Communitarian Ethics and the Sociology of Morals: Alasdair MacIntyre and Emile Durkheim

Author(s): ROBERT T. HALL

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Sociological Focus, Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue: The Sociology of Morals (May 1991), pp.
93-104
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20831575 .
Accessed: 09/07/2012 10:21
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological
Focus.

http://www.jstor.org

Communitarian

of Morals:

Sociology
Maclntyre
ROBERT
West

Ethics
and

Emile

and

the

Alasdair
Durkheim
SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

T. HALL

Vol. 24 No. 2
1991
May

Virginia State College

The recent communitarian perspective inphilosophical ethics raises the question of the sociology
ofmorals proposed byEmile Durkheim. Durkheim's critique of ethics is compared with that ofAlasdair
and the "sociologicalpresupposition"
of each is identified Ethical relativism is evaluated
Maclntyre
in both Durkheim and Maclntyre. Durkheim's
universalism is compared with and found preferable
toMaclntyre''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 ofmorality ? 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 ? thatmoral judgments are dependent upon the structure of a society, and that
ethical theorymust 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 itwas actually a product of social
forces: philosophical justification cannot rest on such historical contingencies. So
philosophers today seldom showmuch interest in empirical studies of the norms and values
? even the
actually current in society
society forwhich they prescribe ethical principles.
on
the
other
have
hand,
Sociologists,
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 ofmorals as a specialized discipline within sociology
(Gouldner 1970, p. 140).
For the better part of a century now there has been a serious riftbetween 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 ofmorals, Emile
Durkheim, with some of the views recently expressed by a major figure in the develop
I believe that a
ment of the communitarian approach in ethics, Alasdair Maclntyre.
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 toDurkheim, was divided
into two schools of thought: the Kantians and theUtilitarians. The problem, he thought,
was that both schools made the same mistake of treating ethics as a matter of deducing

prescriptions fromgeneral principles. "The problem of ethics," he wrote, "has consisted

essentially in determining the form ofmoral conduct fromwhich one could afterwards
deduce the content. One began by establishing the principle ofmorality 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 forpresuming 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 listmoral 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 tomake 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 tomaking things better. He
thus thought that ethical judgments were in one important sense relative to the society
in and forwhich 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 toMaclntyre, 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 ofmoral 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 formorality 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 ofmoral 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 turnsmoral agents intomanipulators

(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, ifhe 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 ismore significant sociologically than he realizes. Given

96

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

his philosophical interpretation, Maclntyre can simply denounce the function of these
roles as somuch 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 themoral 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 iswith the effort to establish a foundation formoral
thought by reference to social processes, I cannot ignore the development ofMaclntyre's
argument. The enlightenment and post-enlightenment project of attempting to provide
a rational justification for ethics has failed, according toMaclntyre, because of certain
internal inconsistencies. Reason alone, apart from any substantive concept of human
nature or society, is unable to provide a justification formoral rules; and the presup
position of any specific concept of human nature or society (an essence or telos) is seen

as a formof "naturalism" which is rationally unwarranted. In a society inwhich religion

no longer provides a public legitimation formorality, 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 ofmutual 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 towhich 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 ofwhich has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen,
soldier, philosopher, servant ofGod" (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 inwhich 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
in such a
taking of innocent life, theft and perjury and betrayal. The table of virtues promulgated
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 fora minute accept the ethical theory thatMaclntyre
constructs on the basis of this understanding of the nature and origins ofmorality. 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 thatmorality 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 formof life (amorality) can be attained, consensus on the legitimation of that morality
(an ethical theory) may

Maclntyre,

is that while

follow. The problem of contemporary ethics, according

on

is consensus

there

the social

roles

of manager,

and therapist, the consensus does not extend to substantive

these
order

facilitative
roles,
?
on a morality.

and

does

What

we

not

therefore

have,

constitute

therefore,

to

bureaucrat,

social goals apart from

consensus

are manipulators

on a form of social
and

facilitators

in

of a purpose.

