Sociological Ethics
So this is a draft of a piece that I have been working on for a while now on and off. It's not complete yet, and it may not be complete for some time, but it is a view that I believe is the best explanation for ethical and moral views. Enjoy and any comments are welcome. If there is something in this piece that you would like to use feel free to do so, but please site it properly. Thank you.
Sociological Ethics
by Larry N. Wagner
Master of Adult and Post Secondary Education (on going), University of Wyoming
Master of Adult and Post Secondary Education (on going), University of Wyoming
Bachelor of Philosophy, University of Wyoming
(draft 23 November 2013 ©2013)
Contents
Introduction 3
Theoretical Bases 3
Philosophical Bases 3
Sociological Bases 4
Social Contract 4
Ethics from Individual 5
Ethics from Society 6
Justice 7
Laws as Ethic 7
Introduction
Over the course of history there has been much discussion across the academic world about Sociological and Ethical norms. In both areas there is a dipping of the toe into the other but there has been very little serious attempt, or even explicit thought, to consider an attempt to look how the two effect each other. While it is true that many great authors have said that there seems to be a link, there has been a propensity, mainly amongst ethical philosophy but also within the sociological realm (baring relativists and subjectivist), to assume that there must be universal norms, or typifications, that can help us understand the working of ethics and society respectively.
Theoretical Bases
Philosophical Bases
With in the philosophical community there is much debate as to the nature of morality and ethics, this should be generally understood to most in the academia. The debate that rages is one over questions of the universal nature of morality and ethics. To one sect of the debate, arguably the larger of them, there is much worry over the possibility that those things that are thought of being universal are really merely subjective. It is the ideal of the subjectiveness of morality and ethics that the other sect appeals to (It is also the view that I will be defending in this paper). Now this is no doubt a simplification of the philosophical debate as it stands today, but it is a close enough generalization of it for the purpose of this paper.
The major theory that will be found under all the rest of this work comes from a particular view of the philosophy of perception. Cunningham
presents a theory of perception that looks toward a devision between the “perceptual spaces”, in which consists of all the many physical objects of the universe, that tend to stand in some from of relation with themselves or to other objects, that we see with our sense organs, and the “conceptional space” where we form all of our laws of the sciences, and mathematics. This theory then leads itself toward a subjective view of even of the very foundational laws of the physical world. At the very best, it does say that our laws of the sciences, and mathematics are at least conventional and are available to be passed down from generation to generation.
If it is possible to pass down scientific and mathematical laws, it is my belief that other laws, that are not related to the physical workings of the world, should be able to be passed down as well. Nor is it just those things that are conceptualizations of the the physical world. It makes sense to think that similar relations that objects have toward themselves and the other objects around them may very well lead to the different conceptualizations of the physical world that lead to our notions of ethics and morality. It is then through convention that those laws of ethics and morality begin to take on what appears to be universal laws.
Sociological Bases
The major sociological bases that I will be working from is one of the Social Contract. It is here that I believe that my assertions will be come prima facie evident. Underling the Contract are many other sociological principles that will be applied to throughout this paper. Again out of a utility to the body of the work I give a short definition of those sociological principles that I will be focusing on.
Social Contract
Given that the Social Contract plays such an important role in this work it would be good to take a moment and look at some elements of the Contract that I will be addressing. These elements are what I will call the loose and strict Social Contract. These come about from two types of societies, the homogenous and the heterogenous.
As it is typically understood, when a group of individuals come together to form any kind of union those individuals enter into some kind of contract with each other. It goes without saying that the wide variety of people that can come together can lead to a wide variety of societies and social contracts. There seems, though, to be at least two distinct societies that can be considered, homogenous and heterogenous, and that those two lead to two distinct contracts, loose and strict.
A homogenous society is one where not just the majority but all of the members entering into the contract share again not just a majority but all of their beliefs. Within these types of societies the work that needs to be done by the group to form the contract and laws that will govern it are fairly easy to come by. The basic nature of each individual is shared by every other member and so there is almost no negotiation that need to be had. Also given this shared nature the need for enforcement of the laws in minimal. What develops out of this is a loose contract between the members of the society.
