The suffering of others: Moral boundaries & political violence

This study examines how the suffering of others is interpreted through the drawing of moral boundaries. Taking my cue from Zerubavel’s theories of moral concern and Lakoff’s work on moral metaphors, I examine how spheres of moral concern are defined in reaction to political violence. Using a multi-method approach (ethnography and content analysis), the research examines how people identify and disidentify with victims of terrorism and aggression. The data is comprised of over 30,000 contributions to online communities hosted by flagship newspapers in Brazil, France, and the U.S.: Le Monde, O Estado de São Paulo, and The New York Times. The research elucidates the frames used by French, Brazilian, and American participants of each online community to articulate competing constructions of justice, responsibility, and victimhood in response to 9/11/01 and other events of political violence. The work explores how individuals and groups react to others’ suffering by engaging in identity work. Findings reveal that in assessing others’ suffering, individuals employ identity categories as boundary markers to include or exclude others from their own spheres of moral concern. Some social actors draw on moral metaphors to identify with others as a member of their own spheres of moral concern. Others, by contrast, do identity work to disidentify with others in order to exile them from salient spheres of moral concern. These findings offer evidence that when faced with others’ suffering, social actors form relational categories of inclusion or exclusion. Through moral focusing, individuals divide the world between the morally worthy us and the morally unworthy them to generate or withhold compassion. In revealing these trends, this project illuminates how identity work allows us to efface or construct difference between the “us” and the “them” in order to designate victims as worthy or unworthy of our moral concern.