Sociology reduces morality to derivative products of non-moral social institutions

Evidence

Between them, the two tasks and the efforts they commanded led to the denial of an independent existential mode of moral norms; if acknowledged at all as a separate factor in social reality, morality has been assigned a secondary and derivative status, which in principle should render it explicable by reference to non-moral phenomena – that is, phenomena fully and unambiguously amenable to non-teleological treatment. Indeed, the very idea of the specifically sociological approach to the study of morality has become synonymical with the strategy of, so to speak, sociological reduction; one which proceeds on the assumption that moral phenomena in their totality can be exhaustively explained in terms of the non-moral institutions which lend them their binding force. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘sociological reduction’: the strategy of explaining moral phenomena exhaustively via the non-moral institutions that give them binding force.
• XREF: This is the theoretical target Bauman will invert in Holocaust analysis — relevant to later readings on how bureaucratic rationality strips moral content from action. — connects to: The language of sociology makes morally unsanctioned behavior unspeakable and thus unthinkable — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 601; Sociology treats social learning as the unexamined root of all human morality — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 601; Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613 (+8 more)

Related

• Sociology mirrored modern society by banishing ethical problematics from its discourse (similarity 0.85)
• Sociology treats social learning as the unexamined root of all human morality (similarity 0.85)
• Socialization manipulates but never produces moral capacity (similarity 0.85)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality (similarity 0.85)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.84)
• Orthodox sociology assumes social regulation produces morality and restrains savagery (similarity 0.84)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil (similarity 0.83)
• Organizations suppress morality because it cannot be rationalized (similarity 0.83)
• Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles (similarity 0.82)
• Morality precedes society and society merely manipulates an already-existing moral structure (similarity 0.82)
• Moral capacity arises socially but not from societal institutions (similarity 0.82)
• The language of sociology makes morally unsanctioned behavior unspeakable and thus unthinkable (similarity 0.81)
• Durkheim’s sociology holds that all morality originates in society’s coercive civilizing force (similarity 0.81)
• Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society (similarity 0.81)
• Sociology fortifies a faithless faith in the very reality whose victims people are (similarity 0.81)