A Companion to Moral Anthropology

Didier Fassin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118290583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies.

• Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism
• Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

PART I

Legacies

CHAPTER 1

Durkheim and the Moral Fact

Bruno Karsenti

Trans. Amy Jacobs

In being constituted as a science, sociology produced the equivalent of an earthquake in philosophy, attacking as it did the very idea of “theoretical morality” and any undertaking to identify a foundation for morality. Not only would moral philosophy never be the same, but it became questionable whether the discipline had the least relevance any longer. Durkheim had formulated his critique early on, during his 1886 trip to Germany – well before writing The Division of Labor in Society. He meant not only to make the point that mores varied by particular society but also to reap the implications of the idea that “moral facts” were conditioned by the “state of society” in which they appeared. To understand “morality,” then, required not an approach in which it was simply conceived as an essence illustrated by historical-social forms but a social science of moral facts. This could be achieved only if the concept of “moral fact” could be made to acquire stable contours in accordance with the terms of the new social science. In sum, the moral fact had to be determined. Durkheim set out to accomplish this in 1906, in a lecture to the Société Française de Philosophie. That his argument was made to and for philosophers is certainly not indifferent. He meant to demonstrate in the very locus of the discipline from which sociology was emancipating itself the validity of the view the new discipline had managed to acquire of philosophy’s own preferred object of study. Durkheim laid the grounds at that time for an approach that has fueled much lively thinking – some of it quite recent – on whether or not moral sociology can cohere as an independent discipline – independent, that is, from philosophy.

But returning to Durkheim has always raised objections. The positivist approach implied in Durkheim’s very notion of moral fact has seemed to suggest it can only really serve in descriptive studies of the mores and social constraints they manifest, and that it is incapable of relating that material to the properly subjective pole of morality, marked by the subject’s relation to values and reflected not so much in externally observable moral facts as in moral acts and judgments that can be understood only by reconstituting their internal structure. The point is particularly paradoxical since at a different level Durkheim was at pains to point out the normative character of sociological knowledge as such, often going so far as to adopt the tone of a moralist able to discern the tendencies underlying and working to shape society’s present state and likewise able to define, within that obscure, often conflictual, ­present state, what direction society should now take. In this respect, the emergence of sociology, and more importantly the figure of the sociologist, clearly brought about not only a change in the space of knowledge – that is, an epistemological change – but also in the way a society could intervene morally and even religiously in its own ongoing existence (Bellah 1974). Given that the ambiguity between descriptive and normative viewpoints was constitutive of the new discipline, that ambiguity is probably most visible in the moral sociology sector. Indeed, at the very moment this kind of approach is used to apprehend the object of study as specifically social, that object seems to escape its grasp, slipping into the subjective dimension where moral experience is made and takes shape as practical judgments and ­convictions. It is as if, of all observable social facts and precisely because of its ­normative texture, the moral fact necessarily overflowed the bounds of externalist factual determination. This in turn seems to suggest that sociology must resign itself either to switching perspectives – for example, adopting the Weberian perspective of value-oriented social action – or ­letting other disciplines take over. Durkheim’s moral sociology may even appear split in two, composed on one hand of a sort of sociological morality, that of the moralist or prophet that the sociologist sometimes seems to represent in the society he speaks in, and on the other a resolutely descriptive approach ultimately destined to become – in direct contradiction to Durkheim’s own presuppositions – a kind of moral psychology or philosophy. As we shall see, it was precisely by twisting the definition of morality that Durkheim managed to guard against such a scission.

DETERMINATION BY “SANCTION”

What exactly did Durkheim mean by “moral fact”? In the first (1893) edition of La division du travail social, he proclaimed the institution of “a science that, after it had classified moral phenomena, would seek to identify the conditions of each type and determine its role – that is, a positive science of morality” (Durkheim 1975b: 271). But for such a science to be possible, a stable criterion had to be found that would define what was to be included in the taxonomy. Clearly by 1893 Durkheim had already formulated the problem of “determining the moral fact” or “moral reality,” his understanding being that such reality was complex and heterogeneous, and had to be typologically organized in a way that would clarify its structure. He resolved this problem as follows. Every moral fact consists in a diffusely sanctioned rule of behavior. “Sanction,” understood as a predetermined social reaction to rule violation, is presented as the fundamental criterion for objectifying moral facts. Morality and law, explains Durkheim, are species of a single genus, distinguished only by the mode in which sanctions are administered: “diffuse” in the former, “organized” in the latter. Clearly this criterion makes the relationship between rule and instituted fact more problematic in matters of morality than in law, precisely because the question of subjectively distributed moral judgment cannot be raised in the same terms for morality as for a clearly outlined, circumscribed, judgment-­making i­nstitution.

