Everyday Moralities

Doing it Ourselves in an Age of Uncertainty

Nicholas Hookway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367670726
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317138303
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2020 Stephen Crook Memorial Prize fromThe Australian Sociological Association, a biennial prize for the best authored book in Australian sociology

From concerns of dwindling care and kindness for others to an excessive concern with self and consumerism, plenty of evidence has been provided for the claim that morality is in decline in the West, yet little is known about how people make-sense of and experience their everyday moral lives. This insightful book asks how late-modern subjects construct, understand and experience morality in a context of moral uncertainty. With a focus on two areas of morality and human conduct – love and intimacy, and the human treatment of animals – the author draws on the work of Bauman, Ahmed, Irigaray, Foucault and Taylor to construct an innovative theoretical synthesis, which is combined with new empirical material drawn from online diaries or blogs to examine the complex and intriguing ways that contemporary subjects narrate and experience everyday moral-decision-making. Providing theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary production of morality and selfhood in late-modernity, Everyday Moralities sheds new light on the ways in which people morally navigate a changing social world and advances sociology beyond models of narcissism, moral loss and community breakdown. As such, it makes an important contribution to an underdeveloped area of the discipline, explicitly addressing the everyday ways morality is lived and practised in a climate of moral ambiguity.

1 Introduction

Moral life in the 21st century

We are in a state of moral decline in the modern West – or so we’re told. From anxieties concerning the spread of relationship ‘short-termism’ and contemporary obsessions with celebrity, cosmetic enhancement and self-image to complaints about cultural permissiveness and millennial narcissism, the world today is often imagined as morally worse than the ‘world’ we used to inhabit. Westerners are supposedly morally cut adrift as the old moral anchors and certainties become merely choices and we are left to bicker and fumble over what might constitute ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (Fevre, 2000: 9). While pronouncements concerning the ‘end of morality’ proliferate in the West, little is known about what the ostensible social condition of moral decline looks like on the ground, in the everyday understandings, practices and experiences of contemporary individuals. The central task of this book is to examine how people actually narrate the construction and practice of everyday morality in conditions of late-modernity outside announcements of the ‘end of morality’. It asks how late-modern subjects construct, understand and experience morality in a contemporary climate of moral ambiguity.

Recovering morality

This book is framed by a critique of ‘moral decline’ sociology. This tradition is broadly united by an anxiety concerning the consequences of the dissolution of a religious, specifically Christian, culture of belief in the West, and its detrimental impact upon self, character and personality. ‘Decline’ sociology can be traced to the pioneering work of Durkheim, who laid important foundations for the sociological study of morality and ethics. Durkheim’s focus on the deterioration of morality as a corollary of weakening community and traditional sources of authority casts a long shadow over contemporary appraisals of morality in the late-modern consumer West.

A key argument of this book is that Durkheim’s influence can be seen in the two dominant camps of modern ‘decline’ social theory. In the first camp are the ‘cultural pessimists’ who maintain that with the decline of religion and traditional forms of authority, Westerners have become ‘narcissistic’ and uncaring as they become absorbed by a ‘therapeutic’ culture of hedonism, consumption and self-improvement (Reiff, 1966; Bell, 1976; Lasch, 1979). In the other camp are the ‘communitarians’ who argue that a breakdown of community and an ensuing individualism has undermined a common moral culture and a shared sense of responsibility toward others (Etzioni, 1994; Bellah et al., 1996; MacIntyre, 1985). This book argues that while these two theoretical positions have gained prominence in articulating the demoralisation of modernity there are more hopeful interpretations to be retrieved from social theory. Here it is argued that Bauman (1993; 1995), Foucault (1986) and Taylor (1992), in combination with feminist thinkers like Ahmed (2000; 2004) and Irigaray (1991) are key to theorising alternative moral structures for ‘doing’ morality outside conservative ‘decline’ models of ‘narcissism’ or ‘community breakdown’.

Bauman (1993; 1995) is introduced as a key theorist who signifies an important departure from the orthodoxy of Durkheimian moral sociology. The book suggests that Bauman provides a framework for understanding the contemporary sources, strategies and experiences of a ‘postmodern’ morality before critiquing his theory of ‘being for the Other’. It is argued that ‘being for the Other’ suffers from what Ahmed (2000) calls ‘stranger fetishism’, ignoring the concrete and particular ways in which we encounter Others and how some bodies are more ‘Other’ than ‘Others’. Further, it is maintained that ‘being for the Other’ obscures the self in ‘infinite responsibility’ to the self. In addressing these critiques, feminist theorising of emotions and embodiment are argued to be useful for ‘grounding’ Bauman’s theory of ‘infinite responsibility’ within a particular, finite and bodily encounter with the Other. Taylor’s (1992) ‘ethics of authenticity’ and Foucault’s (1986) ‘care for the self’ are claimed to go some way in rescuing the self from the ‘traumatising’ (Haar, 1997) relation to the Other. Taylor’s notion of authenticity is positioned as a constructive middle path between the extremes of Bauman’s ethics of infinity and Foucault’s self-stylising subject. While Taylor treats authenticity as a universal, Skeggs (2005: 973) shows how the desire for authenticity is shaped by class processes and relations which form a set of regulatory ideals that govern the self. The book goes on to show how these theorised moralities work in practice.

