Communitarian Ethics and the Sociology of Morals: Alasdair MacIntyre and Emile DurkheimAuthor(s): ROBERT T. HALLReviewed work(s):Source: Sociological Focus, Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue: The Sociology of Morals (May 1991), pp.93-104Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20831575 .Accessed: 09/07/2012 10:21

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Communitarian Ethics and the

Sociology of Morals: Alasdair

Maclntyre and Emile Durkheim

ROBERT T. HALL West Virginia State College

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS Vol. 24 No. 2

May 1991

The recent communitarian perspective in philosophical ethics raises the question of the sociology of morals proposed by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim's critique of ethics is compared with that of Alasdair

Maclntyre and the "sociologicalpresupposition" of each is identified Ethical relativism is evaluated in both Durkheim and Maclntyre. Durkheim's universalism is compared with and found preferable to Maclntyre''s elitism. The article concludes with suggestions for a rapprochement between

philosophical ethics and the sociology of morals.

JLjLround the turn of the century there was a great deal of discussion of sociological studies of morality

? studies of the nature and development of the ethical norms and ideals of people in any given society. The movement included individuals like the German

psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, British sociologists Edward Westermarck and Herbert

Spencer, and the French sociologists Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Emile Durkheim. Some of these theorists believed that an ethical theory could be based upon empirical

studies ? that moral judgments are dependent upon the structure of a society, and that ethical theory must take account of social structure. This social or cultural relativism has not been popular among philosophers to say the least. Critiques of social relativism have become the stuff of introductory ethics courses. The idea of relativism has to be

thoroughly rejected, it seems, before one can even talk about ethics. After all, how could an ethical theory have any philosophical justification if it was actually a product of social forces: philosophical justification cannot rest on such historical contingencies. So

philosophers today seldom show much interest in empirical studies of the norms and values

actually current in society ? even the society for which they prescribe ethical principles.

Sociologists, on the other hand, have simply dropped the issue. Cultural norms and values are just as standard a topic in introductory sociology courses as ethical relativism is in philosophy courses, but, as with the philosophers, once the issue is discussed, it is set aside. Sociologists just did not follow the lead of Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl in the

attempt to develop a distinct sociology of morals as a specialized discipline within sociology (Gouldner 1970, p. 140).

For the better part of a century now there has been a serious rift between philosophers and sociologists on this issue and, I believe, something of a tacit agreement has developed between them to leave well enough alone. Philosophers

? even those who are naturalists

93

94 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

in the sense of basing ethical theories on what they take to be the general conditions of human nature ? have insisted that moral judgments are universal and therefore not

ultimately dependent upon existing social institutions. Social scientists, on the other hand, while pointing out how moral beliefs reflect social structures, have left the questions of the justification of ethical judgments entirely aside.

A rift as old and as wide as this cannot be spanned in the course of a brief paper. I propose in this paper t? explore briefly some of the facets of this fissure by comparing certain aspects of the thought of one of the originators of the sociology of morals, Emile

Durkheim, with some of the views recently expressed by a major figure in the develop ment of the communitarian approach in ethics, Alasdair Maclntyre. I believe that a

recovery of Durkheim's sociology of morals perspective (Hall 1987; Mestrovic 1988)

together with the steps into a more social perspective on ethics taken by Maclntyre and other contemporary communitarians may provide a basis for starting a bridge between these two disciplines.

THE CRITIQUE OF ETHICAL THOUGHT TACIT EMOTIVISM OR LEGITIMATION CRISIS

Ethics in the European philosophical tradition, according to Durkheim, was divided into two schools of thought: the Kantians and the Utilitarians. The problem, he thought,

was that both schools made the same mistake of treating ethics as a matter of deducing prescriptions from general principles. "The problem of ethics," he wrote, "has consisted

essentially in determining the form of moral conduct from which one could afterwards deduce the content. One began by establishing the principle of morality as the good, or duty, or utility and then from this axiom one drew out certain maxims which con

stituted applied or practical morality" (Durkheim 1887, p. 42). What is presupposed in each case, Durkheim thought, is a certain concept of human

nature which is set up as the ideal. The only difference between the Kantians and the Utilitarians is the concept of human nature that each presupposes. The latter school sees human beings as autonomous rational wills which are essentially solitary, and the former school as social creatures with sensitivities and interests. Neither school derives its concept of human nature from empirical evidence and both entirely ignore the fact that there is an already existing morality in society which has a history and power of its own.

