The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice by Owen Abbott

Author:Owen Abbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030318222
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Durkheim saw these obligatory rules of conduct as being a fundamental necessity to the functioning of society. ‘The purpose of the morality practised by a people is to enable it to live’, by engendering the degree of social solidarity necessary to the operative survival of the society (Durkheim 1979c: 131). The function of morality lies no less than in ensuring the functionality of social life as a whole by compelling obligations that moderate against the pre-social urges of human nature (Hookway 2017). Durkheim’s arguments for the functional necessity of socially instituted morality arises from his homo duplex view of humanity, which conceptualises human life as a constant struggle between ‘sensations and the sensory appetites, on the one hand, and the intellectual and moral life, on the other’ (Durkheim 1973: 162). Indeed, Durkheim (1984: 331) refers to ‘that which is moral [as] everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to take account of other people, to regulate his actions by something other than the promptings of his own egoism’.

However, the individual is only able to act morally, contrary to natural egotistical urges, because social existence constitutes them as ‘the servant of a being superior to himself and to all other individuals’ (Durkheim 1925: 61). Thus, ‘in order to fulfil one’s obligations and to act morally… it is necessary that the person be so constituted as to feel above him a force unqualified by his personal preferences and to which he yields’ (Durkheim 1925: 34); ‘society alone can play this moderating role, for it is the only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of which he accepts’ (Durkheim 1979b). Put otherwise, it is the social that contains and imposes intellectual and moral conscience upon the base impulsions of the pre-social individual, which it does through a ‘voice which speaks to us in such an imperative tone, which enjoins us to change our own nature [that] can only derive from a being which is distinct from ourselves, and which also dominates us’, which for Durkheim, is society (Durkheim 1900, cited in Giddens 1972: 133).

Durkheim affirms and reifies the externality of society as the source of morality further still by arguing that ‘since moral requirements… determine conduct imperatively from sources outside ourselves’, ‘one must have some appreciation of the authority sui generis that informs morality’, and subsequently reject ‘the classical and widely held view, that society is only a collection of individuals’ (Durkheim 1925: 34, 60). For Durkheim, viewing society in terms of a collection of individuals, rather than as a binding force with the externalised authority to transform the will and intentions of individuals against their nature, would ultimately result in ‘the collective interest’ being ‘only the sum of self-interests’, which firstly ‘is itself amoral’, but more importantly is inadequate to engender the binding solidarity that is necessary for society to function (Durkheim 1925: 34, 60). Durkheim continues:If society is to be considered as the normal goal of moral conduct, then it must… constitute a being sui

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