Referring back to President Obama’s rhetorical appeal to civic virtue during the 2008 election compaign, Barry Schwartz calls for a revival of morality in public life. As social contexts are changing in modern societies, formal job profiles and directives of welfare departments would only present suboptimal procedures for human interactions. Instead, there would be a demand for acting upon moral values, such as responsibility and respect. For instance, a survey conducted in Switzerland proved that the interviewees would be more likely to carry social and ecological burdens if they were not to be rewarded by higher salaries.
Consequently, rules and incentives were not in any case reasonable mechanisms to control social relations, but would tend to end up in a vicious circle of overregulation. Rather than acting entirely in accordance with formal standards, employees should know how and when to make wise exceptions. Moral wisdom is learned from experience. Everyday heroes can serve as model on doing right, claims Schwartz. Practical wisdom is considered thus as the main social resource to be achieved by the combination of and in accordance with moral will and moral skill.
What counted in the past is applicable even today? The fact that in complex societies, decisions are taken under the condition of uncertainty, and therefore are risky, can be neglected? If one were a good person equipped with an honourable character, there would be no danger of good will resulting in unintended negative side-effects? Virtue shall matter?; regardless of whether moral ideology can lead into tyranny, and regardless whether Kant has already insisted on the functional distinction of morality and legality as private and public spheres?
In a world where politics, religion, economy and the legal system represent different incompatible but functionally equal forces, and where more than 6.7 billion people live, there is no such thing of free will to follow at any time under any circumstances. Instead of all-embracing universal morality, there are different competing rationalities. And there are different situations, organisations and societies as well as different selective mechanisms, cognitive scripts, frames and schemes that all together socially construct a necessary, uncontrollable and contingent illusion of control and identities.
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1978: Thus spoke Zarathustra: a book for all and none. New York: Penguin Books.
Goffman, Erving 1990: The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday.
Luhmann, N. 1991: Paradigm Lost: On the Ethical Reflection of Morality: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Hegel Prize 1988. Thesis Eleven 29, pp. 82-94.
Weick, Karl E. 1979: The social psychology of organizing. 2. edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc.
White, Harrison 2008: Identity and control: how social formations emerge. 2. edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schreibe einen Kommentar