The study

A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a shortage of empirical work on this topic. Sociology has always been concerned with morality but this has seldom involved a systematic or explicit preoccupation with what people believe is good and how they practise this in their everyday lives (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Hitlin and Vaisey, 2013). While most sociological research on class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality engages with questions of ethics or morality, this research tends not to take the practice and experience of morality as its central or substantive focus. When sociology does attend to individual moral evaluations, it tends to reduce them to expressions of structure, power and social position (Sanghera, 2016; Sayer, 2005).

Some empirical advances have been made in the area of psychology (Milgram, 1963; Kohlberg, 1984; Gilligan, 1982; Hart, Atkins and Ford, 1999; Hitlin, 2008). While this research has shed important insights into the processes of moral learning and development, it tends to situate the individual outside the social and cultural realm. In sociology, efforts to survey moral behaviour at the national level date back to the mid-1980s (Harding, Phillips and Fogarty, 1986). Typically this style of mapping research approaches morality through attitudes to substantive moral topics, such as abortion, homosexuality, cheating and lying (Ashford and Timms, 1992; Harding, Phillips and Fogarty, 1986; Abrams, Gerard and Timms, 1985; Inglehart, 1990). This kind of attitudinal data lacks deeper insight into the subjective and meaningful ways in which individuals construct and understand morality in their everyday lives (Hakim, 2003: 340). In fact, there are few theoretically informed quantitative studies that investigate the meanings and motivations of expressions of morality in everyday experience.

The qualitative work that has been done tends to be limited to the American experience and largely frames morality through substantive lenses such as class and inequality, violence and suffering, youth and generational change, gender and caring, neighbouring, volunteering and charitable giving. There are a small number of qualitative sociological investigations which have addressed morality explicitly, including Alan Wolfe’s (2001) research on moral freedom, Jackall’s (1988) study of corporate morality, Baumgartner’s (1988) study of the moral orders of suburbs and Bellah et al.’s (1996) work on moral individualism. Wood and Skeggs (2008) have used reality television as a device for investigating contemporary moralities, showing how working-class bodies and selves are coded as morally inferior, and middle-class values and culture reinforced as universally normative. These studies offer important sociological insight into how people conceptualise and live out morality. However, all of them, besides Wood and Skeggs, are limited to the American experience of morality. There simply is very little qualitative research that has been done on the subjective experiences of morality outside the American context. Furthermore, most of the qualitative research does not attempt to engage with contemporary sociological theorising on morality.

What is missing is theoretically informed qualitative research, conducted outside the American context that explicitly investigates the question of how individuals narrate the construction and practice of everyday morality. In other words, what does the ostensible social condition of moral ‘decline’ or absence look like ‘on the ground’, that is, in the everyday moral relationships, practices and experiences of contemporary individuals? Further, how do contemporary theorisations of morality work out in practice? To answer these questions, this book delves into the personal worlds of urban Australian bloggers to illuminate how morality is understood, constructed and experienced in everyday life. Blogs are treated as a distinct way of accessing ‘the social’, offering highly nuanced, idiosyncratic and honest accounts of how morality emerges concretely within the ‘sphere of the everyday’. The highly emotive and often confessional quality of the blog means they are a rich data source for capturing some of the complex ways in which morality is articulated in the daily lives of contemporary individuals.

Researching morality: use of blogs

The key methodological issue underpinning the research for this book was how to empirically capture the moral reality of everyday life. Researching everyday moral worlds can be difficult to explore using traditional qualitative methods such as interviews that ask people directly about their moral beliefs (Phillips and Harding, 1985). It is challenging to contextualise such a topic so that it is meaningful for participants, and there is the issue of people attempting to present themselves in a specific moral light, abstracted from the way that morality is grounded in their day-to-day lives.

