Moral Cultures: Moral Dependence

I'm going to report him for this.

Wherever you’re reading this, I appreciate your interest!

This is part of a series. It can be read on its own, but for background see Part 1: Honor and Dignity and Part 2: Victimhood.   

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In previous installments I laid out a three-fold classification of moral cultures that Bradley Campbell and I developed in our articles (see also) and book.

The classification is not exhaustive. For example, psychologist Dov Cohen – who was writing about honor and dignity long before we were – also uses a category called face culture to characterize traditional East Asian societies. Face cultures are similar to honor cultures in their concern with public reputation and sensitivity to shame, but with less emphasis on belligerence and bravery and more on cooperation and loyalty. I may have more to write on face culture later. But for now, the distinction between honor, dignity, and victimhood cultures works well as a shorthand for prevailing patterns of morality in the West. And Campbell and I think it is useful for discussing trends in moral evolution.

But it seems like many people who interact with our work don’t go beyond the classification (or worse, the label we chose for it). A lot of it boils down to: “These two sociologists say we’re in a victimhood culture. See! This shows [the culture is bad, or, depending on your priors, these two sociologists are bad].”

Yet while classification can be useful for comparing and contrasting things, a classification isn’t an explanation. It doesn’t tell you what conditions lead to one rather than another, or what causes moral culture to change. But from our first writing on the subject, this is exactly what we tried to do. Drawing from sociological theories of conflict, particularly the work of theorist Donald Black and his students, we presented a theory of victimhood culture.

Indeed, one advantage to our concept of victimhood culture is that it is defined in terms of variables – things are less in one time and place and greater in another. It’s a matter of degree, so we should not get sidetracked in essentialist arguments over whether X, Y, or Z is really a victimhood culture (or honor culture or dignity culture).

The goal should instead be to measure the aspects of victimhood culture: sensitivity to slight, tendency to handle grievances through complaint to authority, tendency to treat domination or privilege as serious deviance, tendency to exaggerate or emphasize victimhood. Thus one can investigate our ideas about what causes these things to increase or decrease.

This series isn’t going to rehash the book, so I’m not going to go through our whole explanation. But to give newer readers an idea of how to sociologically explain moral culture, this post will focus on explaining one aspect of victimhood culture: Tendency to handle grievances by complaint to authority. People in victimhood culture are more likely than those in other moral cultures to handle a grievance by complaining to an authority figure, or to the general public (often with an eye on swaying an authority figure through popular outrage).

This dependence on authorities is interesting because it follows a linear sequence across the three types of moral culture: Honor culture has the least, dignity culture has more, and victimhood culture has the most. So if we can explain this variable, it helps us explain the historical sequence of changing moral cultures.