In place of these axiomatic methods, Durkheim proposed that ethics ought rather to be based upon a study of the actual existing morality in any given society. He criticized philosophers for presuming that ethics could be reduced to one single principle.

What branch of science, he asked, begins its search by looking for a single general principle? Should we not rather begin by looking at the morality that actually exists in a society

? the things people actually treat as duties or rights?

The only scientific way of proceeding would be to list moral rules one by one, to examine and classify them, and to try to explain at least the most important ones by determining the causes that give rise to them and the practical functions they fulfill and have fulfilled, it is only thus that one could

progressively arrive at some idea of the general causes of the essential characteristics they have in common (Durkheim 1953, p. 49; fp. (French edition) 67).

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS 95

Durkheim's assumption was that morality already exists in society and that one has to understand its nature and function before proposing to improve it. His only presup position was that morality has a social function. "Without wishing to make any claims

concerning the ultimate basis of ethics (?thique)," he wrote, "it seems to be incontestable that the practical function of morality (morale) is to make society possible, to enable

people to live together without too much offense or conflict, in a word, to safeguard the great collective interest" (Durkheim 1887, p. 38).1

Durkheim believed that ethical judgments should be viewed as a matter of interven tion in the current moral structure of society with a view to making things better. He thus thought that ethical judgments were in one important sense relative to the society in and for which they are made.

Maclntyre's critique of ethics has much in common with Durkheim's. He holds that

philosophers since the enlightenment do not justify their basic principles or presupposi tions in any effective or coherent way. They rather assert their basic positions, he says, with what amounts to only a emotivist or intuitionist justification (Maclntyre 1980, p. 21). Philosophers criticize the emotivists of the first half of the twentieth century, according to Maclntyre, but, at the same time, when they develop their own theories

they assert basic principles with no more authority than do the emotivists.

Philosophers are not likely to admit that, as far as the public debate over the legitima tion of moral beliefs is concerned, they behave like emotivists. Nor should they admit it if they value their own contribution to the resolution of the crisis. The search for an

effective and commonly accepted foundation for morality will hardly be advanced by giving up on the tradition of rational debate. Much as philosophers might be aware of the lack of consensus on the legitimation of moral beliefs, their task is to carry on the search. The quest is a part of the process of culture; when successful it becomes the foundation on which culture is built.

The crisis Maclntyre has identified as an irreconcilable pluralism of autonomous

agents which in practice turns moral agents into manipulators (Maclntyre 1980, p. 66) may, in fact, be understood not only philosophically as a failed rational project, but

sociologically as a legitimation crisis. In this situation, moral language is used both to seek agreement on judgments and in an effort to construct or discover a common

understanding of what legitimates moral judgment. Maclntyre's insight into the

philosophical significance of the social situation (the lack of consensus on legitimation) should not obscure the fact that he, as a philosopher, is engaging in the same quest for common ground. Indeed, if he believed his own conclusion, he would have adopted an emotivist position and his book would have been much less complicated.

What we have today can thus be viewed either as a philosophical impasse or a

legitimation crisis depending upon whether one is looking at the rational debate or the social problem. It is a problem with both philosophical and social implications. To be

specific, the social reality has philosophical implications, in that it is the lack of a social consensus that forces philosophers to behave like emotivists; and the philosophical analysis has social implications, in that the failure of rational arguments adds to the

legitimation crisis. The moral stance of the social roles that Maclntyre describes as bureaucratic,

managerial, and therapeutic is more significant sociologically than he realizes. Given

96 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

his philosophical interpretation, Maclntyre can simply denounce the function of these roles as so much emotivist manipulation. This plays into the classist or elitist approach that allows Maclntyre to write off these central characters of our society as emotivst barbarians. Actually, these characters of the moral drama of our age ought to be taken much more seriously as men and women who are attempting to negotiate, reconstruct, or rediscover a new moral contract that will lead us out of the crisis of legitimation. It is they and not Maclntyre's communal converts who are addressing the problem.

THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF MORALITY

Although my primary concern is with the effort to establish a foundation for moral

thought by reference to social processes, I cannot ignore the development of Maclntyre's argument. The enlightenment and post-enlightenment project of attempting to provide a rational justification for ethics has failed, according to Maclntyre, because of certain internal inconsistencies. Reason alone, apart from any substantive concept of human nature or society, is unable to provide a justification for moral rules; and the presup position of any specific concept of human nature or society (an essence or telos) is seen as a form of "naturalism" which is rationally unwarranted. In a society in which religion no longer provides a public legitimation for morality, philosophy has been unable to fill the void. The modern world is thus left, according to Maclntyre, with a vague commitment to a rationality which is sterile because it cannot find any common ground in the pluralism of individual interests. The dominant moral mode of our age, therefore, is one of mutual manipulation, and the dominant social characters are the bureaucratic

managers whose efficient command of technique constitutes the only legitimation that can be attained in a society which lacks shared goals (Maclntyre 1980, pp. 70-71).

Maclntyre's analysis of the post-enlightenment impasse is in many respects Durkheimian. He suggests that ethics can only be grounded in a substantive concept

of human nature and that, since people are social beings, such a concept can only be

developed in a community that shares common goals and objectives. Social roles, in his view, are products of the collective projects to which groups of people are committed. A social role is thus necessarily a functional concept and society must have a goal (telos) in terms of which roles can be judged functional in order for them and hence morality to attain a public legitimation.

This understanding of the basis of ethics, Maclntyre submits, can be found in the classic Aristotelian tradition: "For according to that tradition to be a 'man' is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 56). Good, bad right, and wrong in this tradition are factual judgments based upon the socially established notions of

people's proper roles. The idea of morality itself, on this understanding, presupposes a society in which social roles are established. The accepted and expected behavior, or

norms, which sociologists speak of as definitive of social roles, constitute the basis of a morality which is socially accepted as legitimate.

Like many philosophers Maclntyre explains his position in terms of a myth of the

origins of morality.

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS 97

Consider what would be involved in any age in founding a community to achieve a common project, to bring about some good recognized as their shared good by all those engaging in the project. As

modern examples of such a project we might consider the founding and carrying foward of a school, a hospital or an art gallery; in the ancient world the characteristic examples would have been those of a religious cult or of an expedition or of a city. Those who participate in such a project would need to develop two quite different types of evaluative practice. On the one hand they would need to value ? to praise as excellences ? those qualities of mind and character which would contribute to the realization of their common good or goods. That is, they would need to recognize a certain set of qualities as virtues and the corresponding set of defects as vices. They would also need however to identify certain types of actions as the doing or the production of harm of such an order that they destroy the bonds of community in such a way as to render the doing or achieving of good impossible in some respect at least for some time. Examples of such offenses would characteristically be the

taking of innocent life, theft and perjury and betrayal. The table of virtues promulgated in such a

community would teach its citizens what kinds of actions would gain them merit and honour; the table of legal offenses would teach them what kinds of actions would be regarded not simply as bad, but as intolerable (Maclntyre 1980, p. 142).

I should say right off that I don't for a minute accept the ethical theory that Maclntyre constructs on the basis of this understanding of the nature and origins of morality. By emphasizing the link between morality and society as he does with this story, however, Maclntyre attempts to base morality on the notion of a pre-existing society. His point is that morality precedes ethics ? the actual existing morality of a society constitutes in some respects the basis of an agreement on ethical theory. If public consensus on a form of life (a morality) can be attained, consensus on the legitimation of that morality (an ethical theory) may follow. The problem of contemporary ethics, according to

Maclntyre, is that while there is consensus on the social roles of manager, bureaucrat,

and therapist, the consensus does not extend to substantive social goals apart from these facilitative roles, and does not therefore constitute consensus on a form of social

order ? on a morality. What we have, therefore, are manipulators and facilitators in

search of a purpose.

Interesting as Maclntyre's critique of philosophical ethics may be, it is his view that it is the relationship between morality and society that provides the basic axiom for his own ethical theory. Here Maclntyre is again on common ground with Durkheim. His basic premise, that "a moral philosophy . . . characteristically presupposes a

sociology" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 22), closely parallels Durkheim's view that ethics must be related to the existing morality of a society. What Maclntyre means by "presuppos ing a sociology" is that moral beliefs originate in social roles, that a moral perspective is the product of a social "character," and that, as a consequence, we should look to

the major social roles of a society to discover the sources of the moral perspectives to which that society is likely to attribute legitimacy. The contradition between Maclntyre's socially based moral theory and his denigration of the major social roles of our age is

striking. Maclntyre wants a socially based morality as the basis of an ethical theory but the society he wants is his own elitist philosophical clique, not the society we actually live in.

