The Sociology of the Moral and Ethics

This article revisits a classic Durkheimian problem: whether and how solidarity can adapt itself to the consequences of a fully developed division of labour. What would a developed sociology of the moral constitution of society look like? It would firstly have to be empirical and not philosophical; secondly it would have to produce an `irritant' and thus a communicative learning process within sociology itself. The necessary condition for this is the interdiction of self-exemption. The proposed correlation between this negative condition and moral communication is refutable only if moral communication could be found signalling esteem and disesteem in which the communicator took the licence of not applying the proclaimed standards reflexively. The division of labour cannot, in itself, be the source of morality because it is ruled by self-exemption. In moral communication, the duality of ego and alter and the opposition of esteem and disesteem are translated into a binary code that opposes positive and negative values and which is acceptable to both sides of a moral dispute as a framework to which they can refer. Codes are invariant but specific; ethical programmes change historically with the structural changes of the social system. This is not to end with a sterile relativism but to make the distinction, pace Durkheim, between ethics and the sociology of moral communication.