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Transgression and the Social Construction of Moral Meanings

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Representing Communism After the Fall

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology ((PSDP))

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Abstract

This chapter looks at everyday meanings of morality in the public sphere in public responses/reactions to alleged transgressive behavior—having collaborated with the Securitate. It explores the uses and functions of lay versions of morality and various interpretive procedures and socio-cultural resources of interpretation that people mobilize. As I showed in the previous chapters, rather than attempt to analyze moral judgments in abstract, one must focus on constructions and uses of morality that talk and text make relevant. In this chapter I want to extend that line of argument to the issue of everyday social responses and social reactions to moral transgression.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Public avowals of ‘collaboration’ with the Securitate form an extensive collection of public statements made by politicians, public intellectuals, journalists, and clerics on their complicity with the Communist Secret police. Most of the public statements were featured in media and news interviews, newspaper articles, letters sent to newspapers, and radio and television panel debates.

  2. 2.

    Although most of the material is in the public domain, the values of privacy are observed and respected. To respect the privacy of commentators, the excerpts included here are not identified by the name of their producer and are given in their English translation.

  3. 3.

    Conspirational name given by the Securitate

  4. 4.

    Names of two famous Romanian public intellectuals

  5. 5.

    By virtue of their release and presence in the public sphere, confessions can always be regarded with suspicion or presented as stemming from some ulterior motive (see [36]). This is also an implicit nod to how a confession may be constructed and used to manage personal moral concerns, and those of others ‘for some personal edge or … advantage’ (Charmaz 2002, p. 318).

  6. 6.

    Media ‘scandal’ discourses construct and mobilize various versions of lay morality and moral meanings through a shift from reporting the specific event that causes outrage (the individual’s own version of wrongdoing, his/her confession) to the contextualization and recontextualization of (seemingly related) more general concerns whose role is to help reveal the individual’s ‘real’ agenda, concerns or vested interested in presenting a specific version of events to the public: the ‘moral character’ of the individual and those around him, the moral ‘culture’ of the group, society, and political party of which the wrongdoer is a member, and analogies and extrapolations to other ‘scandals’. Such public discourses in the media, associated to the short or long ‘career’ of a scandal, may involve considerable transformations and distortions.

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  1. School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Cristian Tileagă

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Tileagă, C. (2018). Transgression and the Social Construction of Moral Meanings. In: Representing Communism After the Fall. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97394-4_8

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