Durkheim's understanding of the development of moral norms and beliefs shares the "sociology presupposition." He believed that the patterns of behavior which become normative in social groups develop naturally out of the efforts of people to coordinate their actions in recurrent situations. The regularity of habitual activity in social groups, he said, becomes "crystallized" into social norms (Durkheim 1887, p. 40; Durkheim 1973,

98 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

pp. 27, 47; fpp. 24, 41). Morality, he wrote, "can only emerge from relations which are

established among people when they associate; so it reflects the life of the group or groups concerned" (Durkheim 1973, p. 86; fp. 73). Jean-Claude Filloux (1977, pp. 66-69) has given an excellent analytical account of Durkheim's theory of the social origins of morality in terms of the stages of its development.

For Durkheim this was not a speculative matter. He left no myth of the origins of morality like the social contract theory or Maclntyre's communal project. For

Durkheim, the notion that morality originated in the efforts of groups to coordinate their activities was a sociological hypothesis subject to empirical confirmation. "All I can say," he told the French Philosophical Society in 1906 with reference to his twenty years of work in the sociology of morals, "is that up to the present I have not found in my research a single moral rule that is not the product of particular social factors"

(Durkheim 1953, p. 55; fp. 76). Durkheim's account of the social origins of morality bears a strong resemblance

to Maclntyre's story of the development of collective goals. Durkheim found, further more, that this process took place among sub-groups of a society such as professional and occupational groups.

When individuals share... occupations in which the rest of the population has no part, it is inevitable that these individuals are carried along by the flow of similarities as if they are forced or mutually attracted. They seek one another out, enter into relations with one another and associate, so that little by little they form a limited group having its own special form within the larger society. Now once this group is formed, nothing can hinder an appropriate moral life from emerging, a life which carries the mark of the special conditions that gave birth to it (Durkheim 1958b, pp. 23-24; fp. 62).

Finally, Durkheim believed that the ideal element of morality was just as much a

product of collective behavior as were social norms and sanctions. In different ages, he thought, and especially at crucial turning points in history people developed strong ideals ? collective representations

? of human nature and society which became socially shared images of what life ought to be like (Durkheim 1953, pp. 91-92; fpp. 114-15).

Durkheim's understanding of moral ideals was, in fact, quite similar to many of the notions of character, virtue, or communal goal recently discussed by ethical com munitarians. "Every morality, whatever it might be," he wrote just before his death, "has its ideal; at any point in history, the morality a people follow has its own ideal which is embodied in the institutions, traditions, and precepts that regulate conduct

generally" (Pickering 1979, p. 81; fpp. 82-83). Durkheim discussed the development of moral ideals extensively in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim, 1965) and in the lesser known works The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977) and Socialism and Saint-Simon (Durkheim 1958a).

Durkheim read the social crisis of his age a little differently from Maclntyre's notion of the domination of managers and bureaucrats, but there are many similarities in the two accounts nonetheless. In an age in which the religious basis of morality has disap peared as a form of ethical common ground, society needs a new secular morality. Durkheim was convinced that such a morality could be developed as a universal humanistic morality through a process of moral education.2 But Durkheim also thought that the lead in developing a common morality (i.e., the development of actual norms

and ideals through social interaction) would, in an industrial age, have to come from

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS 99

the economic sphere (Hall 1982). Durkheim and Maclntyre agree that to construct a morality we need to reconstruct

communities with common goals. The directions in which Durkheim and Maclntyre look for a solution to this problem, however, are diametrically opposed. Maclntyre's answer

to the crisis is that we can reconstruct a common ground for morality if we retreat to communities in which we can develop goals and roles. He concludes:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time (Maclntyre 1980, p. 245).

Durkheim's answer to the problem is that we must look to the ever widening realm

of economic activity for the development of a universal community which will embody universal humanistic principles. Nationalism, which in Durkheim's view was the only communal force to replace religion, would have to give way to the kinds of forces that have brought about the development of the European and Asian economic communities.

THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY IN SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Maclntyre makes a great deal of the development of virtues as the major product of the social forces of community. His account of the virtues is "socially teleological" in that the teloi exist as products of communal purposes and commitments and are not

presumed to exist independently in nature or human nature. In getting at the core

concept of a virtue Maclntyre says that one feature which emerges from his analysis with some clarity is that it "always requires for its application the acceptance of some

prior account of certain features of social and moral Ufe in terms of which it has to be

defined and explained" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 174). The concept of a social role is crucial to Maclntyre's critique of the naturahstic

faUacy. He refers to A. N. Prior's example of the sea-captain to show that "an 'is' premise can on occasion entail an Ought' conclusion" (Maclntyre 1980, pp. 545-56). The example

is that if S is a sea-captain, S ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do. But quite clearly, the examples Maclntyre gives are examples in which moral obUgations are

entailed by social roles ? a good farmer, a good soldier, or within a certain society, a

good person. One could similarly claim that "S ought to love her neighbors" could be

derived from the statement "S is a Christian." But being a Christian is clearly itself a moral commitment, and the same is true of almost any social role. Sociologists define

social roles in terms of sets of expected and accepted behavior. The factual statement

therefore contains ethical elements, so the logical prohibition of deriving "ought" from

"is" is not violated. Durkheim caUed these roles social facts and he clearly understood them to have

moral impUcations. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1982) where he attempted to

estabUsh the field of sociology as the study of social facts, it is quite clear that the social

facts he had in mind are of the sort that have moral impUcations (HaU 1987, pp. 21-23). The notion that social facts exercise constraint on individuals is itself a moral character

istic. Throughout the essay, which is a crucial text in the history of sociology, Durkheim

100 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

(1952, p. 50; fp. 3) spoke of social facts as "obligations" incumbent upon members of

society. "When I fulfill my obligations as a brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute

my contracts, I perform duties which are defined externally to myself and my acts, in law and custom" (Durkheim 1982, p. 50; fp. 3). In his lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals Durkheim spoke of society as containing a "plurality of morals" associated with social roles:

As professors, we have duties which are not those of merchants. Those of the industrialist are quite different from those of the soldier, those of the soldier from those of the priest, etc. We might say in this connection that there are as many forms of morality as there are different professions and

since, in principle, each individual carries on only one profession, the result is that these different forms of morality apply to entirely different groups of individuals (Durkheim 1958b, pp. 4-5; fpp. 44-45).

Notice how close this is to Maclntyre's statement of the Aristotelian perspective quoted earlier. The fact that evaluative statements can be drawn from social roles with

logical consistency and that people within a society see these evaluative statements as factual statements because the roles are themselves social facts as important. It demonstrates just what Maclntyre and the communitarians might want: that people who have roles in particular societies have obligations, that social roles are morally loaded, and that within a given society it is warranted to speak of virtues as functional

with respect to people's roles. As it turns out, therefore, although Maclntyre's refuta tion of naturalism misses the mark, he need not have bothered in the first place. Since his teleology is social and not natural or metaphysical, he only needs to show that evaluative conclusions can be derived from social facts and that the concept of human nature is generally and commonly understood as a social and not a biological fact.

ETHICAL RELATIVISM

This analysis of the ethical significance of social roles and the misplaced critique of the naturalistic fallacy leads back to the central question of ethical relativism. If virtues or moral obligations are part and parcel of social roles, then Maclntyre is, in the classic sense, an ethical relativist. This relativism is, I believe, a corollary of his story of the

origins of morality. If what people value are those qualities of mind and character which contribute to the realization of socially established goals, then the rules of right and

wrong have their basis in what the community is engaged in as its common project. This is also quite consistent with Maclntyre's final conclusion about forming moral com

munities to defend ourselves from the barbarian bureaucrats. It makes sense to try to reconstruct morality by developing communal goals only if morality is somehow relative

to, or dependent upon, a social world. Durkheim was quite explicit about his relativistic understanding of morality.

Although it must be kept in mind that he was speaking as a sociologist describing morality, not as a philosopher prescribing ethical judgments, his conclusions have ethical as well as sociological significance.

Each social type has its own moral discipline. . . . The old conception according to which there is one and only one natural morality, that is, the morality based upon the human constitution in general, is now no longer tenable. All the moral institutions one encounters in history are equally natural

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS 101

in the sense that they are based upon the nature of the societies which practice them (Pickering 1979, pp. 31-32; see also Durkheim 1973, p. 87; fpp. 73-74; Durkheim 1977, p. 324; fp. 372).

Not only are the norms and values people hold relative to their societies, so are their moral theories and ideals.

... Each society conceives its ideal in its own image. The Roman and Athenian ideals were closely related to the particular organization of those two city-states. The ideal type which each society demands that its members realize is the keystone of the whole social system and gives it its unity (Durkheim 1953, pp. 56-57; fp. 76; Durkheim 1973, p. 87; fp. 75).

