individual the capacity to respond to and converse with herself, and as the individual’s consciousness develops alongside the voices of others that become increasingly abstracted and generalised, the reflected on me also begins to serve ‘as an element of my emerging self-image’ (Joas 1997: 119). This process thus begins to become productive of a self that the individual is conscious of and identifies as being her own. However, the emergent self develops more completely into an individuated self-understanding as the relations from which we emerge as selves become increasingly complex and diverse in the course of our interactions. Individuals are socialised within a plurality of relationships and institutional settings, each of which ‘enforces its own range of meanings, values, and practices’, meaning that the object of our self-consciousness is populated by a diversity of perspectives that must be negotiated (May 2013: 48). The encountering of a plurality of attitudes leads to a plurality of reference points for the me, and consequently, in order ‘for consistent behaviour to be at all possible, these different “me’s” must be synthesized into a unitary self-image’ (Joas 1997: 119). This is a crucial aspect in emerging as a self because it is only from this emergent recognition of her own subjectivity that the individual becomes able to generalise and integrate the diversity of perspectives that she faces

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in an abstract manner; ‘and to the extent that this occurs, there arises an internal center for the self-steering of individually accountable conduct’ (Habermas 1995: 152). What is particularly significant for Mead (1934: 140), and for what follows, is that this process provides the basis for a self that is an object of internal dialogue, which means the individual becomes able ‘to converse with himself as he had communicated with others’. The multitude of attitudes we encounter and continue to engage with in the course of our life populates the object of our self-consciousness with an expanding plurality of others and generalised perspectives, which we engage with and find our own voice in relation to (Crossley 2006). From our interactions and to our particular stratified position in the world, we variably take on generalised and specific attitudes, which are available to our dialogic engagement. For the most part, the developed self-consciousness is habituated to the extent that the explicit and generalised attitudes of others rescind into ‘barely necessary cues’ that reside in the consciousness both as taken-forgranted modes of action and in the self-monitoring of interactional activity (Mead 1913: 378). However, at problematic junctures, ‘when weighing up a potential course of action, we hold imaginary dialogues with our generalized others in which we anticipate possible reactions to what we are about to do. In these internal dialogues, we can challenge existing rules, and if we feel that we have constructed a persuasive reply to potential criticism, or do not care about this criticism, we can act out this challenge in practice’ (May 2013: 56). Once internalised, generalised and specific attitudes are engaged with dialogically, through a process in which the ‘individual can bring the different perspectives into play, against one another, carving out a distinct perspective for their self in the process’ (Crossley 2011: 86). It is in such internal dialogues, which are generated through interaction, that we establish, consider, and potentially transform our perspectives, viewpoints, and modes of action. The Self in Action The generation of internal dialogues in interaction raises a final but integral point to be dealt with before we move into the specific application of this approach to morality in practice. Mead saw the processes of reflexive consciousness not as an abstract, detached facility that only bares occasional relevance on action, but rather conceptualised of the emergence of the self

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and the generalised other in order to explain the vital role that reflective self-consciousness plays in accompanying our actions (Joas 1997). The major shortcoming identified of Bourdieu’s work is that he underplays how ‘actors are capable of distancing themselves (at least in partial [sic] exploratory ways) from… schemas, habits, and traditions’ as ‘they respond to the challenges and uncertainties of social life’, and also that he consequently underplays how ‘imaginative engagement of the future is also a crucial component of the effort of human actors’, both in the immediacy of practice and in the deliberative consideration of themselves and their action (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 984). Mead’s (1934) theory of the development of self-consciousness, however, is founded upon a view of action in which reflexivity is fundamentally necessitated. It is important to stress that, similarly to Bourdieu, Mead (1934) argued strongly that we predominantly engage with the world through a habitual and non-reflective taken-for-grantedness, which rests upon ‘a host of background beliefs and assumptions that are not raised to the level of (self) conscious reflection unless problems occur that warrant addressing’ (Aboulafia 2016). However, he also emphasised that actors do routinely encounter problematic and indeterminate situations that entail conflicting inclinations of how to act, which require the exercise of judgement (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). The use of Mead’s work (along with that of Dewey) as a theory of action, as a theory of ‘practical intersubjectivity’, has consequently been re-appropriated within practice theories for its capacity to account for the self-monitoring and inventive consciousness that are necessary to the consummation of action (Joas 1996, 1997: 14; Emirbayer and Maynard 2010; Bottero 2019). A particular insight of Mead’s pragmatist theory of action concerns the invocation of mundane consciousness in response to problematic features of interactional situations. The intersubjectively emergent and indeterminant nature of practice, coupled with conflicting impulses and tendencies of how to act that arise in the self-conscious agent, means that the possibility of consummating action in non-reflective terms is frequently hindered (de Waal 2008). Such problematic and indeterminate situations provoke the ‘awakening of delayed and conflicting responses’ within the actor (Mead 1932: 71), and thus call out for an imaginative distancing from the immediacy of one’s own response, and engenders a conscious attention of how to proceed (Joas 1990). It is thus our confrontation with problematic situations, which arise as a result of the ‘situatedness of actors in multiple temporally evolving relational contexts’, that Mead argues provides the impetus of reflective consciousness (Emirbayer and Mische 1998:

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989; de Waal 2008). It is Mead’s view that the coordination of action under such circumstances depends upon the individual being able to regard themselves from the standpoint of the other, and it is for this reason that Mead saw consciousness as a phase of action that is necessary to its continuation (Bottero 2019; Joas 1990). As we shall see in the coming section, the confrontation of problematic circumstances, and the place of the capacity for self-conscious response in which the perspective of the other can be assumed, is vital to explaining how morality is engaged with in practice.

Mead, Moral Habituation, and Moral Consciousness In what follows, I contend that these features of Mead’s work can be transposed directly into a relational account of our capacity to engage with morality in practice at the various levels of habituation and deliberation set out previously, while also allowing us to depict the social emergence of a moral subjectivity that is thoroughly situated on the one hand, and individuated and reflexively engaged with by the actor in a way that is potentially transformative of their action and perspectives on the other. I begin with the arguments for using Mead’s theory as the basis of an argument for moral habituation. Although much of the impetus for the argument of our habitual responsiveness to the situation at hand has been drawn from the work of Dreyfus (2014), it was commented in Chapter 3 that Dreyfus’s own model of the development of ‘ethical expertise’ runs a little thin, and leaves much to be desired in terms of its consideration of the social processes involved in the kind of habituated moral comportment that he describes. And while Bourdieu largely disregarded the role of moral evaluation as an ordinary and regular feature of everyday life, and thus gave virtually no heed to the place of the ‘normative orientation of the habitus, especially its ethical dispositions’ (Sayer 2005a: 42–43), Mead takes normativity and moral evaluation to be an indispensable facet of social existence, which consequently plays an integral role in the emergence of the self. Indeed, in many ways, for Mead, emerging as a self means emerging as a ‘moral’ self, in that it entails a thorough habituation into the behavioural expectations of our group, which are internalised to the extent that they become inculcated in our practical action, both in our non-reflective and taken-for-granted activity, and in the mundane self-monitoring and evaluative considerations of the situation at hand (Mead 1925; Habermas 1995; Burkitt 2008; May 2013).

