Constructing Moral Codes of Right and Wrong

Abstract

One Saturday afternoon in the course of watching Resurrection (the account of hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur s life) with research participants, a number of them picked up on a single line from the video: “I know what good morals are, but you have to abandon good morals when you live in a bad world” (Shakur & Lazin, 2003). This quotation was to become central as I began to answer the question, how do these township youth understand and construct notions of morality? As I have just described in the previous chapter, their social contexts—for the most part—constitute a “bad world.” In such a fraught context do young people have a developed moral code or is morality abandoned to basic survival tactics? Taking my cue from the Oxford English Dictionary (2005) that defines “moral” as relating to the distinction between “good or bad… right and wrong,” this chapter provides an analysis of the ways in which young people negotiate, navigate, and interpret the categories of right and wrong. It then elaborates how their moral codes are complex, comprising conventional, contested, and contextual constructions. Finally, it attempts to make sense of these multiple codes by identifying the social representations that lie beneath them.