Blogs offered an alternative way to ‘get at’ spontaneous accounts of everyday morality, providing an original empirical lens through which to investigate the contemporary production of morality and selfhood in late-modernity. Blogs are a user-generated form of web content, where Internet users both produce and consume content at the same time as communicating and interacting with each other. Evan Williams, co-creator of popular blogging programme Blogger, argues that the defining features of blogs are ‘frequency, brevity and personality’ (Turnbull, 2002). Like other Web 2.0 applications, blogs reflect a wider shift in late-modern ‘confessional society’ where people curate and reflect upon their personal lives in the public realm (Beer, 2008).

The blogs were selected as a form of personal life record (Thomas and Znaniecki, [1918] 1958) that allowed access to spontaneous accounts of everyday life that reflected what was important to the blogger without the intervention of a researcher. Blogs are a useful technique for making the morally invisible visible, capturing the immediate, fleeting and transitory moments that constitute everyday life (Jacobsen, 2009: 21).

The use of personal documents in social science research has an established history and can be traced to the pioneering work of Chicago School sociologists Thomas and Znaniecki ([1918] 1958), who claimed they were ‘the perfect type of sociological material’ (ibid.: 1832–1833). More recently, Ferrarotti (2003: 25) argues that ‘reading[ing] a society through a biography’ enables researchers to unpack the ‘explosive subjectivity’ of the social world as it is experienced from the position of the individual within the concrete category of the everyday. This book treats blogs as ‘documents of life’ that enable access to first person and spontaneous narratives of moral experience and action (Plummer, 2001; Hookway and Snee, 2017).

The research study involved a qualitative analysis of 44 Australian blogs combined with 25 online in-depth interviews. The age range for the 44 sampled bloggers was 19–53, with a mean age of 31. Twenty-five of the bloggers were female and 19 were male (see Appendix: Cast of Characters). Interviews were used to ask bloggers about key incidents of moral reflection and decision-making identified in their blog and to use these descriptions as a launch-pad to further develop the bloggers’ moral understandings and practices. The blogs were sampled from the blogging platform LiveJournal (LJ). LiveJournal was singled out for its user-friendly interface, search capabilities, Australian market share and predominantly diary-style blogs. The sample was collected using the following criteria: personal or ‘diary-style’ style blogs; living in a major Australian city; social and cultural diversity; blogs that contain at least two incidents, moments, descriptions or experiences that shed light on the blogger’s everyday moral constructions and practices (e.g. apologising to an ex-partner; helping a homeless person; reflections on more abstract moral issues) and a minimum age of 18.

The majority of bloggers are writing about ‘ordinary relationships’ (Brownlie, 2014). The blogs focus on work, family and friendship and the emotional and moral lives which make up these relationships. Blog posts can be made private, which in some cases the researcher was given access to following blog solicitation (see below). The blogs vary in style and degree of reflexivity. Some bloggers recount their experiences with little self-reflection while others are highly self-reflective and self-analytical. Blog styles differ within and between blogs, shifting from a confessional style to anguished vents, therapeutic self-writing, emotional outpourings and advocating for social causes. The blogs sampled tended not to be explicitly political or issue focused; however, political observations and debate punctured many of the blog accounts of personal and everyday life. Rather than the fragmented and distracted ‘whatever being’ some blog theorists have proposed (Dean, 2010), the bloggers are deeply engaged in tracing and evaluating their worlds and the ethical entanglements and relationships in which these evaluations occur.

Data collection involved a combination of blog trawling and solicitation. The trawling phases used the advanced search functions of LiveJournal to find Australian blogs by age and location (which required becoming a paid member). The identified blogs were manually examined for posts that included moments or incidents of moral decision-making or reflection. The ‘trawling’ approach proved time-inefficient and produced limited results, so blog solicitation was adopted as a more active form of recruitment. The solicitation approach sought to recruit bloggers for the project by advertising on 55 LiveJournal community pages. Blog solicitation resulted in more relevant data being collected as those who were interested in taking part in the research could contact the researcher directly and point to specific posts on moral issues.

The data generated from the blogs were complemented with 25 in-depth online interviews. Bloggers were interviewed either as a result of responding to the request for an interview in the research invite or through the researcher contacting bloggers (via email or their blog) identified in the trawling phase. Interviews were divided into two parts. The first part focused on questions in relation to a concrete incident, moment, encounter or story selected from the blog (e.g. apologising to an ex-girlfriend; helping a homeless person; reasons for becoming a vegetarian; being ‘honourable’ to a friend; reflecting on the connection between God and morality). The guide contained a series of prompts tuned to tap questions of moral belief, reasoning, motivation and experience. The second part of the interview used these ‘moral moments’ to explore more general questions about the bloggers’ moral beliefs, views and worldview. To help protect the identity of the bloggers, a pseudonym has been given to participants that retains the bloggers’ naming conventions.

