Social Theorists of Morality: Essays on Moral Agency

Owen Abbott's Social Theorists of Morality is an excellent and much-needed work. His insightful account of morality goes beyond the standard theory canon and exploits synergies among sociological, psychological, and philosophical approaches. This is a must-read book for sociologists of morality, but also for sociological theorists, sociologists of culture, and social psychologists.

--Gabriel Abend, Professor of Sociology, University of Lucerne

This book provides an interdisciplinary series of essays on key social theorists of morality. It explores contributions to social moral theorising made by W. E. B. Du Bois, G. H. Mead, Jane Addams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Carol Gilligan, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Jonathan Haidt. It thus seeks to integrate alternative voices at the "foundations" of sociological theorising about morality, while entering into dialogues with post-Enlightenment moral philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. In so doing, it engages with perspectives of pragmatism, virtue ethics, care ethics, feminist critiques, and moral foundations theory. The essays discuss key topics in social theories of morality, including moral action, socialisation, habit and reflexiveness, relationships, emotion, self, identity, racism and colonialism, universalism, and innateness. It centres crucial (but often overlooked) questions of moral power, and assesses the relationship between moral theorising and normative argument. The essays are conjoined by a running theme of moral agency--how it is constituted and how it is enacted--which orientates the book's arguments and critiques.

Owen Abbott is Lecturer in Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, which was awarded the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize in 2020 for best first, sole-authored book. He is co-author of Masking in the Pandemic: Materiality, Interaction, and Moral Practice. His research focuses on moral practice, moral agency, and the moral dynamics of personal lives. He has recently completed a Leverhulme Trust funded empirical project exploring forgiving and not forgiving in personal relationships.