Sociology and the Moral Order

Abstract

Morality is about the obligations of the individual to the social group, and moralists over the ages have been keen to clarify what those individual obligations are. Philosophers and theologians have used the tools of systematic thought to consider how people should act and how we should judge the actions of others. I showed in Chapter 2 how some of their ideas can be used as a way to understand the content of television programmes, but one limitation in the philosophical tradition is that morality is treated as a matter primarily for the individual – if a person’s way of thinking or being is right, the goodness of their conduct will follow. The philosophical tradition pays great attention to the cognitive aspect of morality; thinking precedes action and makes it what it is. Sociology turns the emphasis around so that morality refers to the behavioural standards of a society and derives from seeing what people normally do in that society rather than from thinking about what an individual might do.