Sociology and moral character: Diagnostic, agnostic, or gnostic?

ABSTRACT

This article suggests three orientations within sociology toward issues of morality and character development. The first stems from Durkheim, one where sociological tools diagnose the operation of any society and its constituent parts, including typifications of the individual. This tradition holds that sociologists can help diagnose society-specific problems and failings and participate in addressing them. The second is Weberian, the notion that sociologists need to be value-neutral in their science. This approach is more agnostic in terms of prescribing fixes to social structures and attempts a more dispassionate analysis of social systems. The third traces to some origins of the field highlighting moral injustices in contemporary society, holding that there is, in fact, a ‘right’ way to understand human character and potential. Some adherents of this echo ancient gnostic proclamations of holding true insight into the nature of natural and social life, while other, more DuBois-ian strands represent fundamental challenges to existing power structures. Ultimately, the paper concludes that sociological insight is vital for fully contextualizing the forces shaping the teaching, enactment, and consequences of moral character, but the author is less clear about which Ideal Type best captures the discipline’s potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• moral character
• sociology of morality
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Certainly, these could be more richly drawn, but my goal is to provide a fair overview of the approaches to morality-as-it-influences-professional-sociology that are a) recognizable to members of my field but b) aimed at non-sociologists.

2. A famous shortcoming of Kohlberg’s approach to teaching morality was that women almost never made it to the top quadrants, prodding his student (Gilligan, 1982) to offer a more-commonly-attached-to-females-perspective of the importance of ‘care’. Later work showed that the gender bifurcation was overstated (Jaffee & Hyde, 2000), but now psychology had to deal with the existence of different bases that might comprise moral character.

3. Parsons, incidentally, was the focus of ongoing FBI investigation as a potential Marxist instigator, something that his sociological critics might be surprised to learn.

4. I claim no special insight into the nature of Parsons’ own politics, except to note that the FBI had a file on him as a potentially dangerous Leftist radical.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Hitlin

Steven Hitlin is Professor of Sociology & Criminology at The University of Iowa. His work spans morality, social psychology, and the life course, and he is the co-author of The Science of Dignity (Oxford University Press, 2023).