Abstract
This article reviews the substantive empirical and theoretical research programs and disputes within the sociology of morality. Specifically, research is reviewed in the areas of moral emotions, reputations and identities, at the social psychological level, and in the areas of political economy, religion and values at the cultural level. In addition, three areas of theoretical controversy are discussed—contentions over the primacy of culture over structure, over the primacy of subliminal versus reflective displays of moral behavior and over the ontological, metatheoretical nature of morality itself. The article ends with a proposed general, interdisciplinary, and integrative theoretical framework for the study of morality in sociology.
Keywords
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Abend (2011) for a review of the relevant arguments against viewing artificially/philosophically constructed moral judgements as entirely, sufficiently, constitutive of morality.
- 2.
Elsewhere, Haidt has flirted with adding additional moral foundations to his list. Here I discuss only his original “foundations”.
- 3.
I am defining wellbeing in a psychological and social sense—wellbeing involves cognition that is not overly taxed with stress and fear, and it also involves the networks, opportunities and resources (power, respect, influence, capital) people need to pursue valued cultural goals.
References
Abend, G. (2008). Two main problems in the sociology of morality. Theory and Society, 37, 87–125.
Abend, G. (2010). What’s new and what’s old about the new sociology of morality. In S. Vaisey & S. Hitlin (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of morality (pp. 561–584). New York: Springer.
Abend, G. (2011). Thick concepts and the moral brain. European Journal of Sociology, 52, 143–172.
Abend, G. (2013). What the science of morality doesn’t say about morality. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 43, 157–200.
Amodio, D., Jost, J. T., Master, S. L., & Yee, C. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 1246–1247.
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Apicella, C. L., Marlowe, F. W., Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2012). Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers. Nature, 481, 497–501.
Bader, C. D., & Finke, R. (2010). What does God require? Understanding religious context and morality. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of morality (pp. 241–254). New York: Springer.
Bainbridge, W. S. (1992). Crime, delinquency, and religion. In J. F. Shumaker (Ed.), Religion and mental health (pp. 119–210). New York: Oxford.
Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Tice, D. M. (2007). The strength model of self-control. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 351–355.
Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. ([1985] 2008). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Black, D. (1993). The social structure of right and wrong. Cambridge: Academic.
Black, D. (2011). Moral time. New York: Oxford University Press.
Black, D. (2013). On the almost inconceivable misunderstandings concerning the subject of value‐free social science. The British Journal of Sociology, 64, 763–780.
Bloom, P. (2012). Religion, morality, evolution. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 179–199.
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boehm, C. (2012). Moral origins: The evolution of virtue, altruism, and shame. New York: Basic Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Brandt, A. M., & Rozin, P. (2013). Morality and health. New York: Routledge.
Brooks, A. C. (2006). Who really cares: The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism. New York: Basic Books.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Brown, D. E. (2004). Human universals. Daedalus, 133, 47–54.
Bruce, S. (2011). Secularization: In defense of an unfashionable theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brueggemann, J. (2014). Morality, sociological discourse, and public engagement. Social Currents, 1, 211–219.
Burke, P., & Stets, J. E. (2009). Identity theory. Oxford: New York.
Carney, D. R., Jost, J. T., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles, and the things they leave behind. Political Psychology, 29, 807–840.
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality–social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 111–135.
Churchland, P. S. (2011). Braintrust: What neuroscience tells us about morality. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Collett, J. L., & Lizardo, O. (2010). Occupational status and the experience of anger. Social Forces, 88, 2079–2104.
Collins, R. (1981). On the micro-foundations of macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology, 86, 984–1014.
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Côté, S., House, J., & Willer, R. (2015). High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 15838–15843.
De Waal, F. (2009). Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved: How morality evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Decety, J. (2011). The neuroevolution of empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1231, 35–45.
Decety, J. (2014). The neuroevolution of empathy and caring for others: Why it matters for morality. In J. Decety & Y. Christen (Eds.), New frontiers in social neuroscience (pp. 127–151). New York: Springer.
Decety, J., & Svetlova, M. (2012). Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 1–24.
Desmond, S. A., & Kraus, R. (2014). The effects of importance of religion and church attendance on adolescents’ moral beliefs. Sociological Focus, 47, 11–31.