The collection and analysis of the blog and interview data were approached with the intention of understanding how late-modern subjects formulate morality in everyday life and how their lived experience of morality receives expression within key areas of everyday life. The first part of the question focuses on how bloggers narrate the construction of everyday morality; the second maps specific configurations of morality in everyday social practice and their implications for understanding the relational dimensions of morality. This analysis is grounded in the investigation of the substantiative areas of love and intimacy and human–animal relations, which were present in the blog narratives. These areas were also selected for their theoretical power in exploring the moral dimensions of contemporary self–Other relationships and so provide rich analytical space in which to empirically engage key concepts in Bauman’s moral sociology, such as ‘being for the other’ and ‘liquid love’. ‘Love’ and ‘animal’ relations are also areas of everyday life that remain relatively unexamined in empirical forms of sociology, particularly in terms of charting implications for contemporary moral and ethical life.

Book outline

A key argument of the book is that the blog accounts draw attention to morality as an actively made and non-conforming do-it-yourself project where the self is elevated to the position of rightful source and creator of morality. Morality is realised within the confines of the choosing, creative and original moral self rather than a following morality ‘enforced from outside’ (Bauman, 1993: 12). The DIY emphasis is shown to be important not only for atheist or non-believing bloggers – who often construct their own moral position against the ostensible ‘moral laziness’ of religion – but also for ‘believing’ bloggers, who use the vocabulary of ‘self-creation’ and ‘understanding’ rather than ‘blind following’. The book highlights a tension between the focus on an autonomous, artistic and non-rule following morality and the risk of missing the ‘aboutness’ (Sayer, 2005) of morality: how morality is less about the Y in DIY and more about the difficulty of doing in relation to Others. Although acknowledging issues of narcissism, concerns about ‘moving on’ culture and the class formation of subjectivity, the bloggers tell a largely hopeful story about the everyday moral power of self, emotion and ideals of authenticity that push back against the prevailing pessimism of moral decline accounts.

The blogged accounts of love and intimacy and human–animal relations spotlight the operation of morality within concrete sites of everyday life. First, the stories of contemporary love relations capture the dynamics of doing love in worlds lived increasingly ‘together and apart’ (Bauman, 2005a: 4). On the one hand, the blogs reveal the darker aspects of self and authenticity culture, where committed relationships look like obstacles to self-fulfilment, while on the other, love emerges as a distinctly ‘moral space’ where moral identity and responsibility are reflexively tackled as part of a culture of ‘moving on’ and ‘letting go’. Second, animals are argued to constitute significant moral ‘Others’ ignored in Bauman’s and Levinas’s ethics of Otherness. The blog accounts signal the ethical importance of animals within everyday moral reflection who both make demands on human responsibility and provide a mirror to human moral worlds. Animals tell not only about relations with non-human ‘Others’ but also about ‘ourselves’ – about the uniquely human.

Chapter 2 outlines and critiques a dominant genre of moral ‘decline’ sociology. The chapter begins with Durkheim’s original analysis of the moral infirmity of modernity before mapping his influence within two more recent strands of ‘loss’ sociology: the ‘cultural pessimists’ (Reiff, 1966; Bell, 1976; Lasch, 1979) and the ‘communitarians’ (Etzioni, 1994; Bellah et al., 1996; MacIntyre, 1985). These two theoretical positions are critiqued for their shared ontological debt to Durkheim’s model of human nature. Three specific assumptions are identified and critiqued: the view of human nature and self; ‘society’ as the necessary source of morality; and the functions of morality. This chapter sets the foundation for the discussion of more positive theoretical accounts of morality developed in Chapter 3.

Having critiqued the pessimism that infuses both classical and contemporary sociological work on morality, Chapter 3 draws on Bauman (1993), Ahmed (2000), Irigaray (1991), Foucault (1986) and Taylor (1992) to construct more positive accounts of contemporary morality. The chapter draws on these theorists to conceptualise how self, emotions and cultural ideals of authenticity and self-improvement can work as meaningful moral structures in late-modernity. The chapter begins by arguing that Bauman (1993; 1995) – despite his latter ‘liquid’ pessimism – is significant in tackling the moral presen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Moral life in the 21st century
• 2. Moral decline sociology and the legacy of Durkheim
• 3. Beyond moral decline: Theorising alternative moral structures
• 4. DIY morality and the problem of narcissism
• 5. ‘DIY spirituality’, ‘DIY Catholics’ and ‘anti-DIY’ fundamentalists
• 6. Love as moral space?: The morality of ‘moving on’
• 7. Animals and ethics: Being for the non-human Other
• 8. Conclusion: Moral futures
• Appendix
• References
• Index