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Mead in fact conceptualises the self and its emergence in fundamentally normative terms: ‘The individual possesses a self only in relation to the selves of the other members of his social group; and the structure of his self expresses or reflects the general behavior pattern of this social group to which he belongs’ (Mead 1934: 7). From Mead’s perspective then, ‘the self is not individual as such but an expression of the general social patterns’ in which it was formed (Hjortkjær and Willert 2013: 468). As we have seen, the human capacity for linguistically mediated reflexive awareness allows the individual to recognise her action from the perspective of the other, thus rendering possible symbolic interaction, which in turn ‘allows one to monitor and control one’s own behaviour through self-referential cognition’ (Habermas 1995: 179). It is in this process that the attitudes of others come to populate the object of the individual’s budding self-consciousness, and it is through the fact that the individual comes to perceive their self as a social object of the other that ‘a new reflexive agency is formed through which [the] ego makes the behavioral expectations of others into his own’ (Habermas 1995: 179). One of the key tenets of Mead’s theory is thus that the process of emerging as a self from one’s social surroundings embeds the individual within the normative expectations and values of this environment, which migrate into the consciousness of the person, and come to be formative of her action. For Mead (1925), moral habituation is integrated into the process of emerging as a self because, from an early age, our practical activity in the social world ‘depends upon the internalization of the agencies that monitor behavior, which migrate, as it were, from without to within’ (Habermas 1995: 152). To begin with, these attitudes tend to be the specific attitudes of specific others, most often parents and caregivers, which are initially taught by rote, and a key aspect of its functioning mechanism lies in the fulfilment and continuation of practical activity: if you want something you need to ask nicely, if you want other children to play with you, then you can’t steal their toys (Mead 1934). The instructions and commands given to children come loaded with ‘moral evaluation and emotional intonations of approval or disapproval’ that the child gradually comes to be able to comprehend in relation to her developing reflexive self (Burkitt 2008: 59). As the attitudes of others come to be integrated into the child’s experience, ‘[h]is reactions now are not simply the direct responses to the social and physical things about him, but are also to this self which has become an object of continually increasing moment [sic]… Thus a child comes to regard himself as a playmate who must share his toys with other children

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if he is to keep them as playmates’ (Mead 1934: 371). This stage represents the simple self-regulation of one’s conduct in relation to learnt rules that facilitate the continuation of gratification (Mead 1934). However, as this process continues, the individual becomes able to internalise the more complex attitudes taken towards her by others in relation to her emerging self-consciousness. She comes to recognise that if she acts in a certain way, she will be thought of by her caregivers as being bad, rude, or ungrateful. This engenders a new dimension of evaluative self-judgement, notably in the form of shame and pride, as the child comes to understand how she may be judged by others (Cooley 1902). The process of socialisation thus begins as ‘the growing subject takes what the reference person expects of him and first makes it his own’ (Habermas 1995: 152). However, the expanding and diversified sphere of the child’s interaction both engenders and necessitates a more circumspect and generalised understanding of behavioural expectations, which comes to build up the ‘me’ of the developing self. The me is constituted as our social integration puts demands upon our action, which are internalised to the extent that they become implicit in our practical activity. The me is, then, constituted not just as the object of abstracted self-awareness, but rather becomes a thoroughly integrated phase of the individual’s action that ‘places limits, from the intersubjective perspective of a social “we”, on the impulsiveness and the creativity of a resistant and productive “I”’ in the immediacy of interaction (Habermas 1995: 180). What is significant here is that the action of the socialised self is integrated with the generalised expectations of social practice held by the group. These are taken on and become formative of the me, which directs and inhibits the impulsiveness of the I in our practical action through the internal modulation of one’s own conduct and by directing motives of action. The emergence of the self is thus a process of being practically inducted into the shared norms and expectations of our social world via social interaction, which gradually come to be internalised to the extent that they form the basis of a nuanced practical comprehension of social meaning, and come to fundamentally mould the parameters of our understanding of the social world and our practice within it. This is initially a process of instructed habituation into ordinary behavioural expectations of our social group, which gradually develops into embodied dispositionally enacted understandings of the normative expectations of social practice, so well described by Goffman (1959). These are learnt from and carried into a

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multitude of variably complex interactional exchanges, our effective participation in which generally relies on the enactment of such normative expectations of conduct in the flow of practice (Goffman 1959; Burkitt 2008). In the first instance then, the self-regulation of conduct in relation to the ‘social attitudes of the social group or community’ of which we are part, for Mead, thus provides the mechanisms through which ‘the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members; for it is in this form that the social process or community enters as a determining factor into the individual’s thinking’ (Mead 1934: 155, 156). The emergence of the self through socialisation thus situates the actor into the taken-for-granted background understanding upon which their basic moral competency is founded, which allows the individual to engage with the ordinary normative parameters of their social world with an embodied dispositional comportment. However, there is much more to this process than the socialised internalisation of habituated repertoires of normative action. As well as habituating action, our socialisation into a ‘thoroughly moral world’ (Sie 2014: 279) embeds us into deeply valued and evaluative terms and sentiments, into not just normative but also moral questions of ‘how people should treat others and be treated by them’, and into questions of how our action affects the well-being of others (Sayer 2005b: 251). The individual is thus being integrated into normative expectations and evaluative judgements, which is productive of the capacity for judgements to be formed and enacted. As children, we are not simply told how to act, nor does our social development entail the uncomplicated absorption of prescriptive rules to follow for all circumstance. We are also being taught, through our interactional integration into practice, to evaluate ourselves, to take responsibility for and justify our actions and opinions, to form judgement on what it means to be a certain type of person, and to understand why certain things are personally and socially important (May 2013; Burkitt 2008; Shotter 1993). Through the emergence of the self and in continually ‘monitoring our own conduct according to its effects and the responses of others in different social situations we develop a complex set of ethical (and sometimes unethical) dispositions, partly subconsciously and partly through reflection and repeated practice’ (Sayer 2005b: 252).2 These dispositions exhibit not just ‘lay normativity’, but also lay moral concern for the ‘relations to others’ and ‘how people should treat one another in ways conducive to well-being’ (Sayer 2005b: 251, 252). Emerging as a self in a morally charged world

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leads to not just a banal habituation into normative convention, but also engenders the development of concerted everyday moral capabilities that we take to be indicative of ordinary personhood, for example capacities of responsibility, accountability, evaluative judgement, and care and concern for others, which are routinely and dispositionally enacted in the course of doing social life (de Waal 2008). While Mead (1925) argued that the internalisation of attitudes manifests in the emerging self as a pervasive mechanism of self-regulating social control, he also argued that it is the individual self’s integration in patterns of normative conduct which provides the foundations of a self-consciousness that allows lay moralities to develop (Bottero 2019). He argued that ‘to behave ethically’ the individual must first be integrated ‘with the pattern of organized social behavior which, as reflected or prehended [sic] in the structure of his self, makes him a self-conscious personality’ (Mead 1934: 320). Indeed, for Mead, being able to assume the perspective of the generalised other ‘lies at the root of morality’ and forms the basis of ‘the individual’s ability to gain moral consciousness’, because the taking on and the assumption of moral attitudes, as well as the capacity for moral action, is necessarily based upon the individual being able to ‘take the attitudes of the generalized other towards his own acts as well as those of others’ (de Waal 2008: 159). The social emergence of the self in Mead’s terms means that the self and its moral dispositions reflect the patterns of relations and expectations within which it is formed; however this emergence also produces a self that relates both to itself and to the other, and it is this that allows the development of a morally conscious self (Mead 1934; Habermas 1995; Hjortkjær and Willert 2013).

