Social Theorists of Morality

Essays on Moral Agency

Owen Abbott

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031751806
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031751813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an interdisciplinary series of essays on key social theorists of morality. It explores contributions to social moral theorising made by W. E. B. Du Bois, G. H. Mead, Jane Addams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Carol Gilligan, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Jonathan Haidt. It thus seeks to integrate alternative voices at the "foundations" of sociological theorising about morality, while entering into dialogues with post-Enlightenment moral philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. In so doing, it engages with perspectives of pragmatism, virtue ethics, care ethics, feminist critiques, and moral foundations theory. The essays discuss key topics in social theories of morality, including moral action, socialisation, habit and reflexiveness, relationships, emotion, self, identity, racism and colonialism, universalism, and innateness. It centres crucial (but often overlooked) questions of moral power, and assesses the relationship between moral theorising and normative argument. The essays are conjoined by a running theme of moral agency—how it is constituted and how it is enacted—which orientates the book's arguments and critiques.

Table of contents

• Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity
• Social Theorists of Morality
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• 1. Introduction
• 2. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Forgotten Sociology of Morality: Contesting the Foundations and Informing the Future of the Sociology of Morality
• 3. George Herbert Mead: Morality from the Perspective of the Act, Self, and Experience
• 4. Jane Addams’s Sociology of Moral Practice and Practice of Moral Sociology
• 5. Alasdair MacIntyre: Virtue, Practices, Identity, and Traditions
• 6. Carol Gilligan’s Different Moral Voice: Gender, Ethics of Care, and the Reconstitution of the Moral Domain
• 7. Seyla Benhabib: Interactive Universalism, the Concrete Other, and Discourse Ethics
• 8. Kwame Anthony Appiah: Ethics, Identity, and Idealization
• 9. Jonathan Haidt: Social Intuitionism and Moral Foundations Theory
• 10. Conclusion: A Social Perspective on Moral Agency
• Index1