Question.

Walls

I am uncertain if this has enough depth to warrant a discussion in itself, but nevertheless....

The question takes for granted that Morality is a changable thing within Western Society. While some acts, attitudes and beliefs were unacceptable in the past they may hold much less condemnation now, and vice versa.

My question is this; If Morality is changeable, then what factors change it? What acts on or affects it? Do we change our Morality on the basis of economic factors? Or is there something more, like educational levels of a populace, their history and cultural background? The rights accorded to each individual and how that individual thereby sees the world?

The interesting thing about this is that the elements are there, right there all around us, acting and chaging our world each day. Its just a question of figuring them out....

Your thoughts, please.

simu

Bourdieu had this idea of the doxa - these are ideas and assumptions accepted by a given society. These doxa are constantly enforced by that society - largely in a subconscious manner - say, by naming groups in society, attributing certain characteristics to them and thereby predisposing others and even the groups themselves to seeing each other in that light and thus conforming more to the image imposed upon them. Like maybe, if you consider yourself to be a bit of a geek, geeks are supposed to like The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy so you might read this and then you're becoming the steroetype. Well, individuals are a bit more complex than that but it's something that becomes a factor when you're getting impressions of groups of people rather than getting to know an individual very well. Or, to take a more negative example, women used to be considered to be illogical, if a woman did something illogical, people would say "Well, what did you expect, she's a woman" whereas if a man did something illogical, they would be more inclined to see it as a once-off happening rather than a defining characteristic and so on.

Different ideas circulating in a society might seem contradictory but the doxa still remains - at any given time, no matter how different or conflicting the various ideas are, there is always going to be a set of ideas that are acceptable to different groups within a society to different degrees, ideas that may compete with one another for wider acceptance and then, another set of all all the possible ideas that could ever be conceived but that cannot be expressed at a particular time in a particular society. This isn't a question of supression of freedom of speech and so on - the views of a minority in society still forms a small part of the total field of ideas - it's more that this second set of ideas simply could not be conceived by the minds of people in a given society at a given time.

Getting onto the morality bit, let's say that morality is what is considered acceptable or what is expected as behaviour from an individual in a certain situation in a given society. The doxa can apply to pretty much any ideas circulating in a society and a subset of these ideas would govern appropriate behaviour in a given circumstance i.e. morality.

So, how does the doxa change? Well, the weight of different ideas and their proportional influence is always shifting. Different groups in society want to distinguish themselves from others and so, they come up with new variations on ideas (I'm using idea in a very general sense here - this could be accent, clothes, the way you walk, anything!) which in turn, cause reactions from other groups and so on, ad infinitum. So, you have minor changes happening in society all the time. At other, rarer occasions, what happens is that the gap between the images presented to us by society at large and the way things present themselves to be of themselves becomes so large that it is impossible to be fooled by these images. For example, if the general consensus is that a country's economy is booming and that life is getting better for all on the one hand but that the streets are fillled with beggars on the other hand, this general consensus would start to change. But you never get to a state where the doxa is destroyed and people can look completely objectively at a society as a new doxa always replaces the old one.

Or at least, that's how I remember Bourdieu's ideas anyway! And he's not the only one to have tackled this question. Either way, far from not warranting a discussion, there's a lot there to explore.

It's more sociology than philosophy in a way, but then again, I think Bourdieu's ideas are also interesting in relation to philosophy because you can also apply them to the history of thought, how different ideas are born, circulate, influence each other and so on.