Dodd, M. D., Balzer, A., Jacobs, C. M., Gruszczynski, M. W., Smith, K. B., & Hibbing, J. R. (2012). The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: Connecting physiology and cognition to preferences. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 367, 640–649.
Durkheim, E. (1893 [1997]). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1912 [1976]). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Routledge.
Durkheim, E., & Mauss, M. (1903 [1963]). Primitive classification. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Edgell, P., Gerteis, J., & Hartmann, D. (2006). Atheists as “Other”: Moral boundaries and cultural membership in American society. American Sociological Review, 71, 211–234.
Emerson, M. O., & Smith, C. (2000). Divided by faith: Evangelical religion and the problem of race in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2006). The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: Why the adjustments are insufficient. Psychological Science, 17, 311–318.
Eriksson, K., & Strimling, P. (2015). Group differences in broadness of values may drive dynamics of public opinion on moral issues. Mathematical Social Sciences, 77, 1–8.
Farrell, J. (2014). Moral outpouring: Shock and generosity in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. Social Problems, 61, 482–506.
Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99, 689–723.
Fiske, A. P., & Haslam, N. (2005). The four basic social bonds: Structures for coordinating interaction. In M. W. Baldwin (Ed.), Interpersonal cognition (pp. 267–298). New York: Guilford Press.
Galen, L. W. (2012). Does religious belief promote prosociality? A critical examination. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 876–906.
Gervais, W. M., Shariff, A. F., & Norenzayan, A. (2011). Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 1189–1206.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gilovich, T. (1991). How we know what isn’t so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: Free Press.
Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994 [2009]). Moral panics: The social construction of deviance. New York: Wiley.
Gorski, P. S. (2013). Beyond the fact/value distinction: Ethical naturalism and the social sciences. Society, 50, 543–553.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1029–1046.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Vintage.
Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2007). Social intuitionists answer six questions about morality. In W. Sinnott Armstron (Ed.), Moral psychology volume 2: The cognitive science of morality (pp. 181–217). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In S. T. Fisek, D. T. Gilbert, & G. H. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 797–832). Hoboken: Wiley.
Harkness, S. K., & Hitlin, S. (2014). Morality and emotions. In Handbook of the sociology of emotions: Volume II (pp. 451–471). New York: Springer.
Harris, M. (1989). Cows, pigs, wars, and witches: The riddles of culture. New York: Vintage.
Harris, S. (2010). The moral landscape: How science can determine human values. New York: Basic Books.
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., Peterson, J. C., & Feher, B. (2014). The deeper sources of political conflict: Evidence from the psychological, cognitive, and neuro-sciences. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 111–113.
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., & Alford, J. R. (2015). Liberals and conservatives: Non-convertible currencies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, 27–28.
Hitlin, S., & Kramer, K. W. (2014). Intentions and institutions: Turning points and adolescents’ moral threshold. Advances in Life Course Research, 20, 16–27.
Hitlin, S., & Pinkston, K. (2013). Values, attitudes, and ideologies: Explicit and implicit constructs shaping perception and action. In J. DeLamater (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (pp. 319–339). New York: Springer.
Hitlin, S., & Vaisey, S. (2013). The new sociology of morality. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 51–68.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983 [2003]). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hodgkiss, P. (2013). A moral vision: Human dignity in the eyes of the founders of sociology. The Sociological Review, 61, 417–439.
Hunter, J. D. (1992). Culture wars: The struggle to control the family, art, education, law, and politics in America. New York: Basic Books.
Iadicola, P. (2014). Economic crime: The challenges of regulation and control. Economic Forum, 531, 158–163.
Ignatow, G. (2009). Why the sociology of morality needs Bourdieu’s habitus. Sociological Inquiry, 79, 98–114.
Inglehart, R. (1977 [2015]). The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles among western publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Johnson, M., Rowatt, W., & LaBouff, J. (2010). Priming christian religious concepts increases racial prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 119–126.
Johnson, M., Rowatt, W., & LaBouff, J. (2012). Religiosity and prejudice revisited: In-group favoritism, out-group derogation, or both? Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 4, 154–168.
Johnson, K. M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S., Vaisey, S., Miles, A., Chu, V., & Graham, J. (2014). Ideology‐specific patterns of moral indifference predict intentions not to vote. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 14, 61–77.
Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist, 61, 651–670.
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A., & Sulloway, F. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.
