ABSTRACT
As a social scientist I have long been troubled by the lack of recognition in contemporary social science of what might be termed the moral dimension of social life. In much of recent social theory, action is assumed to be either merely interest-driven, or habitual, or a product of wider discourses and institutions. Often it adopts a sociologically reductionist account of actors’ motives and actions, in effect, saying ‘they would say/do that, wouldn’t they, given their social position’, which is in contradiction with the first person accounts which actors (including social scientists) offer for their own behaviour, which involve justification rather than sociological explanation. Actors’ rationales or normative dispositions are discounted – either altogether, or by reducing them to conventions or features of discourses. Even those social theorists who, like Durkheim, invoke morality a great deal, often concentrate on its effects in reproducing social order, reducing it to mere convention backed by sanctions. This gives no insight into its normative force, and hence why it should matter so much to us. The idea that ethics or morality1 is simply ‘what we do round here’ will always be unconvincing, producing an alienated view of actors as mere dupes that misses what they care about and why.
