Sociology of Moralities and Sociological Theory
Sociology of Moralities and Sociological Theory
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 19:00-20:30
Location: SJES027 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC16 Sociological Theory (host committee) Language: English
Although the moral theme is present in the classics of the discipline, most centrally for Durkheim, the problematic lost its theoretical centrality. For some decades now, moral issues have reemerged as topics of interest in sociology, transversally to the concerns of either integration or conflict, with greater emphasis on the normative dimension of sociology itself (Vandenberghe, 2017) or on the deployment of moralities in societies (Hitlin and Vassey, 2013), apart from the normative dimensions of the field. This often occurs in dialogue with other disciplines and relates to major societal changes. Relationship to others, a fundamental question of the social sciences, is once again becoming an explicit problem of social life. Through empirical and theoretical studies, the sociology of moralities privileges the observed range of definitions of good and evil, moral orientations that structure social behaviors and define the relationships between individuals, and between these and the idea of society. It addresses a essential set of questions such as what place for moralities in the framework of contemporary individualisms? How do new technologies strain the relations between the rules of civility and moralities? How do environmental concerns impact our sentiments of justice?
This session aims to bring together papers that problematize the problem of social moralities in contemporary societies, but with the explicit purpose of exploring the scope of sociologies of moralities as a way of producing current sociological theory on the cardinal problem of social life, and of the living together, in diverse societies.
Session Organizers:
Oral Presentations
Distributed Papers