Koleva, S. P., Graham, J., Iyer, R., Ditto, P. H., & Haidt, J. (2012). Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes. Journal of Research in Personality, 46, 184–194.
Krivo, L. J., Washington, H. M., Peterson, R. D., Browning, C. R., Calder, C. A., & Kwan, M.-P. (2013). Social isolation of disadvantage and advantage: The reproduction of inequality in urban space. Social Forces, 92, 141–164.
Lawler, E. J., Thye, S. R., & JeongkooYoon, J. (2009). Social commitments in a depersonalized world. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Lee, M. T. (2014). The essential interconnections among altruism, morality, and social solidarity: The case of religious altruism. In V. Jeffries (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of altruism, morality, and social solidarity: Formulating a field of study (pp. 311–332). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lenski, G. E. (2005). Ecological-evolutionary theory: Principles and applications. Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. (1995). Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 35, 80–94.
Lukes, S. (2008). Moral relativism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marmot, M. G. (2006). Status syndrome: A challenge to medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 11, 1304–1307.
Marx, K. (1857 [2008]). Condition of factory laborers. In J. Ledbetter (Ed.), Dispatches for the New York tribune: Selected journalism of Karl Marx (pp. 189–191). New York: Penguin.
McCaffree, K. (2015). What morality means: An interdisciplinary synthesis for the social sciences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McPherson, J. M., & Ranger-Moore, J. R. (1991). Evolution on a dancing landscape: Organizations and networks in dynamic blau space. Social Forces, 70, 19–42.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444.
Miles, A. (2014). Demographic correlates of moral differences in the contemporary United States. Poetics, 46, 75–88.
Miles, A., & Vaisey, S. (2015). Morality and politics: Comparing alternate theories. Social Science Research, 53, 252–269.
Molm, L. D. (2003). Theoretical comparisons of forms of exchange. Sociological Theory, 21, 1–17.
Newman, G. (1976). Comparative deviance: Law and perception in six cultures. New York: Elsevier.
Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Norenzayan, A., & Shariff, A. (2008). The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science, 322, 58–62.
Norenzayan, A. (2012). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2012). Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children’s copying behavior. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 126, 182–192.
Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., Hatemi, P. K., & Hibbing, J. R. (2008). Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science, 321, 1667–1670.
Panksepp, J., & Panksepp, J. B. (2013). Toward a cross-species understanding of empathy. Trends in Neurosciences, 36, 489–496.
Park, R. E. (1924). The concept of social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 8, 339–344.
Paul, G. F. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 1–17.
Peterson, R. D., & Krivo, L. J. (2010). Divergent social worlds: Neighborhood crime and the racial-spatial divide. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Phelan, J. C., Link, B. G., Diez-Roux, A., Kawachi, I., & Levin, B. (2004). “Fundamental Causes” of social inequalities in mortality: A test of the theory. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45, 265–285.
Phelan, J. C., Link, B. G., & Tehranifar, P. (2010). Social conditions as fundamental causes of health inequalities theory, evidence, and policy implications. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51, 28–40.
Preston, S. D. (2013). The origins of altruism in offspring care. Psychological Bulletin, 139(6), 1305.
Ridgeway, C. L. (2007). Gender as a group process: Implications for the persistence of inequality. Advances in Group Processes, 24, 311–333.
Ridgeway, C. L. (2009). Framed before we know it: How gender shapes social relations. Gender and Society, 23, 145–160.
Ridgeway, C. (2011). Framed by gender: How gender inequality persists in the modern world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rios, V. M. (2009). The consequences of the criminal justice pipeline on black and latino masculinity. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623, 150–162.
Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S., & Haidt, J. (1999). The CAD triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 574–586.
Schnittker, J., & McLeod, J. D. (2005). The social psychology of health disparities. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 75–103.
Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a theory of the universal content and structure of values: Extensions and cross-cultural replications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 878–891.
Shweder, R., Much, N., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The big ‘Three’ of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity) and the big ‘Three’ explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119–169). New York: Routledge.
Simpson, B., & Willer, R. (2008). Altruism and indirect reciprocity: The interaction of person and situation in prosocial behavior. Social Psychology Quarterly, 71, 37–52.
Simpson, B., & Willer, R. (2015). Beyond altruism: Sociological foundations of cooperation and prosocial behavior. Annual Review of Sociology, 441, 1–21.