Beyond the Dispositional: Mundane Reflexivity and Morality in Practice Indeed, one of the notable values of Mead is that his theoretical framework allows us to move from an explanation of moral dispositions and habituated normative conduct into an integrated theory of the development of relationally entangled moral subjectivities, which can be reflexively engaged with in the course of practice. At the more basic level, Sayer (2005a) and Reay (2004: 437) similarly argue that Bourdieu’s habitus neglects the kind of ‘mundane everyday reflexivity’ that is necessary to the flow of practice. Sayer (2005a: 45) continues that ‘[s]ocial action is influenced by an ongoing mutual and self-monitoring of conduct’ which occurs ‘not only

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in confronting serious moral dilemmas but in the most ordinary situations, such as conversations, where we have to evaluate how we are being treated and how we are treating others’. Our integration into patterns of normative conduct and ordinary moral concern becomes vital to the contextualization of social experience by setting the terms of our practical evaluations of how situations and conduct are assessed, understood, and translated into action (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). However, Mead’s theory of reflexive consciousness as a phase of experience in action is also particularly effective at incorporating processes of self-evaluation into interaction, which is a vital aspect of how morality is integrated into practice (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). While our predominant mode of dealing is dispositional, the vicissitudes of emergent interaction necessitates ‘quasi-dialogical’ self-monitoring and the imaginative playing through of action, which is operationalised within practical action in response to the experience of challenges and indeterminacy that disrupt our pre-reflective flow (Joas 1996: 160). The capacity to engage with the objectified self within interaction means that ‘there appears over and above the immediate impulsive responses a manner of conduct which can conceivably both analyse the act through attention shifting where our tendencies to act direct it, and can allow representation, by holding out the imagery of the results of various reactions’ (Mead 1934: 368). This allows for the ‘ongoing mutual and self-monitoring that occurs in everyday interactions with others’ (Sayer 2005b: 952), which runs alongside our practical activity, but towards which we become reflectively conscious in the face of conflicting impulses and indeterminant situations. While we are aware ‘[a]t the back of our heads… of our own replies to the remarks made to others’ and of the likely responses of others if we acted in a certain way, problematic situations leads our monitoring to enter our self-consciousness, and puts us in touch with a ‘criticizing, approving, and suggesting, and consciously planning… reflective self’ (Mead 1913: 376). Even our routine interactions, which can be responded to via ‘relatively unreflective routine dispositions’, require cursory evaluations and adjustments, and the holding in mind of unfolding intentions in order to deal with the ‘exigencies of changing situations’ (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 944). The enactment of ordinary moral expectation through routine responsive moral dispositions in relation to the emergent flow of indeterminate practice necessitates that, as a matter of course, ‘[w]e imagine how others’ well-being will be affected by our actions, and how a spectator would evaluate our own actions, so as to consider what to do’

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(Sayer 2005a: 45). Indeed, the capacity for self-conscious objectification, for quasi-dialogical self-monitoring, evaluativeness, imaginative distancing and the playing through of likely actions and responses in the moment of practice is key to the kind of ordinary responsive moral comportment described in Chapter 5, in relation to tactful blindness in particular situations and the maintenance and avoidances of family secrets. It is exhibited also in the micro-practices of accounting, of holding to account, of questioning, diverting, of ‘cautionary glances’ and ‘pretending not to hear’. These presuppose some degree of evaluative and anticipatory capacities being engaged with in real time in response to threats, as Goffman (1959) would term it, to the interactional order. However, this argument also allows us to explain the more conscientious moral responsiveness described in relation to sensitive considerations exhibited by health and social workers in the face of complex problems posed in the undertaking of their assigned tasks, likewise described in Chapter 5. While guided and undertaken in relation to institutionally set means and ends, these have been shown to be enacted and unfold in intersubjectively emergent interaction, between responsive (and often morally concerned) actors. Even fairly rigidly set directives get rehashed and redirected in relation to the emergent situation, where intersubjectively affective parties bring their own ends and intentions, which get negotiated and remoulded in the exchange (Zimmerman 1970; Heritage and Sefi 1992; Maynard 2003). Mead’s theory of the role of consciousness in the facilitation of social action in the face of problematic situations and conflicting impulses is integral to being able to explain how responsive moral comportment in a fuzzy and indeterminant world is possible. Mundane reflexivity is crucial to the enactment of lay moralities in the messiness of practice, and what is crucial to the process of mundane reflexivity, from a Meadian point of view, is the capacity of the actor to assume the position of the other towards herself, and to evaluate herself and her conduct, as well as the conduct of others, from the standpoint of both specific and generalised others. Indeed, a significant utilisation of Mead’s work in the sociology of morality comes in recent research into how reflexivity and ‘the generalised other’ are operationalised in interaction, at the moment of practice. As was discussed in the previous chapter, empirical research, which has arisen within the renewed sociological concern for the role of moral judgement in everyday life, has indicated the extent to which ‘individuals need to be able to make judgements about differing situations and calibrate accepted practices for individual cases’, and has highlighted how

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mundane reflexive comparison and self-evaluation in relation to generalisations of expected conduct are vital to these processes (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 413). Holdsworth and Morgan (2007) and Burr (2009) thus highlight Mead’s ‘generalised other’ as something that is necessarily engaged as a reference point for practice, which allows us to engage with the perceived attitudes of others that are germane to the immediate intersubjective context, as well as facilitating the negotiation of our own subjective positions. In affinity with its original pragmatist intentions, the generalised other is viewed here not as an abstract theoretical concept but rather ‘as a process, a device which is deployed, often with considerable subtlety’, in routine evaluations and judgements both in the alignment of practices and in the consideration of courses of action (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007: 407–408). Our emergence as a self endows us with an awareness of how our actions will be perceived by a plurality of specific and generalised others, and it is this that allows us to anticipate their responses and imaginatively ‘play through’ the situation in our self-monitoring and mundane reflective capacities (Joas 1990: 178). However, contrary to a simplistic reading of the generalised other as referring to ‘the attitudes of the whole community’ (Mead 1934: 154), Mead’s deployment of the concept in fact functions on varying levels of generality and specification in relation to the situation at hand (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). Broad attitudes surrounding appropriate practice at a funeral, for example, may be engaged with in a generalised fashion, while more nuanced perspectives may inform our immediate practice depending on who we are talking to at the funeral, our own position in relation to the deceased, and the circumstances of the death (Turner and Edgley 1976). Similarly, as Griffiths (1995) highlights, an individual may challenge a sexist joke among their peers, but feel less willing to do so at a family gathering or while they are in a subordinate position in a workplace, perhaps for fear of being rebuked by specific family members in the former, or due to a more generalised perception that one should “keep their head down” at work while in a junior position in the latter (May 2013). The generalised other should thus not be seen as a single voice representing a static community, but rather as a process through which we move, which evolves around us as we move through and reflect upon practice in order to negotiate the ‘ongoing mixture of simultaneous values that individuals must navigate in day-to-day ethical decision-making’ (Burr 2009: 337). The emergence of the self allows generalised others to be utilised as the object of our mundane and self-monitoring reflexive consciousness,

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which is routinely engaged with in the evaluative moral judgements that are necessarily undertaken in everyday practice (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007).