On the other had, in a heterogenous society there is a wide variety of people that are coming together. To form a contract these types of societies will need to put forward a great deal of work to develop a set of laws that will best sever everyone. The amount of negotiation is fairly high and the amount of compromise will be high as well. Unlike in homogenous societies, it will often be the case that a majority of the people will get what they are looking for out of the union; though ideally the majority rule will be minimal in the name of justice. What will come about in the ideal case will be that everyone will, or at least should, have a enough buy in to the contract that they will be willing to follow the laws of that are developed. Needless to say, there will be some that will not feel as though their particular interests are being served. In these cases the need for high levels of enforcement will found. This is development of the strict contract. One that is needed to keep the society together even during differences.
With just a general over view of sociology it will become clear that there are very few homogenous societies in the world. Human nature is such that our opinions on things change, even if nothing more than through ones life. These basic changes mean that what may have started out as a homogenous society will very quickly evolve into a heterogenous society. As this begins to happen there is a greater need to ensure that justice is being done to all those in the society. It is then form the need of justice that the contract starts out strict or becomes strict over time.
In either case there is a dialectic relationship between the members of the society and the society and its members, when forming its laws. These laws can be seen as being the ethics of the society. These ethics can be hard to pin down within heterogenous societies, but that is what I will try to do now.
Ethics from Individual
As I have said above, it seems that it is possible for people to conceptualize their notions of ethics and morality out of the relations that they they have with themselves and the relations that they stand in with others. And then those conceptualizations can become conventional as they are passed down from generation to generation. Within a society, then, there are really at least two types of people: those that hold the ideals of those around them, and those that do not. While this has profound consequences on the formation of laws in a society, it is important not to look passed the individual as the possible source of ethics. But to understand the ethics of the individual we must come to understand the ways in which individuals gain those ideas that they understand as being ethics.
Erving Goffman describs for us the world that the individual lives in as being that persons “life world”
The life world of the individual encompasses all the experiences that the person has had through their lifetime. This life world has an effect, of lesser or greater value, on the way the person see and interacts with the world. It is the way that a person see and interacts with the world that develops that persons ethical and moral ideals.
This is not a trivial claim in anyway when we think about the way in which we consider the development of ethics. Classically, ethical philosophers rarely wish to look toward this kind of relativistic view of the development of ethics and morals. They wish to look toward calls toward reason and logic to explain the way in which people choose to act. Two formative that dominate ethical debate today are that of deontology and consequentialism. Both of hold that there are normative ideals about ethics that can be obtained just through reason.
... justice to ones self
Ethics from Society
As a society develops it becomes impossible for it not to develop a set of laws. Many will claim that these laws will derive themselves from the ethical ideologies of the people that form the society itself. While this is certainly true in a homogeneous society it is very unlike to happen in a heterogeneous societies. Within them there will be a need for the society as a whole to work together to resolve the differences between the groups. So while individual ideals will play a part in the forming of laws, will not come from a single social ideal that is easily agreed upon, and easily tracked downward to the individuals of the group, it will come about from the society itself.
Some will argue that it is not the society that as formed the laws but still the individual ethics of the people that have formed them. Within a homogeneous society this may very well be so. There could be completely possible for a group of people to see that they all share an ethic and then live by it. There would be no substantial problems with enforcing the laws and there would be no need to explain them to anyone with in it. I think in this way it could be said that that the laws of the land do in-fact come from the individuals, but this is an ideal society at best. It is only in this ideal society that one could say that the ethics of the people are the ethics of the society. This cannot, however, be said about heterogeneous societies.
Within heterogeneous societies the ethics of the people that make it up are different in many ways, and sometimes dramatically so. When these societies form there is hard work to be had in finding a middle ground between the differing ideals. Of course this is made much easier if the ideals are closer in nature, but the process and need for negotiation is still the same. What comes of the of the work is, or should be, a set of laws that best represents all the many ideals of the people. This set of laws can then be seen as the ethics of the society. There will be things that not everyone will be able to agree upon completely but there will be enough agreement to allow the people to function with each other.
