Welcome to The NSF Morality Workshop
About the Conference
The workshop is designed to increase
sociology’s participation within the social scientific study of
a core human concern: morality. Debates over right and wrong,
justice, values, propriety, deviance, and so on are at the core
of organized social life. The scientific study of morality has
recently received a number of prominent treatments within
popular discourse including magazine cover stories in Time
(Nov. 21, 2007), the New York Times Magazine (Jan 13,
2008), and three recent feature stories in Newsweek (Sept.
13, 2008; April 25, 2009; May 4, 2009). These stories tend to
focus on evolutionary and psychological aspects of moral
judgment. What is left out of the coverage is a sociological
understanding of morality. For example, there is little or no
discussion of the structural, cultural, and interactional bases
for moral judgment, feeling, and action. There is also limited
discussion as to how people handle conflicts between moral
issues often necessitated by occupying multiple social positions
across important roles and social groups, the ways that moral
claims motivate political and social movements, or the
importance of the moral dimension for understanding the human
self. Sociologists have much to offer to both the academic and
public discourses, but they also have much to learn from other
disciplines, thus they would be well-served by starting an
interdisciplinary dialogue. To this end, there are several goals
of this workshop. First, it includes expanding sociologists’
understanding of the moral dimensions. Second, it involves
improving interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and
cognate disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, religion,
law, political science, and economics. Finally, the goal is to
develop interdisciplinary research programs on morality among
sociologists and researchers in other disciplines.
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