The Self and Reflexive Moral Subjectivity However, an essential point to be made is that the generalised other, and the moral judgements and evaluations that people routinely make upon its engagement, while inextricably relationally constituted and intersubjectively emergent, are engaged with from the perspective of an active and individuated reflective subject—the ‘I’ in Mead’s terms. Indeed, while generalised perspectives are taken into account, the actor is by no means obliged to acquiesce or concede to the view of generalised others. This is firstly because the plurality and situational variability of generalised attitudes engenders competing ‘claims and prescriptions [that] generate a tension which the actor must seek to resolve for their self’ (Crossley 2011: 86), and secondly because the perspectives of others are engaged with dialogically, from the perspective of an individuated self who is aware of her own standpoints and takes these into account as a pivotal factor in their definition of the situation (Bottero 2019). Mead’s theory of individuation is vital here because the process of the differentiated emergence of the self firstly allows us to engage with a multitude of generalised perspectives of others across a diversity of situations in practice, while also facilitating the capacity to engage with the voices of others from the perspective of an individuated subjective ‘I’ (Habermas 1995; Joas 1997). The result of this is that a diversity of generalised others can be differentially engaged with in situation-specific terms, through internal dialogue, in relation to our own subjective understanding of our self and our standpoints on the social world. Indeed, Holdsworth and Morgan’s (2007) studies into decisions to move away from home revealed that their participants reflexively engaged with various generalised others—parents, friends, the neighbourhood, etc.—in relation to their own perspective on their own decisions, with an understanding of what is at stake, what action they want to take, and so forth, which frequently produced action that ran contrary to their perception of the generalised attitudes of friends, family, or the community more broadly. This is something that is also readily exemplified in the research conducted by Gilligan (1982), Rapp (2000), and Smart and Neale (1999), described in Chapter 3. The moral decisions that their participants took

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reflect the social contexts in which their subjectivities were formed, as well as the immediate relations and considerations with which these decisions are entangled. However, these were decisions upon which the actors arrived at their own standpoints, occasionally in opposition to the typifications and expectations of their social conditions and positioning.3 As Gilligan (1982) is keen to stress, contrary to modernist depictions of the universalising moral subject, these were not the decisions of detached agents rationally formulating the course of highest justice. However, while the moral decisions and positions that were construed reflect the deeply entangled relations within which they were formed and enacted, they were nonetheless arrived at and articulated by a moral subject who recognised these positions and decisions as being their own. As was discussed in the last chapter, the same is true of the moral positions that people arrive at and enact in terms of ethical consumption or veganism (Grauel 2016; Holmes 2019; Pleasants 2010). It was argued there that understanding such positions sociologically necessitates situating them within both interpersonal relations and within broader forces of social discourse, the normalisation of certain practices, intersections with non-moral factors, such as cost, health, and enjoyment, as well as structural transformations in technology and economy, for example (Pleasants 2010; Haskell 1985). However, these commitments also need to be seen as personal decisions construed by morally concerned and evaluative subjects who are able to respond with moral judgement to the world that is before them. Indeed, while becoming increasingly normalised, the adoption of veganism and ethical consumption practices continue to exemplify the transformative potential of dialogic subjectivity, because, for the most part still, such commitments are assumed by people in ‘a more or less self-conscious and reflective manner rather than just continuing what was established for them during childhood’ (Larsson et al. 2003: 64). What is more, such decisions represent a conscious ‘status passage’ not just of moral beliefs, but also of the individual’s lifestyle choices, and subsequent courses of action (Larsson et al. 2003: 66). Through his conceptualisation of the individuated and dialogically capable self, Mead’s (1925, 1934) theory is able to facilitate an explanation not just of the mundane reflexivity highlighted in the last section, but also of the deeper and more occasional level of considered rumination on complex moral quandaries, which can lead to the individual’s articulation and enactment of standpoints that they recognise as being their own (Habermas 1995). However, though such dialogical transformation is

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potentially efficacious to personal action, what is key for Mead is that the locus of moral transformation, from the personal to the social, rests upon intersubjective interaction. His interactionist theory of the self firstly establishes the ground upon which the capacity for evaluative moral judgement develops within the social emergence of the self, and secondly locates the stimulation of such evaluative judgement in interaction, as being a product of intersubjective sociality in a complex social world, which frequently engenders confrontations and conflicts of viewpoint and problematic junctures of action that stimulate the need for reflexive contemplation and resolution (Joas 1990). Several accounts have illustrated, for example, the interactional processes that go into the arrival at, and the commitment to, concerted moral decisions that are decisive for the individual’s long term action (such as veganism, ethical consumption, and activism), which often involve certain decisive interactional events engendering shifts in perspective (see, for example, Lasson et al. 2003; Durbin 2003; Povey et al. 2001). However, far from disparaging the development of the conscious capacities of individuals to form, conduct, and enact moral evaluations and judgements dialogically, a Meadian approach provides a sociologically viable explanation of their emergence, and likewise reaffirms their significance to a processual picture of society. Indeed, a further contribution that Mead’s work is able to make to a relational sociology of morality is that his conceptualisation of the ‘dynamic and continually reconstructivist picture of social life’ locates ‘the transformative nature of social action’ as the basis upon which both personal and social transformation occurs, as it is ultimately interaction that generates both renewed individual perspectives, values, and courses of actions, which itself is generative of renewed objects of social concern, orders of practice, constellations of values, and so forth (Côté 2018: 101; Emirbayer 1997).4 Mead of course presents a view of the self that is strongly socially embedded, with our multiple interactional engagements leading us to take the perspectives of others towards ourselves, and consequently inducting us into more or less normalised expectations of behaviour, as well as into fairly ordinary parameters of debates on social issues. However his theory continues that while self-consciousness is indeed initiated by taking the perspective of the other, the multitude of attitudes that the individual encounters leads to the development of a more complex form of subjectivity, in which the individual comes to form standpoints upon the social world that she recognises as being her own; standpoints that can be engaged with via internal conversations from a position of self-conscious subjectivity, which can be

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‘causally efficacious’ (to borrow Archer’s term [2003: 16]) to the course of the individual’s action. Our moral subjectivities reflect both the broadly construed and interpersonal relational entanglements in which they are formed, our experience of which is stratified according to social positioning and personal circumstances from which moral expectations and attitudes are encountered. Yet our emergence of self through integration into an evaluative moral world tasks us with finding ‘one’s own voice and to orient it among other voices, to combine it with some and oppose it to others, to separate one’s voice from another voice with which it has inseparably merged’ (Bakhtin 1984: 239, cited in Burkitt 2008: 59). In this sense, the capacity to assume an autonomous position, to form judgements, to take and justify positions that one recognises as being their own, and thus to be accountable is something of a ‘rhetorical achievement’, which is attained through the interactional emergence of a dialogic self (Shotter 1993: 193). Importantly from a Meadian-relational perspective, capacities for autonomy and responsibility are consequently seen as being arrived at through the transformative power of relations, as they ‘constitute a context wherein we develop the capacity to make decisions and act upon them, including decisions which deviate from social norms and resist social pressures’ (Crossley 2006: 4). Individual responsibility is thus diverted away from Kantian notions of the autonomous individual, and instead is reconceptualised in terms of the intersubjective development of the capacity for reflexive engagement with an individuated subjectivity, which we appropriate as being our own, and through which we recognise ourselves as being responsible. Indeed, Habermas (1995: 170) argues that a major value of Mead’s contribution to understanding the development of the moral self lies in the recognition that the ‘self of an ethical self-understanding is not the absolutely inward possession of the individual. The impression that it is arises from the possessive individualism of philosophy of consciousness that begins with the abstract self-relation of the knowing subject, instead of conceiving the latter as result’. A Meadian approach undercuts modernist moral theories based on the disembedded moral subject by positing individuated reflective moral consciousness itself as being an outcome of the social constitution of the self. Consequently, a key point to be drawn from Mead as a basis for a relational explanation of how morality is engaged with in practice by individuals, is that his theory allows us to tread the difficult water of accounting