Simpson, B., Harrell, A., & Willer, R. (2013). Hidden paths from morality to cooperation: Moral judgments promote trust and trustworthiness. Social Forces, 91, 1529–1548.
Smith, C. (2013). Comparing ethical naturalism and ‘Public Sociology’. Society, 50, 598–601.
Smith, C., & Sorrell, K. (2014). On social solidarity. In V. Jeffries (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of altruism, morality, and social solidarity: Formulating a field of study (pp. 219–248). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stets, J. E., & Biga, C. (2003). Bringing identity theory into environmental sociology. Sociological Theory, 21, 398–423.
Stets, J. E., & Carter, M. J. (2012). A theory of the self for the sociology of morality. American Sociological Review, 77, 120–140.
Stets, J. E., & McCaffree, K. (2014). Linking morality, altruism, and social solidarity using identity theory. In V. Jeffries (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of altruism, morality, and social solidarity (pp. 333–351). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stryker, S. (1980). Symbolic interactionism: A social structural version. California: Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company.
Stryker, S. (2004). Integrating emotion into identity theory. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theory and research on human emotions (pp. 1–23). New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Stryker, S., & Burke, P. J. (2000). The past, present, and future of an identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63, 284–297.
Sayer, A. (2011). Habitus, work and contributive justice. Sociology, 45, 7–21.
Tavory, I. (2011). The question of moral action: A formalist position. Sociological Theory, 29, 272–293.
Turner, J. H. (2007). Human emotions: A sociological theory. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Turner, J. H. (2010a). The stratification of emotions: Some preliminary generalizations. Sociological Inquiry, 80(2), 168–199.
Turner, J. H. (2010b). Natural selection and the evolution of morality in human societies. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of morality (pp. 125–145). New York: Springer.
Turner, J. H. (2014). The evolution of affect, sociality, altruism and conscience in humans. In V. Jeffries (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of altruism, morality and social solidarity: Formulating a field (pp. 275–302). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Turner, J. H., & Maryanski, A. (2008). On the origin of societies by natural selection. New York: Routledge.
Turner, S. P., & Turner, J. H. (1990). The impossible science: An institutional analysis of American sociology. New York: Russell Sage.
Vaisey, S. (2007). Structure, culture, and community: The search for belonging in 50 urban communes. American Sociological Review, 72, 851–873.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual‐process model of culture in action. American Journal of Sociology, 114, 1675–1715.
Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2010). Can cultural worldviews influence network composition? Social Forces, 88, 1595–1618.
Vaisey, S., & Miles, A. (2014). Tools from moral psychology for measuring personal moral culture. Theory and Society, 43, 311–332.
Van Leeuwen, F., & Park, J. H. (2009). Perceptions of social dangers, moral foundations, and political orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 169–173.
Van Leeuwen, F., Park, J. H., Koenig, B., & Graham, J. (2012). Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33, 429–437.
Van Leeuwen, F., Koenig, B., Graham, J., & Park, J. H. (2014). Moral concerns across the United States: Associations with life-history variables, pathogen prevalence, urbanization, cognitive ability, and social class. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35, 464–471.
Wikström, P. O. H. (2010). Explaining crime as moral actions. In S. Vaisey & S. Hitlin (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of morality (pp. 211–239). New York: Springer.
Wagmiller, R. L., Jr., & Lee, K. (2014). Are contemporary patterns of black male joblessness unique? Cohort replacement, intracohort change, and the diverging structures of black and white men’s employment. Social Problems, 61, 305–327.
Weber, M. (1919 [2004]). The vocation of science. In S. Whimster (Ed.), The essential weber: A reader (pp. 270–287). New York: Routledge.
Weber, M. (1920 [2002]). The protestant ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. In The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: And other writings (pp. 1–201). New York: Penguin.
Willer, R., Youngreen, R., Troyer, L., & Lovaglia, M. (2012). How do the powerful attain status? The roots of legitimate power inequalities. Managerial and Decision Economics, 33, 355–367.
Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. London: Verso.
Wright, J. C., & Baril, G. (2011). The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions: Are we all liberals at heart? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1007–1012.
Zuckerman, P. (2008). Society without god: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. New York: New York University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McCaffree, K. (2016). Sociology as the Study of Morality. In: Abrutyn, S. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61601-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32250-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)