MORAL COMMUNICATION IN MODERN SOCIETIES, Sundararaju Madri

Moral Communication in Modern Societies               Social anthropologists and sociologists as well as legal scholars and political theorists have good reason to be interested in morality. Whenever they are concerned with social integration and social solidarity, or their opposites, anomie and deviance, they are concerned with aspects of the moral order of a society. One of the obvious ways for social scientists to investigate morals is to look at the ways in which the members of a society communicate with one another. This holds especially for modern societies. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that in order to find out what the state of morals is in modern society, one must analyze moral communication. We shall try to explain why this is so, and if we succeed, much of the theoretical task we set ourselves for this lecture will be accomplished. The other, empirical part will consist of the description of some key features of modern morality. Although we shall not define the terms, it may be useful to indicate what we mean when we talk of morality and morals and what we understand by communication and moral communication.               We take morality to be a reasonably coherent set of notions of what is right and what is wrong, a set of notions about the good life that guide human action beyond the immediate gratification of desires and the momentary demands of a situation. Such notions, as all notions, are of course held by individuals. Their origin, however, is intersubjective: they are constructed in long historical chains of communicative interactions, and they are selected, maintained and transmitted in complex social processes. Over the generations they come to form distinct historical traditions in which a particular view of the good life and, correspondingly, of the bad life, is articulated. This means that some conceptions of what is right and what is wrong are censored, others systematized and canonized. Thus certain coherence between the notions is achieved; an ideal conception of morality is established. The ideal serves as the norm in the organization of collective life. When the ways to achieve the moral