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for individuals as relationally produced and entangled creatures of habituated action, while also allowing us to depict individuals as being reflexively active in their own moral action, as being able to dialogically engage with their own views and the views of others from the perspective of their own deeply entangled subjective self-understanding, in relation to the unfolding circumstances at hand. A notable advantage to a Meadian approach thus resides in its capacity to simultaneously recognise the socially constituted nature of moral consciousness and the situatedness of moral action and responses, while allowing for the reflexive transformation of moral perspectives and action to occur in relation to the interconnected interaction of adaptive and reflexively capable actors (Joas 1990). In so doing, without retreating into problematic reliance on the disembedded subject, this approach is able to move beyond a straightforwardly communitarian moral theory centred on the enactment of pre-established normative rules into which we have been habituated, and towards a theory that facilitates the development and emergence of ‘new possibilities for moral action’, which themselves are conceptualised as emerging in relation to the entwined intersubjective action of ‘relatively autonomous actors within networks of interdependence and interaction which comprise the social world’ (Joas 1990: 184; Crossley 2011: 3).

Summary In short, I have argued that although attempts have been made to incorporate a greater degree of reflexivity into Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Bourdieu’s model remains less well equipped than Mead’s theory to explain the ontogenetic emergence of reflexivity as an inherent facet of the interactional development of the self. Bourdieu’s account is also less flexible in its ability to account for individuation, as well as for the capacity for individuals to take a dialogic perspective upon their own situation and standpoints. Contra Bourdieu, Mead allows us to account for social action as predominantly entailing the habitual enactment of learnt modes of practice, while also allowing us to take seriously the place for reflexivity in interaction, from mundane self-monitoring to the dialogic assessment of the conduct of ourselves and others in relation to our own subjectivity, which is part and parcel of individuated engagement in intersubjective practice. Mead’s work provides a sound basis for a relational-interactionist explanation of how individual moral subjectivities and actions are always socially constituted. Indeed, his work explains the interactional mechanism through

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which the self comes to be embedded with normative and evaluative dispositions, which occurs precisely because the social world from which selves emerge are indispensably ordered by ordinary moral expectations of behaviour. The individual self thus comes to reflect the attitudes and practices of the relations within which it develops, and these themselves reflect wider patterns of attitudes and modes of behaviour that are common to the broader web of relations that shape the interaction from which the particular self emerges. Our social emergence as a self necessarily embeds us into collectivised attitudes, conventions, and patterns of practice, which themselves make intersubjective interaction possible. However, Mead also explains that it is the process of the internalisation of these attitudes that shapes the individual’s understanding of herself as a subject. I have thus also argued how and why Mead’s theoretical framework is well placed to explain firstly how individuated moral subjectivities can be explained as forming socially—and thus reflect the relational entanglements in which they are situated—and secondly how dialogic engagement with individuated subjectivities can be brought forth into moral action. This in turn allows us to square the circle of affording a place to individuated moral perspectives that can be reflexively engaged with and causally efficacious in practice, without presenting individuated subjectivities as socially unbounded. This, I argue, allows us to cohere explanations of dispositional moral comportment with the varying levels that people dialogically consider their own moral judgements and actions, both in relation to themselves and others according to the demands of the situation at hand. This consequently provides the basis for a theoretical framework of the varying ways in which morality is engaged with in practice by ordinary people in ordinary social life.

Notes 1. Indeed, even though Sayer (2005a) does not take up Mead’s arguments, and in places is critical of them, many of Sayer’s extensions of Bourdieu have been described as being ‘Mead-adjacent’ (Bottero 2019: 101). 2. It is interesting to note that although Sayer’s point here sound remarkably Meadian, his ‘critical realist’ position leads him to be largely dismissive of Mead. 3. See in particular Rapp’s (2000) discussion of how, for every categorisation she drew around factors such as religiosity, class, ethnicity, educational background, etc., as a predictor of attitudes towards amniocentesis, the actions

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and attitudes of participants in her study routinely undermined, in one way or another, precisely the assumption that was made. 4. It should be noted that while Emirbayer (1997) takes Mead’s reconstructivist view of social life to be indicative of how relational sociology should proceed, Côté (2018), along with Dépelteau (2008), argue that Mead’s admittedly dated conceptualisations separate society and the individual more than contemporary relational sociology tends to allow. This is fair, however I side with Emirbayer in arguing that the scope and insights of Mead’s work nonetheless provides a rigorous (although imperfect) basis for an interactionist relational sociology.

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Sie, M. (2014). Self-Knowledge and the Minimal Conditions of Responsibility: A Traffic-Participation View on Human (Moral) Agency. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 48(2), 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9424-2. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press. Thorpe, C. (2013). Critical Strategies for Implementing a Relational Sociological Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu, and Uncivilized Sociological Theoretical Struggles. In C. Powell & F. Dépelteau (Eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (pp. 105–122). https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137342652_7. Turner, R. E., & Edgley, C. (1976). Death as Theater: A Dramaturgical Analysis of the American Funeral. Sociology & Social Research, 60(4), 377–392. Wacquant, L. (2005). Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership. Qualitative Sociology, 28(4), 445–474. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s11133-005-8367-0. Zimmerman, D. H. (1970). The Practicalities of Rule Use. In J. D. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge (pp. 221–238). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: A Relational View of Moral Phenomena

The main aim of this book has been to argue that relational sociology provides the basis for a coherent theory firstly of how morality is done in practice, and secondly of how individuals come to be able to engage with morality in practice in the ways that they do. Indeed, it has been argued that the insights of relational sociology, as a comprehensive theory of social phenomena, are integral to guiding the sociological theorising of moral phenomena in a way that remains true to describing how morality is done in practice. I have argued that a relational approach is able to do this as a result of its simultaneous critique of holist and individualist theories of social phenomena. It has been contended that the relational critique of holism offers a sound theoretical framework to renewed perspectives developed within the resurgent sociology of morality, which have tended to move away from Durkheimian notions of substantive moral norms that reside external to the interaction of individuals. From this perspective, in line with the insights of what I have termed the ‘new’ sociology of morality, it has been argued that moral phenomena should be considered not as some sort of holistic, substantive form that exists beyond interactional relations, but rather need to be understood as being the product of ongoing interaction, as being continually in the making as they are taken on, sustained, and transformed in processual, intersubjective, interdependent social practice,