I have attempted to show elsewhere that Durkheim did not, in the end, develop a successful ethical theory (Hall 1987). Early in his career he held a form of naturalism. Ethical judgments, he thought, could be drawn from an understanding of the evolution of social structures. He gave up on this theory mid-way through his career, however, and never developed a coherent replacement. In fact, within the context of his social

relativism, Durkheim came more and more to appreciate the role of the ethical philosopher as one who develops and makes explicit and advances the moral ideals of a society. This type of ethical relativism, I believe, does not depreciate his respect for the

philosophical quest. Durkheim's ethical perspective was a form of what might be called interventionism:

a view that ethical judgments are made within a given society as prescriptions for making that society better without necessarily being based upon any ideal of what the perfect society might be and without any pr?tention that judgments of what is "better" have to be based upon any absolute or ultimate principles or values. His model for this inter ventionist understanding of ethics was the science of medicine. Physicians prescribe what might make an individual better, he said, without having any idea of what absolute health or perfect humanity might be.

If, as I suspect, a contemporary communitarianism of the sort Maclntyre and others

espouse involves a measure of social relativism, it is important to understand just what sort of relativism it is. Ethical relativism has often been understood to mean individual relativism: that ethical judgments are ultimately reducible to individual choices or

feelings. Social roles, however, are not matters of individual choice. Some are thrust

upon us by society and others are socially established roles which one can choose to

adopt or not, but which one cannot change to any great degree. They are not natural or inevitable, but neither are they individually subjective nor entirely relative to individual choice.

I do not believe that an ethical relativism of this type necessarily undermines a

philosophical perspective. It raises many questions about the relationship of sociology to philosophy, however, which I shall have to leave for another time. One of these

problems can be further explore, however, in terms of my comparison of Maclntyre and Durkheim. This is the issue of the univeralism of ethical judgments.

DURKHEIM'S UNIVERSALISM AND MacINTYRE'S ELITISM

While Maclntyre's return to Aristotle's concept of the polis as a community with

specific goals may point out a path to the recovery of legitimacy for ethics, it is not

102 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

clear that Maclntyre has escaped one of the major criticisms of classical ethics ? its classist or elitist point of view. In Aristotle's view, which Maclntyre does indeed criticize,

"only the affluent and those of high status can achieve certain key virtues" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 144). But while Maclntyre says that this limitation in Aristotle's account does not injure Aristotle's general understanding of the place of virtues in human life, it may be a more damaging problem than Maclntyre expects, even for his own neo-Aristotelian

position. If the virtues are necessarily defined relative to communal goals, there is and will always be the problem of the relationship of the individual moral agent to people who do not share his or her communal perspective.

Justice in the classic sense (with which Maclntyre agrees) is to give each person his or her due. "To deserve well," according to Maclntyre, "is to have contributed in some substantial way to the achievement of those goods, the sharing of which and the

pursuit of which provide foundations for human community" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 188). We must ask, however, who it is that defines the communal good. Surely it would have to be those with power in the community, and just as surely those who set the goals for the community will themselves appear to deserve more rewards because they can

always show themselves to have contributed more, since they will naturally define the communal good primarily in terms of their own contributions. The privileges of the

powerful will be maintained in Maclntyre's communitarianism because, since the

powerful set the goals, they can always feign to fear anarchy if the goals of which they are the beneficiaries are challenged. This can become a most critical issue when the ruling class, or some elite that succeeds in passing itself off as a majority, decides in the name of its own morality that society has no place for blacks, gays, or women's rights and

attempts to legislate its own vision into social goals.

Maclntyre's elitism is obvious from his conclusions about creating communities in our time to sustain civility and morality through the dark ages which are upon us.

Does he not precisely dismiss individuals in the managerial and bureaucratic roles who, he says, "have been governing us for some time" as barbarians? Utopian communities, be they Christian fundamentalists or counter-culture drop-outs, have always had

problems relating to outsiders. In the light of the communal telos, the goals and interests of non-members ? the unconverted ? simply do not count. A communal ethic can thus tend to become an elitist ethic in which the advancement of the common project at the

expense of the lower classes seems entirely justified. Maclntyre notably did not pick the Egyptian pyramids as an example of a communal project in the ancient world.