What is most important within the heterogenous society is to ensure that the ethics of the society are broad enough to allow as many people to get on board with them as possible, but tight enough that the one person or another will be inclined to adhere to them. If the ethic is too narrow people will not be able to, or not be inclined to, follow them. An example of this would be a non Christian living in a Christian ethics based society. The ethics of that society are not in tune at all with his or her own ethics. Only outside of mere conformity, or fear of reprisal, which is no better then corrosion, will the person follow the ethics of the society.
... justice to all. Simple in a homogenous society, difficult in a heterogenous society.
Justice
There seems to be one common thread that links the different levels of ethics in a society, that is a notion of justice. As has been seen the level of justice needed varies from society to society, low in homogenous societies and high in heterogenous societies. What has not been taken into account is a definition of justice. It is this that I believe is one of the hardest philosophical questions that has to be answered. Whatever is concluded by that answer will have lasting effects of the ethic of the individual/society dialectic relationship.
Laws as Ethic
Education of the Social Ethic
Adult education stands at a moment where major change needs to occur to face the every encroaching marketization and commodification of learning. This paper will address a theory of radical transformative theory from its formation out of the radical principles of Stephen Brookfield and John Holst, transformative learning of Patricia Cranton, and the works of Marx. Once this theoretical framework has been established time will be taken to developing the theory into practice.
Theory before Practice
All great practices in education, or otherwise, have started from theory. This point may be argued by analytical and experiential researchers but even they have started from a point of view, from either wanting to find something, or simply because they don’t know what to find. Their studies are based off of a theory. So to then will the practice of radical transformation. Before the educator, facilitator, or teacher, can enter into the classroom and take on the task of guiding their learners through the radical transformation process it is important to understand the grounds and goals of such a task. The practices later discussed are based off a theory of radical transformation. Radical transformation finds its roots in a combination of transformative learning and radical learning with the goal of creating socially, and politically, intelligent and engaged individuals.
Marx states that "Just as it is not religion which creates man but man that creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution" (Marx, page 20). It is form this basis that radical transformation takes its stance. As members of a society individuals are the ones that are responsible for the social contract the binds us all together. But it is not just a social contract, or a constitution, or the economy of the nation, “We must also take seriously the our beliefs in equality and justice and how they are taught to individuals” (Wagner, page 2).
The ability for the nation of have strong constitution is held by the individual who has a strong sense of what is equitable and just. Yet a false consciousness has creeped in to the America psyche at both the personal and socio-ontological level that has made it nearly impossible for just and ethical actions to be carried out day to day. This false consciousness also pulls people apart. It divides them and leads them to believe that they are islands untouched and unaffected by others within society. This belief must be overthrown. It must be done so by “changing individuals ontology away from a self-centric mode of thinking toward one that is focused toward the society” (Wagner, page 3). For contrary to the ideologies that are festered by false consciousness we are really constantly a part of society and have an affect and are effected by it.
Society, like so many other things in the world internally and externally, is part of our lifeworld. And as part of our lifeworld it is not something that we can escape. Because of this the alienation that comes with false consciousness finds its way in to our lifeworld. Capitalist market systems that are so interrelated with false consciousness have, as Habermas puts it, colonized our lifeworlds. In doing so individuals stop seeing themselves as members of a larger society and having worth in and of themselves. Rather “By buying a particular item we become more attractive, interesting, more alive and loving” (Fleming, page 127). By identifying our self worth as being linked with not ‘who’ we are and rather ‘what we have’ capital systems have thusly changed our personal and socio-ontological understanding of our lifeworlds.
