Introduction

We are in a state of moral decline in the contemporary West – or so we’re told. This chapter contextualises the focus and aims of the book within both popular and theorised anxieties about moral change and decline, before outlining central theoretical arguments and tracing the key empirical literature on morality. The chapter sets the foundation for the book’s central premise that morality needs to be recovered from ‘decline’ readings and sociological attention paid to how people actually narrate the construction and practice of everyday morality. The chapter outlines the blog and interview research methods that inform the empirical content in Chapters 4 to 7 and outlines the key arguments of each chapter.