From a Durkheimian perspective it is useless to talk about starting new societal communities as though one could separate out a group of people from the larger society. This is the sort of proposal that comes from making the myth of the social origins of

morality into a solution rather than just an analytical tool. Society as a whole cannot be a project such as founding a hospital or a school which one undertake de novo. We must rather think more about the development of natural sub-communities within Western society and about the relationships of those communities to one another.

Although Durkheim himself was critical of socialist utopianism, he nonetheless advocated the re-development of occupational and professional sub-communities. In their

relationships with one another such moral communities would have to share certain

general values such as the equality of individuals and justice. The communal goals of

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS 103

occupational and professional groups, furthermore, would not be separate from the moral traditions of the society of which they are a part. It is these society-wide, or as Durkheim

said, universal virtues that are needed to put limits to Maclntyre's elitism. The problem of elitism is avoidable in communitarian theory only if one's social relativism is openly pluralistic. There is no reason why the development of ideals of life in moral communities in which common goals define virtues must be inconsistent with the claim that people in other communities have rights, or that certain rights ought to be treated as universal

(Buchana 1989). In this respect we can see what Durkheim had in mind in his theory of the evolution

of universality. According to his view the universality of moral beliefs develops not from the dominance of any one societal community or from any philosophical claim regarding the absolute universality of certain moral principles. These are only small parts of the

picture which ought rather to be conceived as the actual participation of smaller communities in the emerging world community.

Durkheim faced this problem in a very specific way. His analysis of the develop ment of society after the industrial revolution (post-enlightenment, scientific, secular

society) led him to the conclusion that the nation-state was the dominant moral

community. The family, of course, was and remains the individual's primary moral

community; the nation is second; and universal humanity is the third and most compre hensive moral sphere. In his lectures on Moral Education Durkheim raised the question of the relationship of these three realms of the generation of morality, the question of which should have priority ethically. He concluded that there was

no necessary antagonism between these three collective feelings, as if one could only be a citizen to the extent that he or she was alienated from the family, or could not fulfill duties to humanity except by neglecting duties to one's country. Family, country and humanity represent three different

phases of our social and moral development which prepare for and build upon one another (Durkheim 1973, p. 74; fpp. 62-63).

This ultimate convergence of interests was not, however, a theoretical point that

Durkheim felt compelled to demonstrate philosophically. It was, in more recent socio

logical terminology, a process of globalization which would be confirmed or falsified

historically. Durkheim certainly got carried away with his own confidence in the eventual

development of a universal morality, but the proposition remained for him a sociological question.

No matter how devoted people may be to their country, everyone now feels that beyond the force of national life there are others which are higher and less ephemeral because they are not bound to the special conditions in which particular political groups find themselves and are not tied to the destinies of such groups. There is something more universal and more durable. And it is evident that

these more general and more constant ends are also higher ideals. The more evolution advances, the more one can see the ideals people pursue breaking free of local and ethnic circmstances which belong only to one part of the world or to one human group, rising above all these particularities and

approaching universality (Durkheim 1958b, pp. 72-73; fpp. 106-7).

One aspect of Durkheim's theory of the evolution of universal morality that is

especially interesting nearly a century later is his projection that the trend toward

globalization will be driven primarily by economic forces. In his lectures on Socialism and Saint-Simon he argued that it is the industrial sector of society that will first take

104 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

on an international character. Modern internationalism, he said, is a development not

out of religion but out of occupational and professional morality. "The result is," Durkheim wrote, "that the corporate spirit sometimes tends to bind similar corpora tions in different European societies" more tightly than different corporations in the same society (Durkheim 1958a, p. 174; fpp. 201-2).

Durkheim's theory of the evolution of universal morality raises a question which

goes to the heart of the gap between ethics and the sociology of morals. Philosophers often speak of the universal character of ethical judgments. The idea of cultural relativism

is often rejected out of hand because it denies the universal intent of ethical judgments and thus threatens ethical universalism. But what if it turns out that we can talk about

universalization sociologically as well as ethically ? a kind of de factor universalization

as well as a de jure universalization? Does this not take some of the sting out of social

relativism and make common sense out of the universalistic pr?tentions which

philosophers rightly hold for their theories?

FOOTNOTES

1. In this article I have attempted to follow Durkheim's habit of using the term "morality" for the socio

logical study of existing moralities and the term "ethics" for philosophical theories.

2. Durkheim's much neglected book on Moral Education (1973) contains his account of the nature of morality and of the moral crisis of his age.

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