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which is differentially engaged with by relationally moulded yet individuated social agents. In assuming such a position, I argue that a relational approach is able to provide a processual picture of moral action that is sufficiently dynamic to be able to account for the considerable variation and intersubjective emergence of moral practice. This argument is strengthened further through the concurrent undermining of individualist modes of theorising. The relational arguments regarding the fundamental social constitution of action, the intersubjectively emergent nature of practice, and the inextricable embeddedness of subjectivity, cohere to a significant degree firstly with recent critiques of Enlightenment modes of moral theory, and secondly with the arguments made and the research conducted in contemporary sociologies of morality. Through its critique of methodological individualism and of rational action theories, relational sociology is able to offer a decisive critique of modernist approaches to morality, and move into the argument that moral action cannot be considered in terms removed from social circumstance, as something that either is or is not achieved depending upon the detached reason or the purity of the intentions of the actor. Alongside the critiques of MacIntyre (1985), Dreyfus (2014), and Gilligan (1982), it has been argued that the depiction of moral action in terms of the detached reasoning of the disembedded subject is sociologically untenable, and provides a decidedly dissociative picture of how moral action is approached and how moral problems are faced by actors in empirical realities. Such critiques have been instrumental in the growing trend within moral philosophy towards viewing moral action in terms of the everyday, in the socially constituted practice of deeply entangled and intersubjectively responsive actors. However, the relational challenge to individualism adds clarity and sociological weight to these philosophic critiques by providing a theoretically sound means for conceptualising the various ways in which individuals are inextricably situated in complex networks of relational entanglements, which are fundamentally constitutive of the individual’s dispositions, subjectivities, and actions, moral or otherwise. Indeed, the relational approach moves forward into the argument that individual dispositions and subjectivities are enacted in relation to others within intersubjectively dynamic situations, and that action is moulded in the immediate social context in which it occurs (Burkitt 2016; Crossley 2011). A relational approach seeks to provide a complex and processual view of how the social world is produced and maintained at the level of interaction. However, interaction is cast as a dynamic that flows through

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the intersubjective modifications to their action that actors make in relation to the fuzzy indeterminacy of the situation at hand. In this view, action that is taken emerges intersubjectively, meaning that the notion that action can be properly understood in terms of the rational intentions of the actor is rejected. By simultaneously rejecting the notion that morality can be adequately conceptualised as external to the interaction of interdependent individuals on the one hand, and individualist arguments for the disembedded actor as a plausible locus of moral action on the other, it has been argued that assuming a relational stance points us towards conceptualising of morality in terms of practice. From the relational view of action, morality needs to be considered as something that is principally engaged with and enacted in the fuzzy indeterminacy of relationally entangled and intersubjectively emergent practice, which, I have argued, leads to everyday moral action being centred as the primary site within which morality is conducted, and within which moral phenomena are sustained. More specifically, this book has contended that the relational view can be applied in order to provide a sociologically rigorous account of how morality is engaged with in practice by ordinary people in their everyday lives. As the cited research indicates, from a sociological perspective, a picture of social action would remain incomplete if it did not acknowledge the relatively routine enactment of various kinds of decent behaviour that take account of the value of others and of how we should treat them (and be treated by them), in the emergent flow of intersubjective life. Yet a sociological approach necessitates seeing such practice as being entirely encumbered with the entanglements and circumstances within which moral actions and judgements are formed and enacted, such as the intersubjective ambiguities of the situation at hand, the broader social and personal contexts in which they are framed, and the relational entanglements that have moulded the dispositions and subjectivities of the actors themselves. This means that sociologists of morality need to be able to provide an explanation of how people come to be able to engage with morality in everyday life in practice on the one hand, while also being alive to the variable factors that mould and shape how such practice is engaged with on the other (Smart and Neale 1999). It is my contention that relational sociology provides the theoretical resources to fulfil both ends of this task, firstly by positing the self, dispositions, and subjectivities as emerging relationally from a social world that is awash with moral values and expectation, and secondly through its

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recognition that agency and interaction are always entangled in the intersubjectivity of the immediate situation, while also being framed by broader social and practical realities. From the basis that people do, in varying degrees, engage with morality in practice, the question arises of how best to describe and characterise this engagement in a way that is attuned to sociological evidence, and again, I argue that an interactionist relational sociology is of benefit here. It has been argued that the bracket of ordinary engagement with morality in practice varies between habituated embodied comportment, mundane reflexivity and the self-monitoring of conduct in interaction, and the more occasional cautioned deliberation of perspectives and circumstances. Specifically, from this basis, I have argued that a Meadian-based interactionist sociology is better suited to explaining how morality is engaged with in practice than a Bourdieusian based relationalism. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1999: 87) praise Bourdieu’s model of habitus for providing a concrete exposition of how our embodied dispositions towards practice are ‘socially inculcated’. However, Bourdieu largely disregarded the role of moral evaluation as an ordinary and regular feature of everyday life, and thus gave virtually no heed to the place of the ‘normative orientation of the habitus, especially its ethical dispositions’ (Sayer 2005: 42–43). A Meadian approach, however, facilitates the notion that the social emergence of the self inculcates a process of moral habituation, which involves being inducted into shared moral expectations that pattern the relations between actors, and which is formative of lay moral conscientiousness (Habermas 1995). Also, as was highlighted in Chapter 5, even our routine moral responsiveness requires a greater degree of mundane reflexivity and active coordination of practice than Bourdieu’s work tends to allow, which is conversely something Mead’s theory of reflexive consciousness in interaction provides for. What is more, while Bourdieu is right to emphasise habit by way of overcoming flagrant subjectivism (Bottero 2009), the residing implication that our dispositions and our perspectives scarcely get remoulded as we move through social life underestimates the transformative potential that interaction has for moral outlook. I have argued that the bulk of moral action is indeed conducted at the level of habituated ethical comportment. However, it is important not to discount the capacity for people to evaluate their own behaviour and the behaviour of others, to arrive at their own moral standpoints, form moral judgements of what is good and proper in the world, and to dialogically consider their action in relation to the moral problems they may face (Sayer 2005).

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We have seen in examples given that individuals take up varying moral perspectives on issues such as consumption and veganism, assume stances on intersubjectively emergent decisions on the ‘proper thing to do’ in difficult circumstances, and occasionally challenge the ordinary expectations of their social context in the decisions they take (Rapp 2000; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007). Such cases exemplify how people can and do reflexively engage with their own differentiated, individuated subjectivity in the course of giving direction to their action, and it is likewise true that interpreting one’s place in a morally charged intersubjective world necessitates the capacity for evaluative judgements of social life, of what is of worth, of what is the best course of action. Our basic practical engagement with the world situates us among others, from whom we take our means of interpreting the world and ourselves. Emotions such as shame at certain actions, or pride in the actions of others, only make sense as phenomena held among other people who shape our facility to interpret and respond to the world around us. Yet, as reflexive actors, we come to arrive at our own positions on the world, which are established in relation to the others who have shaped our lives. We emerge as selves within complex networks of differentiated and multifarious interactions, and it is as a result of this that we become capable of not simply replicating the moral world of which we are part, but also of construing our own position within it (Moran 2009). A Meadian approach is able to provide the framework that allows us to depict how and why subjectivity and reflexive deliberation are always entangled with relations, while recognising that this ‘socially rooted reflexivity forms a basis for human autonomy’ and for dialogic deliberation with one’s own individuated self (Crossley 2006: 4). By drawing on Mead, we are able to explain our dispositional orientations towards decent comportment, mundane considerations of how to behave and respond to a situation at hand, and deeper dialogic assessments of our own perspectives that can be in some way efficacious for future action and transformative of our viewpoints. These are ordinary facets of social existence and Mead explains them as such. However, there is an additional advantage of a Meadian-based approach, which is that it provides a basis for seeing broad moral phenomena in purely interactionist terms. Moral phenomena from this perspective are conceptualised as being shared and diffused throughout a particular social context; yet they are seen as being formed, sustained, transmitted, and transformed as they are variably enacted within complex networks of relational interaction, which brings

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them into the experience of the individual, moulding both their action and their consciousness. This approach thus facilitates an explanation of moral phenomena as being sustained and remoulded as they are participated in, through the interdependent interaction of differentiated, intersubjectively affective, and reflexively capable relationally constituted actors.