Durkheim granted priority to sanction because sanction alone allows for ­distinguishing moral rules from purely technical ones within the general domain of rules. In other words, an action is sanctioned not only when it has violated a rule but inasmuch as it has violated a rule. Rather than being a consequence of the act and so analytically contained in the concept of that act, the sanction is a consequence of the relationship between the act and the rule as rule. If there were no such relationship, no sanction-type consequence could attach to the act. This, according to Durkheim’s liberal interpretation of Kant’s distinction between precept and imperative, is because the sanction-to-act relationship is a synthetic one (Durkheim 2004 [1925]: 61). Intrinsically, there is nothing in the act that leaves it open to sanction. Rather, a ­synthesis is produced – and as we shall see, it can only be produced socially – between act and sanction, and it is this synthesis that enables me to say not that I am being punished because I have done such-and-such but inasmuch as I have done such-­and-such, that is, as a consequence of my relationship to the rule.

However, there is a difficulty implied in using the notion of sanction to meet the requirement of fact objectification. Durkheim’s aim was to provide sociology with the means of envisaging and organizing moral facts in their plurality, and he meant to achieve this by turning away from classic philosophical analysis of the concept of moral act. But trying to grasp moral facts from without meant concentrating on the effects of violation, the consequences of acts that go against morality. Sanction, as Durkheim put it, is a reagent; the way it achieves objectification is by pointing to a rule as that which has been disregarded or negated. But might not the reagent notion imply an unacceptable restriction here? It would seem to fail to take into account acts that express respect for obligations whose transgression does not incur sanction (Pharo 2004: 99).

To correctly measure the impact of this objection, we have to return to the conceptual economy of the relationship between obligation and sanction, as that is the form Durkheim’s argument actually takes. For him it was beside the point to determine whether a transgression actually carried a risk of sanction or even whether that risk was clearly perceived by the agent. All repressive sanctions aim to diminish the agent and therefore consist quite literally in a peine (punishment). That the sanction is aimed at the agent this way has a considerable effect on how Durkheim understood obligation. Penal law – from which, once again, morality as he understood it differs not in nature but only in the way that punishment is administered – “does not first state, as does civil law: This is the duty; but states immediately: This is the punishment” (Durkheim 1996 [1893]: 41; English edn. 1974: 35). One implication of this is that the obligation itself is ever-already known. Moral obligation, then, is characterized by a specific cognitive situation and indicated by a certain type of sanction. Another implication is that not only does this understanding in terms of sanction not preclude evaluation of the type “moral judgment,” but it actually implies such evaluation from the outset, as the point is to discover what serves as a foundation for obligations characteristic of repressive sanction, regardless of whether such ­sanctions are organized or diffuse.

HOW DURKHEIM’S THINKING IS RELATED TO KANT’S

What is the source of sanctions characteristic of moral rules? Durkheim only provided a full answer to this question in the above-mentioned 1906 lecture, entitled Determination du fait moral, and he obtained that answer by shifting the emphasis of the classic Kantian argument he was using. A brief review of the terms of the philosophical debate is in order. Durkheim claimed that, in contrast to Kantian thought, utilitarianism, particularly Spencer’s, “betrays a complete ignorance of the nature of obligation” (2004: 63; English edn. 1974: 44) in that utilitarian thinkers could understand the consequence of violating an obligation in analytic terms only as the “mechanical consequence of an act.” This amounted to a failure to understand the very concept of sanction, for sanction involved a synthetic tie between act and rule. The objective perspective of sanction, on the other hand – quite different from the perspective a Kantian would adopt in that, as Durkheim recognizes and indeed claims for his own argument, it implies “rigorously empirical analysis” – leads to the conclusion that what makes an obligation an obligation pertains not to the nature of what is commanded but rather to the fact of being commanded. Behind sanctioned rules of conduct, that is, those rules in which moral obligations are incarnated, we must therefore discover a “special authority,” in accordance with which rules “are obeyed simply because they command” (Durkheim 2004: 50; English edn. 1974: 36). This provided a solution to the problem raised by repressive sanctions: A moral obligation need not be formulated; rather it can be assumed to be “ever-already known,” precisely because it is not known in terms of its content, as the only thing that need be known about a moral obligation is that it obligates, and that knowledge is implied in its very form, that of moral commandment.

