Collective Morality and Crime in the Americas by Birkbeck Christopher;

Author:Birkbeck, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

What if . . .?

Considerations regarding stability and variation underline a view of collective moral discourses as particular configurations of textual style, collective identity, moral outlook, and moral agency. One very natural sociological perspective on these potentially variable characteristics is to seek to identify the processes that produce them, treating collective morality something like—in common scientific parlance—a dependent variable.19 This is an interesting line of approach, but it has not been pursued here.20 A different perspective is to speculate on other possible configurations of collective morality, which is useful both for posing normative questions about its quality and content and for understanding its social significance. These are the subjects of the remaining paragraphs.

That collective moral discourse on crime in the Americas looks to be melodramatic and Manichean, that it is fuelled by multiple and often competing empirical claims, that it insists on action and judges action almost exclusively in terms of consequences, suggests an exercise in moralizing that is both narrow and superficial. Other ways of structuring the social universe and other conceptions of moral agency would broaden it; other visions of criminality and of knowledge would deepen it.

Something of this latter point was made by Silvio Waisbord in his study of exposé journalism in Latin America. Investigative stories, he argued, “contribute little to a public examination of the moral order” and involve only a “narrow discussion of morality.”21 He felt that the superficial treatment of scandals, in a medium addicted to instant and ephemeral news, militated against any detailed consideration of the causes of corruption and the possible remedies for abuses of power. Tipping his hat (unwittingly or not) to the deliberative caucus, he charged that exposés “fail to serve as a forum for a wider public discussion on the moral dimensions of democracy.”22

This is one way to push for a different kind of moral commentary, especially given interest in the “communicative action” and “discourse ethics” so influentially proposed by Habermas, which offer a model by which to fashion and judge discourse in the public sphere.23 But it is worth noting that the newsprint examined by Waisbord seems no different to other sorts of public issue discourse which, when assessed from a Habermasian perspective, fairly clearly fail to approximate the ideal.24 It is not as if journalists, or Latin Americans, are particularly deficient in this regard; simply that the quality of public deliberation is not as inclusive, structured or reasoned as it apparently needs to be if it is to meet democratic aspirations. Moreover, studies informed by discourse ethics have largely focused on the structural properties of deliberation (for example, the extent to which it is inclusive or exclusive) and its formal characteristics (for example, the degree of dialogue).25 They have yet to look at the width and depth of the ideas put forward.26

In an earlier study on newsmaking in the United States, Herbert Gans rather memorably described the adherence to convention among journalists and those whom they consult:

sources and other people try to be on their best behavior because they are exposed, at least potentially, to public visibility.

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