Debating Durkheim by Hermino Martins William Pickering

Author:Hermino Martins, William Pickering [Hermino Martins, William Pickering]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135087838
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2012-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Durkheim: the modern era and evolutionary ethics

W. Watts Miller

In the preface to the first, 1893 edition of The Division of Labour, Durkheim sets out the basis of his lifelong project for a science of morals which is also the key to ethics. As a science, it observes, describes, classifies and seeks to explain the ‘facts of moral life’. As the key to ethics, it helps us to address practical problems, propose reforms, and clarify, correct, decide on ideals. In both roles it very much involves a comparative approach to social and moral life. In the original introduction to The Division of Labour — unfortunately omitted in standard modern editions – Durkheim insists on the need to identify societies according to their type and stage of development.1 Practices and institutions can qualify as ‘normal’ if they are general throughout societies of the same type and at the same stage of development of this type. Hence a whole society can be in some way deviant compared with others of its type and stage of development. We might think of slavery in nineteenth-century America, or apartheid in modern South Africa, as well as Durkheim's own example of the tolerance in Italy of acts of brigandage (1893b: 34/t.l933b: 432). But the point of importance here is Durkheim's concern with the dynamics of change and development within a social type.

Discussion of evolutionary ethics is often preoccupied with how morality changes in the course of the world's history, or at least with how it changes in the transition from one basic type of society to another. Durkheim's interest in such issues is considerable. So, however, is his interest in moral change and development within the same social type, not least within our own, ‘modern’ society. It is on this which I wish to focus.

It involves an idea of an underlying and unfolding dynamic at work in modern society. This dynamic, it will be argued, does not and cannot just consist of the division of labour. It consists of two interdependent elements, the division of labour and the basic ideals of individualism-humanism. The argument is necessary since in The Division of Labour Durkheim himself can seem to cast their relationship as one in which the division of labour is the fundamental, unidirectional cause, and individualist—humanist ideals are its mere product and effect.

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