A society’s time structures impose normative expectations that shape agents’ moral identities

Evidence

According to Rosa, however, time cannot simply be seen as another dimension alongside culture, personality, social structure, and the relation to nature, since it cuts across all four of them. In addition, it is a theoretically strategic focal point because it marks a privileged site for the coupling of social structure with the self-understanding and identity of agents. Further, the dynamic interrelationship between this coupling of structure and agency and the wider cultural realm is a powerful influence on the symbolic possibilities of expression that are available to agents. As Rosa notes, the time structures of a given society are inevitably encountered by its members as normative expectations. The development of standardized clock and calendar times and ever more regularized schedules for trains, school days, stock markets, factory work, and so on, compels individuals to conform their behavior and plan their lives around the socially dominant time schemes. Hence any social theory that maintains a constitutive linkage to normative principles must take into account the impact of social time structures on the moral identities and aspirations of individuals. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to themes of how technological/scheduling infrastructure shapes subjectivity, parallel to work on clocks and discipline (Thompson’s time-discipline tradition). — connects to: Temporal structures lie at the center of ethics — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 149; Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612; Societal requirements transform into self-justifying norms devoid of social origin (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Societal requirements transform into self-justifying norms devoid of social origin #expands (0.78)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612
• Morality precedes society and society merely manipulates an already-existing moral structure #contradicts (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 514
• Social possibility rests on well-founded expectations about others’ conduct #qualifies (0.72)
• Collective moral disengagement arises from members mutually exonerating each role in a shared system #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 685