False consciousness as worked at bigger levels in society as well. It has done so at the very level of our concept of the legitimacy of trade and economic interactions. Habermas’ notion is that “[C]apitalism has based its claim to the legitimacy on the notion that market exchange between equals is just” (Wallace & Wolf, page 178). Yet, Habermas states that this claim to legitimacy is false. Due to the nature of capitalism, one that is prone to massive changes which can leave large swaths of the population economically injured
, or even leave whole businesses to rust, we cannot take serious claims to legitimacy. The only ones that do not suffer under shifts in the market are those that are well off. “The market is not, in fact, a meeting place of equals; rather, it is a form of institutionalized power where some are better placed than others” (Wallace & Wolf, page 178).
Yet, even with this being clear to so many the power of false consciousness still holds strong within the lifeworld of people and society. It has systematically modified personal and social ontology as to limit individuals action against it. This action can be understood through communicative action as defined by Habermas, but it can also be understood from a view of thought-action. Lindeman states that “The intelligent alone are free for only by knowing what it is we can be free with, can we find freedom at all” (Lindeman, page 44). Along with knowing what we are free with, our though-action requires eduction to be freed from the colonization of the lifeworld by false consciousness. This education is focused toward changing the altered ontological framework of thought-action so that it “not only liberates it from alienation but also allows it to see alienation in the society as a whole. This is important because contrary to later claims by Lindemen (Lindeman, page 46) freedom is not solely held in the mind” (Wagner, page 3). This is due to the fact that,
“Realizing alienation exists in the mind is one thing but it is not sufficient for true freedom. Freedom of the mind and thought-action must be met epistemologically so individuals sees that alienation exists at the socio-ontological level as well. That is, people must also know that alienation is an otological truth not just in the mind, but in the world around them, and acts upon them. The role of education is then to transform the false consciousness that exists in the mind into liberated thought-action that has the ability to see ontologically and epistemologically, and to overcome, alienation in society” (Wagner, page 3).
To transform thought-action away form the false consciousness, and liberate it as well as the lifeworld, it is necessary to begin education through the transformative learning process. Cranton states, “Through emancipatory knowledge, the learner is freed from the constraints of unquestioned or inflexible ways of knowing; the learner is empowered or perhaps enfranchised” (Cranton, page 117). Transformative learning then is the first step in freeing thought-action and the lifeworld. But that step must be joined, and empower, with more radical change and direction. This radical change must move beyond the reformation of adult education that has been attempted in the past, and that has many times has been co-opted by the current social system trough a process of repressive tolerance. By which “allowing a limited amount of protest that is carefully managed, a societal pressure valve is created to release into thin air the stream of energy that would otherwise cause the system to make real change” (Brookfield & Holst, page 28). Due to this the only way in which to overthrow false consciousness is to proceed with a radical change in the way adult education is conducted.
If we are to take what Marx tells us as being true, then it is necessary to address the education system as it stands. No longer can adult education be focused toward creating better and more productive workers. It must be focused toward creating a population that is empowered with the ability to be act in a fully participatory democracy. To do this requires an adult education system and programs that will challenge long held personal and socio-ontological views that have been formulated and legitimized in the lifeworld of society. That system is then formed on the basis of radical critical theory and transformative learning theory with the goal of changing society.
References:
Brookfield, S. D., Holst, J. D. (2011). Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just World. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Cranton P. (2006). Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults (Second Edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Fleming, T. (2012). Fromm and Habermas: Allies for Adult Education and Democracy.
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31, 2, 123-136. doi: 10.1007/
s11217-011-9268-1
Lindeman, E. C. (1989). The Meaning of Adult Education. Norman, OK: Oklahoma Research Center of Continuing Professional and Higher Education (Original work published 1926).
Martinez-Aleman, A. M. (2012). Accountability, Pragmatic Aims, and the American University. New York, NY: Routledge.
Marx, K, Engles, F. (1978). The Marx-Engles Reader (Second Edition) R. C. Tucker (Ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Wagner, L. N. (2013). Radical Transformation: Adult Education for Social Change. Unpublished manuscript, University of Wyoming
Wallace, R. A., Wolf A. (2006). Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition (Sixth Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
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