References Bottero, W. (2009). Relationality and Social Interaction. The British Journal of Sociology, 60(2), 399–420. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01236.x. Burkitt, I. (2016). Relational Agency: Relational Sociology, Agency and Interaction. European Journal of Social Theory, 19(3), 322–339. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1368431015591426. Crossley, N. (2006). Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Dreyfus, H. L. (2014). Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (M. R. Wrathall, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (1999). Can There Be a Science of Existential Structure and Social Meaning? In R. Shusterman (Ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (pp. 84–93). Oxford: Blackwell. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1995). Individuation Through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (pp. 149–205). Cambridge: Polity Press. Holdsworth, C., & Morgan, D. (2007). Revisiting the Generalized Other: An Exploration. Sociology, 41(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038507076614. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Moran, D. (2009). The Phenomenology of Personhood: Charles Taylor and Edmund Husserl. Colloquium, 3(1), 80–104. Rapp, R. (2000). Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smart, C., & Neale, B. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Index

A Actant, 1 Activism, 86, 170 Actor, 3, 13, 14, 16–20, 22, 24, 27–29, 31, 33–37, 39–42, 54, 55, 60, 61, 65, 66, 75, 76, 88, 95, 96, 104, 115–118, 123, 124, 126, 132–134, 144, 146, 150–152, 154, 159, 160, 163, 166, 168, 169, 172, 180–184 Addams, J., 84, 116, 123 Agency, 2, 12, 13, 18, 21, 27, 29, 31, 35, 55, 62–64, 68, 74, 104, 121, 131, 161, 182 Applied ethics, 50, 52–55 B Batson, C.D., 67 Bauman, Z., 7, 51, 55, 76, 84–86, 89, 96–107, 117 Benhabib, S., 53, 70, 75, 95, 103, 114, 120 Bourdieu, P., 6, 8, 11–13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 28–30, 32, 35, 37–41, 59, 61,

66, 67, 122, 130, 136, 143–152, 159, 160, 164, 172, 173, 182 C Capital, 37–41, 59, 130, 146 Care, 5, 68, 70–72, 76, 105, 114, 115, 135, 158, 164 Care perspective, 70 Categorical imperative, 77, 97 Cohabitation, 68, 101 Communitarianism, 85, 102, 172 Consciousness, 6, 19, 22, 24, 32, 41, 74, 91, 93–96, 100, 101, 104–107, 135, 150, 152–155, 157–161, 165–167, 171, 172, 182, 184 Constitution of action, 25, 180 Context, 24 cultural, 55, 131 social, 2, 14, 17, 23, 27, 32–34, 36, 40, 51–53, 66, 72, 76, 85, 116, 123, 144–148, 150, 157, 169, 183 Continental philosophy, 54

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Abbott, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31822-2

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INDEX

Conventionalism, 93 Crossley, N., 2, 3, 6, 11, 12, 14, 17–21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 35–39, 41, 67, 75, 89, 94, 103, 143, 147–149, 151–154, 158, 168, 171, 172, 180, 183

D Darley, J.M., 67 Deliberation/deliberative, 1, 6, 8, 24, 25, 31, 62–65, 68, 75, 77, 104, 121–123, 128, 135, 145, 146, 152, 159, 160, 182, 183 Dewey, J., 29, 31, 49, 60, 73, 104, 116, 159 Dialogic engagement, 158, 173 Disposition, 3, 18–21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 36, 38–41, 57, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72, 76, 87, 93, 122, 127, 131, 145–148, 156, 163, 165, 173, 180–182 Divorce, 14, 26, 55, 60, 61, 68, 119 Dreyfus, H.L., 1, 4, 5, 7, 20, 21, 29, 32, 49–52, 58–60, 62–69, 73, 74, 77, 84, 114, 119–123, 127, 134, 143, 145, 146, 160, 180, 182 Dreyfus, S.E., 50, 58, 59, 62–66, 77 Durkheim, É., 7, 11, 14, 84, 86, 88–99, 101, 104, 106, 107

E Elias, N., 3, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26 Embodied/embodiment, 4–6, 32, 33, 38, 49, 55, 60, 62, 66, 67, 84, 90, 114, 115, 119, 120, 146, 147, 150, 156, 162, 163, 182 Enlightenment, 1, 4, 20, 49, 51, 52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 68, 69, 77, 90, 98, 180 Enlightenment/Detached/ Disembedded/Rational subject, 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 20,

21, 29, 49, 50, 53–55, 59, 62–64, 68–71, 73, 76, 85, 94, 95, 99, 105, 114, 128, 129, 134, 158, 169, 171, 172, 180, 181 Enlightenment/Modernist Moral Philosophy, 5, 85 Entangled subjectivity, 33, 73, 172 Ethical comportment, 62, 64, 66–68, 127, 134, 145, 146, 182 Ethical consumption, 129–131, 136, 169, 170 Ethical/moral expert/expertise, 51, 52, 55, 63, 64, 66, 68, 129, 130, 160, 163, 171 Everyday/everydayness, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 31, 33, 35, 50, 62–64, 68, 69, 83, 84, 87, 105, 106, 113–115, 117–119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130–132, 134, 135, 143, 144, 150, 151, 160, 164–166, 168, 180–182

F Family, 17, 24, 60, 67, 68, 71, 75, 87, 105, 126, 131–133, 150, 156, 166–168 Foundation, 7, 23, 28, 36, 51, 56, 84, 85, 98, 118, 164

G Generalised other, 24, 151, 154–156, 159, 166–168 Gergen, K.J., 2, 26, 42, 52, 54, 56, 73, 76, 118, 119, 121 Gilligan, C., 1, 4, 5, 7, 50, 53–55, 68–75, 77, 84, 85, 96, 114, 115, 151, 168, 169, 180 Goffman, E., 33, 34, 115, 116, 123–127, 162, 163, 166 Good life, 5, 56, 76, 77

INDEX

H Habitual, 6, 20, 31, 123, 145, 146, 148, 149, 159, 160, 172 Habituated, 106, 116, 122, 124, 127, 129, 136, 145, 146, 150, 152, 158, 160, 163, 164, 172, 182 Habitus, 6, 38, 39, 59, 66, 143–149, 160, 164, 172, 182 Heidegger, M., 20, 29, 31, 32, 49, 62, 66, 74, 99 Hekman, S., 1, 4, 21, 49–51, 54, 55, 69, 72–74, 77, 85, 96, 116, 118 Holism, 84, 89, 105, 179 homo economicus , 13, 76 I Impersonal, 16, 26, 27 Individuation, 36, 95, 144, 157, 168, 172 Interaction, 2–6, 8, 13–21, 23, 25–28, 31, 33–42, 66, 83, 84, 87–89, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 105, 106, 113, 114, 119–129, 131, 135, 144, 146–149, 152, 153, 155–158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 170, 172, 173, 179–184 Interactional relations, 18, 36, 39, 40, 104, 135, 147, 148, 151, 152, 179 Interactionist relationalism, 6, 84, 89, 105, 113, 122 Interactor, 12, 15, 28, 33, 38, 106 Internal conversation, 150, 151, 170 Internal goods, 57, 59, 61, 62 Intersubjectivity, 21, 36, 49, 66, 115, 182 Intuitiveness, 66 J Judgement, 3, 25, 31, 34, 51, 53, 54, 62–64, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77,

