Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: a relation to the world of concern
- 2 Values within reason
- 3 Reason beyond rationality: values and practical reason
- 4 Beings for whom things matter
- 5 Understanding the ethical dimension of life
- 6 Dignity
- 7 Critical social science and its rationales
- 8 Implications for social science
- Appendix: Comments on philosophical theories of ethics
- References
- Index
5 - Understanding the ethical dimension of life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: a relation to the world of concern
- 2 Values within reason
- 3 Reason beyond rationality: values and practical reason
- 4 Beings for whom things matter
- 5 Understanding the ethical dimension of life
- 6 Dignity
- 7 Critical social science and its rationales
- 8 Implications for social science
- Appendix: Comments on philosophical theories of ethics
- References
- Index
Summary
Conventionality is not morality … To attack the first is not to assail the last.
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 2nd edn, preface)Introduction
How are we to understand the ethical or moral dimension of everyday life? That is, the way in which people's actions are influenced by ideas and feelings regarding how they should behave with respect to each other, how they should live together? In the foregoing chapters, we have already introduced some of the building blocks for understanding the ethical dimension of everyday life, such as emotions, virtues, practical reason, commitments and other aspects of human social being. In this chapter I will bring these and other elements together and discuss their interaction.
We are ethical beings, not in the sense that we necessarily always behave ethically, but that as we grow up we come to evaluate behaviour according to some ideas of what is good or acceptable. We compare and admire or deplore particular actions, personal traits, social practices and institutions. How people behave and should behave with respect to one another is undeniably important to us, indeed it is hard to imagine anything more important, yet social science tells us little about our sense of what is good or bad in these matters and why it is so important to us. Its third person descriptions typically drain away the normative force of such considerations, making it appear that we are mere pursuers of self-interest, creatures of habit, followers of conventions and norms or puppets of power (Archer, 2007).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Why Things Matter to PeopleSocial Science, Values and Ethical Life, pp. 143 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011