Abstract
In this chapter, we examine morality as a practical feature of everyday interactions. Drawing on scholarship in two closely related traditions, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we locate moral reasoning in the embodied interactional practices of social actors, rather than the private” thought processes of independent individuals. Building on a distinction between surface morality, or the norms and expectations people enact in everyday settings, and its deep moral underpinnings in the natural attitude of daily life, we bring together the ethnomethodological insight that society is a moral order with conversation analytic research that specifies the patterned action sequences through which this order is achieved, both within and across social contexts. Following an exposition and analysis of conversation analytic work on moral discourse in non-institutional (everyday) and institutional settings, we conclude with suggestions for how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis may be placed in dialogue with more traditional approaches to social psychological research on morality and moral cognition.
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Notes
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There are some actions where agreement is the dispreferred response. This can be seen in phenomena like self-deprecation, when proper receipt entails disagreeing with the initial assessment (Pomerantz 1984).
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A pre-sequence is preliminary to an action sequence, and projects the kind of act that will be performed (i.e., invitation, question, request, and so forth). Pre-sequences can be a means of avoiding dispreferred responses, since recipients can address, and signal their orientation to, the projected action before it is actually executed. As we noted earlier, requests are dispreferred relative to offers, and the pre-request sequence often works to elicit a preemptive offer (Schegloff 2007:90–91).
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Consider also how adult patients present candidate diagnoses of their illnesses for the doctor to confirm or disconfirm (Gill 1998, Gill and Maynard 2006). When offered to occasion an evaluation of their adequacy, explanations are regularly designed in a markedly cautious, equivocal way. The delicate character of explanations soliciting assessments stems in part from their status as covert ways of self-diagnosis, which attain the status of soliciting the doctor’s confirmation or disconfirmation in and through the collaborative work of doctor and patient.
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Related to the pervasive issue in medicine regarding evidence, another critical aspect of designing diagnostic delivery is how to handle is how to handle bad, uncertain, and good news (Maynard 2003:Chapter 2). In ordinary conversation, people routinely work to expose good news and shroud bad, and this happens in the clinic as well. Uncertain news, when evidence is not present for certain conditions but symptoms continue, tends to be handled like bad news – it is regularly foreshadowed, downplayed, delivered hesitatingly, and so forth (Maynard 2003, Maynard and Frankel 2006). Specifically, when a diagnosis is ruled out, the patient can be anxious about what else could be causing the symptoms, leaving symptom residue” or unexplained discomfort or pain, which may lead to another kind of noetic crisis, anomie (Maynard and Frankel 2006:278), or ontological insecurity (Giddens 1984) that physicians handle through practices associated with delivering bad news.
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- 7.
For an extended treatment of attribution theory as a discursive, interactional phenomenon, along with a poignant critique of more traditional conceptualizations, see Edwards and Potter (1993).
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Turowetz, J.J., Maynard, D.W. (2010). Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life. 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_27
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