This amounts to claiming that duty is or carries within it its own foundation. Indeed, that is what gives duty primacy over good. Here Durkheim seems to align himself with Kant: morality must be founded not on an objectively qualified good but rather on duty as “objective necessity” for action – precisely Kant’s words. For Kant, the commandment specific to moral law must be formally characterized as an imperative that determines “will as will,” not as a means to attain a desired effect. It is ­neither subjective like maxims nor conditioned like precepts, which are merely ­hypothetical imperatives. It is instead categorical – Kant’s word for defining the order of strictly practical necessity.

It is by means of the classic form of commandment that Durkheim seeks to determine what makes the moral fact absolutely distinctive. However, he then immediately subverts its meaning by laying down a principle that is not in the least Kantian and at first seems irreconcilable with the definition of formal obligation recalled above. The notion of duty, writes Durkheim, is in itself insufficient, and pure formalism is untenable, because it is “impossible for us to carry out an act simply because we are ordered to do so and without consideration of its content” (2004: 50; English edn. 1974: 36). The classic rigoristic solution, then, was in Durkheim’s view only partially right; to it must be added a material element that actually contravenes its formalist dimension. In other words, the only legitimate way to affirm the primacy of duty over good – good being, for Kant, the “material but only objective determining ground of objects of action” (1983 [1788]: 79; English edn. 1997: 43) – is to perceive good in duty itself and thus to furnish content for what Kant considered the purely formal principle of moral commandment. Durkheim’s move was to demonstrate that the correct understanding of the notion of obligation and the correct analysis of duty could not do without the notion of good. Thus, contrary to all expectations, the bases for a ­nonformal theory of morality were to be found within rigorism.

Durkheim’s combined critique of Kantian formalism and return to morality understood in terms of duty by universalizing the action maxim was no novelty; it was a commonplace of republican French philosophy, the philosophical thinking that had come to the fore in the second half of the nineteenth century and been presented by such authors as Barni, Renouvier, Fouillée, and Paul Janet. Nascent sociology resparked that debate at the turn of the century and took up one of its main concerns: finding a motive for action that could inscribe the categorical imperative within feeling, feeling of a kind that went beyond mere respect for the law – “a feeling that is positive in its intellectual cause” (Kant 1983: 83; English edn. 1997: 68) – since respect for the law would not suffice as subjective determination to act, that is, ­precisely the type of determination that republican morality was seeking to reactivate through appropriate educational techniques. The universal could not be reduced in practice to an abstraction, ran this argument, and even less to the content of a commandment whose form alone was enough to guarantee its validity. Frédéric Rauh summed up the republican thinkers’ aim in 1890 in a work that proved decisive for the position of the morality issue in this period: “We must surpass Kant’s logicism by justifying feeling as reconciled with the idea” (1890: 4).¹

However, within this general framework, where the point was to show that the purpose of the universal was situated at the very heart of feeling and therefore at a level that Kantian thinking rejected as pathological, the uniqueness of Durkheim’s position is immediately apparent, first of all in his aforementioned refusal to remain on the same grounds of discussion. His point was to determine moral facts, and this meant examining moral reality not through the internal experience of the moral ­subject – that is, the individual’s representation of what is moral – but from the outside. As Durkheim saw it, the attempts by moralists (Kant, Renouvier, Janet, but also the English utilitarian thinkers) to provide a foundation or a new foundation for morality could not succeed because they were introspective and individualistic. But this was not all: for Durkheim the point was not to amend rigorism but to bolster it. He meant to establish an internal tie, unsuspected by either Kant or his critics, ­between duty and good, obligation and desire. Moral things, or what Durkheim called the moral (substantivizing the adjective primarily for the purpose of objectification and thus, in accordance with the first “rule of sociological method,” to apprehend a thing as posited outside the subject), were desirable in themselves. This objective desirability brought the notion of good back to the fore and required a more complex analysis of duty. The paradox – a paradox that sociology alone could render acceptable – was that de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthropology
• PART I: Legacies
• PART II: Approaches
• PART III: Localities
• PART IV: Worlds
• PART V: Politics
• PART VI: Dialogues
• Index of Names
• Subject Index