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114, 115, 126, 129, 132–135, 151, 152, 162–164, 166, 167, 169–171, 181, 183 Justice, 51, 53, 63, 64, 70–72, 75, 76, 85, 169 Justice perspective, 70

K Kant, I., 51, 77, 89, 97, 98

L Leaving home, 133 Level/levels of reflexivity/reflexive engagement, 4, 8, 12, 13, 17, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 38, 54, 55, 59, 62, 67, 69, 76, 77, 87, 88, 90, 93–95, 102, 104, 105, 114, 121, 122, 126–129, 131, 133–135, 143, 147, 149–152, 159, 160, 164, 167, 169, 171, 173, 180, 182 Lying, 121

M MacIntyre, A., 1, 4, 5, 7, 50, 51, 55–61, 77, 83, 103, 114, 136, 180 Mead, G.H., 3, 8, 18, 20–24, 27, 31, 33, 75, 95, 106, 115, 116, 122, 134, 144, 147, 149, 152–174, 182, 183 Methodological individualism, 7, 12, 13, 19, 20, 25, 32, 35, 102, 180 Modernism/modernist, 1, 2, 4, 7, 49, 50, 52, 55, 73, 97–99, 101, 169, 171, 180 Moral action, 2, 4, 7, 50, 54, 62–64, 66–70, 73, 75, 76, 86, 87, 94, 97–104, 113, 114, 121–123, 127, 144–146, 150, 164, 172, 173, 180–182

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Moral disposition/Ethical disposition, 54, 55, 130, 145–147, 160, 164, 165, 182 Moral habituation, 8, 135, 136, 144, 160, 161, 182 Moral judgements, 50–52, 55, 68, 74, 76, 85, 94, 123, 168, 173, 182 Moral phenomena, 2, 3, 7, 88–90, 104–107, 113, 114, 135, 144, 179, 181, 183, 184 Moral philosophy, 1, 4, 49–52, 55, 60, 63, 64, 68, 70, 75, 76, 83, 85, 114, 116, 180 Moral subject, 2, 7, 8, 50, 51, 68, 76, 129, 169, 171 Moral voice, 69, 70, 72 Mundane reflexivity, 6, 8, 135, 164, 166, 169, 182

N Neale, B., 5, 14, 26, 50, 60, 61, 68, 69, 74, 76, 85–87, 95, 96, 107, 115, 120, 151, 168, 181 Neo-Aristotelian, 56, 57, 61, 77 Network, 3, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 26, 34, 38, 39, 42, 76, 102, 103, 129–131, 135, 151, 172, 180, 183 New sociology of morality, 87–89, 105

O Objectivism, 13, 15, 19

P Personal/interpersonal, 12, 24–28, 53, 54, 64, 67, 73, 76, 92, 95, 96, 102, 104, 114, 117, 118, 120, 126, 127, 129, 131–133, 150, 156, 169–171, 181 Phenomenology, 31, 63, 65, 77, 99 Practical circumstance, 26, 31, 63

Practicality, 61 Practice, 1–8, 14–17, 19–21, 23, 25, 26, 28–42, 49, 50, 52–63, 65–69, 72–77, 83–86, 88, 96, 100, 105, 106, 113–125, 127–132, 134–136, 143–153, 156–160, 162–173, 179–182 Practice theory, 29, 35, 113, 118, 125 Pragmatism, 31, 63, 115, 143 Pre-reflexive, 33, 40, 62, 68, 134, 144–146, 148 Principles, 51, 52, 54, 56, 63, 65, 68, 76, 85, 114, 117, 119, 121, 128, 129 Proper thing to do, 132, 183

R Rational action, 1, 24, 29, 49, 54 Rational action theory, 7, 180 Rationalism, 53–55, 58, 63, 73, 99, 105 Rationality, 13, 20, 22, 50, 53, 64, 70, 71, 85 Reason(s), 4, 14, 17, 21, 29, 32, 36, 40–42, 51, 53–55, 60–62, 85, 87, 97–99, 101, 118–120, 122, 126, 135, 144, 145, 147, 149, 156, 160, 180 Reflexive subjectivity, 23 Reflexivity, 6, 8, 18, 22, 67, 122, 129, 134, 143, 144, 147–149, 151–153, 159, 164, 166, 172, 183 Relational sociology, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11–14, 16–21, 25, 27, 28, 34–37, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50, 83, 114, 131, 135, 143, 144, 149, 170, 179–182 Relationally constituted action, 25, 94, 134 Relationally entangled moral action, 50 Responsiveness, 27, 32, 50, 62, 63, 65, 67–70, 72, 73, 99, 114, 119, 122,

INDEX

123, 128, 129, 135, 136, 150, 156, 160, 166, 182 Rorty, R., 117 Rules, 29–32, 42, 56, 58, 59, 65, 76, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 119, 120, 128, 149, 158, 162, 163, 172 S Sayer, A., 4–6, 8, 33, 37, 41, 50, 62, 67, 85, 86, 93, 115–117, 123, 127, 134, 135, 143–151, 160, 163–166, 173, 182 Secrets, 126, 166 Self, 22–24, 33, 40, 76, 99, 100, 106, 117, 124, 130, 135, 144, 152–165, 167–173, 181, 183 Self-monitoring, 134, 158–160, 164–167, 172, 182 Sexism, 67, 117 Singer, P., 50, 52, 53, 85 Skilful coping, 77 Skill acquisition, 64–66 Smart, C., 5, 14, 26, 50, 60, 61, 68, 69, 74, 76, 85–87, 95, 96, 107, 115, 120, 151, 168, 181 Social emergence of the self, 8, 18, 23, 25, 151, 152, 164, 170, 182 Socialization, 23, 101 Social phenomena, 2, 3, 6, 12, 14–19, 28, 34, 35, 37, 49, 83, 85, 88–90, 104, 106, 135, 179 Social protest, 68 Social space, 37–39, 59, 66, 145, 148 Social structure, 1, 3, 12–16, 19, 20, 23, 27, 29–31, 35, 36, 41, 93, 96 Sociation, 17, 106 Sociology of morality, 1, 3, 4, 7, 50, 76, 84, 86–88, 90, 106, 113, 115, 121, 129, 166, 179 Sociology of personal life, 131

189

standards, of excellence, 56–61 Structural relationalism, 6 Structural relations, 38, 39, 147, 148, 150 Structure, 12–17, 21, 23, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 87, 90, 94, 95, 97, 125, 153, 161, 164 Subjectivity, 2, 4, 6–8, 18, 22–24, 36, 40, 49, 50, 73, 75, 83, 100, 106, 115, 123, 129, 144, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 160, 168–172, 180, 183

T Taste, 37–39, 130 Taylor, C., 4, 20, 31, 32, 50, 55, 103, 114, 116–119, 136 Telos , 56–58, 61, 62, 77 The I, 154–156, 168 The me, 154–157, 162

U Universalism, 50–52, 63, 64, 85 Universality, 51, 63, 70 Utilitarianism, 51

V Validity, 52 Veganism, 169, 170, 183 Virtue, 12, 56–62, 76, 93, 127 Virtue ethics, 56, 61

W Webs, 18, 24, 26–28, 34, 35, 76, 83, 106 Wellbeing, 126 Wittgenstein, L., 29, 32, 49, 66, 74, 118