search

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
forhis 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

themajor social roles of a society to discover the sources of themoral 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 lifeof 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 ofmorality
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 ofmorals, "is that up to the present I have not found
inmy 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
toMaclntyre'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.

individuals share... occupations inwhich 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 formwithin the larger society. Now
once this group is formed, nothing can hinder an appropriate moral life from emerging, a lifewhich

When

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 ofmorality 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 itmight 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 theReligious 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 littledifferently fromMaclntyre's notion
of the domination ofmanagers and bureaucrats, but there are many similarities in the
two accounts nonetheless. In an age inwhich the religious basis ofmorality has disap
peared as a form of ethical common
Durkheim was convinced that such
humanistic morality through a process
that the lead in developing a common

ground, society needs a new secular morality.

a morality could be developed as a universal
ofmoral education.2 But Durkheim also thought
morality (i.e., the development of actual norms

and ideals through social interaction) would,

in an industrial age, have to come from

99

COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS

the economic sphere (Hall 1982).

Durkheim and Maclntyre agree that to construct a morality we need to reconstruct
communities with common goals. The directions inwhich Durkheim and Maclntyre look
fora solution to this problem, however, are diametrically opposed. Maclntyre's answer
to the crisis is that we can reconstruct a common ground formorality ifwe 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 forhope. 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 inDurkheim'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 themajor 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 toA. 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 ifS 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.

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 inmind 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
Durkheim

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

100

(1952, p. 50; fp. 3) spoke of social facts as "obligations" incumbent upon members of
society. "When I fulfillmy obligations as a brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute
my contracts, I perform duties which are defined externally tomyself 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 ofmerchants. 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 ofmorality apply to entirely different groups of individuals (Durkheim 1958b, pp. 4-5; fpp. 44-45).

statement of the Aristotelian perspective

Notice how close this is toMaclntyre's
can be drawn from social roles with
earlier.
The
fact
statements
that
evaluative
quoted
a
and
that
within
logical consistency
society see these evaluative statements
people
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 iswarranted 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 themark, he need not have bothered in the firstplace. 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. Ifvirtues
ormoral obligations are part and parcel of social roles, thenMaclntyre is, in the classic
sense, an ethical relativist. This relativism is, I believe, a corollary of his story of the
origins ofmorality. Ifwhat people value are those qualities ofmind 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 formingmoral com
to defend ourselves from the barbarian bureaucrats. It makes sense to try to
reconstruct morality by developing communal goals only ifmorality is somehow relative
to, or dependent upon, a social world.

munities

Durkheim was quite explicit about his relativistic understanding of morality.

Although itmust be kept inmind 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 itsmembers 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 theorymid-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 ofwhat might be called interventionism:
a view that ethical judgments aremade within a given society as prescriptions formaking

that society better without necessarily being based upon any ideal ofwhat 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 ofmedicine. Physicians prescribe
what might make an individual better, he said, without having any idea ofwhat absolute
health or perfect humanity might be.
If, as I suspect, a contemporary communitarianism of the sortMaclntyre 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 tomean 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 furtherexplore, however, in terms ofmy comparison ofMaclntyre and

Durkheim. This

is the issue of the univeralism of ethical judgments.

DURKHEIM'S UNIVERSALISM AND MacINTYRE'S ELITISM

return to Aristotle's concept of the polis as a community with
While Maclntyre's
may
specific goals
point out a path to the recovery of legitimacy for ethics, it is not

102

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

clear that Maclntyre has escaped one of themajor 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 inAristotle's account does
not injureAristotle's general understanding of the place of virtues in human life, itmay
be a more damaging problem thanMaclntyre expects, even forhis 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 (withwhich Maclntyre agrees) is to give each person
his or her due. "To deserve well," according toMaclntyre, "is to have contributed in
some substantial way to the achievement of those goods, the sharing ofwhich and the

pursuit ofwhich provide foundations forhuman community" (Maclntyre 1980, p. 188).

