Abstract
How is morality related to cooperation? One common model posits that morality facilitates cooperation, insofar as the adherence to explicit rules or guidelines for collective practices enables or abets these practices. In this chapter, we draw on work from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and the cognitive sciences to discuss an alternative model that flips this perspective on its head. While acknowledging that cooperation is facilitated by explicit rules and deliberative rule-making in some cases, we argue that frequently, morality emerges as people participate and gain skill in embodied, situated, coordinated activity. Morality here is grounded in the phenomenological experience of “oughtness,” or the immediate feeling that things “ought” to be a certain way, cultivated via repeated practical experience. Accordingly, immorality is grounded in the feeling that one’s sense of “oughtness” associated with a practice has been impeded, which often results in conscious moral deliberation. By grounding morality in the sense of “oughtness” cultivated via local, practical experience, this model has promising implications for research on moral variation and the socio-historical antecedents of moral deliberation and resultant moral frameworks.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Heimer (2010, pp. 180–1): “Morality is about what people feel they ought to do; it is about distinguishing what people feel is right from what seems to them wrong” and Durkheim [1895] (1982, pp. 80–81): “To decide whether a precept is a moral one or not we must investigate whether it presents the external mark of morality. This mark consists of a widespread, repressive sanction, that is to say a condemnation by public opinion… Whenever we are confronted with a fact that presents this characteristic we have no right to deny its moral character, for this is proof that it is of the same nature as other moral facts.” This also aligns with Whiteley (2020, pp. 22–23) who offers two possible definitions of morality: “no rule is part of a community’s morality if people can openly break that rule without incurring the hostility and disapproval of their neighbours…” and “morality comprises those actions which I think I ought to do regardless of inclination and regardless of personal advantage.”
- 2.
As Weber (1978, pp. 21–22) writes, “in the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness…the ideal type of meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case” (see also Bargh & Morsella, 2008; Davidson, 2004).
- 3.
This in no way minimizes the fact that driving is the most dangerous common mode of transportation (Savage, 2013).
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Stoltz, D.S., Wood, M.L. (2023). Grounding Oughtness: Morality of Coordination, Immorality of Disruption. In: Hitlin, S., Dromi, S.M., Luft, A. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2 . Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32022-4_9
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