Abstract
The development of a sociology of morality calls for engagement with what Max Weber considered the world of facts and the world of values. Increasingly, what people know to be true, good, right, healthy or dangerous is communicated through the language of risk. Morality and risk intersect at boundaries and borders of all kinds, in techniques of governance, and in the discourse of cultural narratives and codes. Exploring diverse perspectives on the reality of risk helps us to recognize and understand varieties of moral discourse. This chapter examines literature from various risk perspectives that emphasizes the connections between morality and risk, allowing us to see how different attitudes toward the reality of risk lead to a focus on particular aspects of morality. I argue for a weak constructionist/cultural-symbolic perspective as offering the broadest avenues for research into how morality and risk intersect. This perspective allows for an understanding of morality as a potential means of social control; but also allows investigation into the ways affectively laden cultural narratives help individuals, groups, and nations constitute themselves as socially embedded moral actors.
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Notes
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In highlighting risk assessments as proxies for moral discourse, Beck opens the door to more constructivist approaches to studying the risk society. Consequently, some research shows willingness to position the risk society as an umbrella under which cultural and discursive interpretations of risk can operate. Even so, scholars who wish to explore moral dimensions of risk while preserving the risk society narrative must borrow heavily from sociocultural or postmodernist paradigms to bridge the gap between risk society’s grand narrative and the lived embodied experience of risk by diverse individuals (Tulloch and Lupton 2003).
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There is a direct link here between ‘responsibilization’ and the work of Max Weber (1958), who conceived of responsibility as a duty to a calling, the fulfillment of which became “the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume” (p. 80). While religion may have been the engine for Protestant acceptance of the responsibility ethic, rationalization stripped away the religion leaving only the ethic—“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so” (p. 181). This ethic is enshrined within the political philosophy of neo-liberalism. No longer is “the unequal distribution of the goods of this world…a special dispensation of Divine Providence” (p. 177); instead, it is the result of individuals’ poor risk-management practices. God may be out of the picture, but responsibility remains through the instrumental rationality of risk techniques.
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Examining insurance this way requires that the researcher look at the outcomes of actuarial risk production and not necessarily the goals of particular insurance providers. Insurers certainly do not set out to become enforcers of public morality. At the same time both insurers and the State benefit from these governance techniques through reduced economic and social costs.
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Alexander (2003) notes the absence of this affective element in the Foucauldian emphasis on technique, which he criticizes as reducing discourse to “dry modes of technical communication” (p. 20). Certainly, the affective dimension plays a large role in the dissemination of risk discourse, which can stoke fear and anxiety in a population (Furedi 2002).
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Alexander and Smith (1996) critique Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) approach for a cultural determinism that aligns culture too closely with social structure. By conflating institutional culture with organizational structure, their analysis of environmentalism’s appeal to the masses not involved with formalized environmental groups falls short. However, radically unhooking culture from social structure (see Alexander 2003) creates problems of its own in terms of how the symbol-sets and narratives that constitute culture are created.
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Roth, L.T. (2010). The Moral Construction of Risk. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_25
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