We must ask, however, who it is that defines the communal good. Surely itwould 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

in Maclntyre's
communitarianism because, since the
powerful will be maintained
can
set
to
the
fear anarchy if the goals ofwhich they
goals, they
always feign
powerful
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.

elitism is obvious from his conclusions about creating communities
Maclntyre's
in our time to sustain civility and morality through the dark ages which are upon us.
Does he not precisely dismiss individuals in themanagerial 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 inwhich 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 frommaking themyth 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 themoral

traditions of the society ofwhich they are a part. It is these society-wide, or as Durkheim
said, universal virtues that are needed to put limits toMaclntyre's elitism. The problem
of elitism is avoidable in communitarian theory only ifone's social relativism is openly
pluralistic. There is no reason why the development of ideals of life inmoral communities
inwhich 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 inmind in his theory of the evolution
of universality. According to his view the universality ofmoral 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 onMoral Education Durkheim raised the question
of the relationship of these three realms of the generation ofmorality, 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, inmore 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 forhim 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

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

104

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 ofmorals. Philosophers
often speak of the universal character of ethical judgments. The idea of cultural relativism
is often rejected out of hand because itdenies the universal intent of ethical judgments
and thus threatens ethical universalism. But what if it turns out that we can talk about
? a kind of de
universalization sociologically as well as ethically
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.

2.

In this article I have attempted to follow Durkheim's

habit of using the term "morality"
theories.
logical study of existing moralities and the term "ethics" for philosophical
Durkheim's much neglected book onMoral Education
and of the moral crisis of his age.

for the socio

(1973) contains his account of the nature of morality

REFERENCES
Alan E.
the Com
1989. "Assessing
Buchanan,
munitarian Critique of Liberalism." Ethics 99:4. _
1887. "Le Science positive de la
Durkheim, Emile.
Vol.
morale en Allemagne." Revue Philosophique,
24.
_. 1960. Professional
Ethics
and Civic
de
Morals.
IL: Free Press; Le?ons
Glencoe,
Sociologie: physique des moeurs et du droit. Paris:
PUF,
_ ..

1969.
. 1953. Sociology

and Philosophy. Glencoe,

et Philosophie.
Paris:
IL: Free Press; Sociologie
PUF, 1979.
. . .. _ _. . 1958a. Socialism and Saint-Simon. Yellow

_.

Springs, OH: Antioch Press; Le Socialism.

PUF, 1971.

Ethics
and Civic
1958b. Professional
de
111.: Free Press; Le?ons
Sociologie: physique des moeurs et du droit. Paris:
PUF, 1969.
1965. The Elementary
Forms of the

Morals.

_.

Parish:

Glencoe,

Religious Life. New York: Free Press; Les formes

?l?mentaire de la vie religeuse: la syst?me totemi
1979.
que en Australie. Paris: PUF,
. 1973. Moral Education.
New York: Free

morale. Paris: PUF, 1974.

Press; L'Education
. 1977. The Evolution
of Educational
L'Evolution
London:
Houtledge;
Thought.
en France. Paris: PUF,
1969.
p?dagogique
_ 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method.
New York: Free Press; Les Regles de la m?thode
1981.
sociologique, 2nd ed. Paris: PUF,
1977. Durkheim et la socialism.
Filloux, Jean-Claude.
Geneva: Droz.
1970. The Coming Crisis of
Gouldner, Alvin W.
Western Sociology. New York: Avon Books.
Hall, Robert T. 1970. "Emile Durkheim on Business
and Profes
and Professional Ethics." Business
sional Ethics Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1.
. ... . 1987. Emile Durkheim: Ethics and the
Sociology ofMorals. New York: Greenwood Press.

1980. After Virtue. Notre Dame,

Maclntyre, Alasdair.
Ind.: Notre Dame Press.
Mestrovic, Stjepan G. 1988. Emile Durkheim and the
Reformation of Sociology. New Jersey: Rowman.
on
Pickering, W. S. F., ed. 1979. Durkheim's Essays
Morals and Education. London: Routledge. "Intro
1920.
duction a la morale." Revue philosophique,