Moral Culture Book

`Life is nasty, brutish and short, but sociologists have generally failed to provide an adequate account of human rights and have no satisfactory explanation of how strangers in the modern metropolis might live together in harmony and prosperity. Tester presents a challenge to na[um]ive notions of ethical neutrality and to what we might call caf[ac]e cosmopolitanism and yuppie intellectualism... Powerful, bold and fascinating' - Professor Bryan S Turner, Deakin University If sociology is about `society' must it not also be about morality? The identification between sociology and morality was clear cut in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Spencer and Veblen all dealt with moral issues. But now the connections between sociology and moral concerns have become more tenuous.In this book, Keith Tester examines what it means to be moral in contemporary social and cultural life. He takes the highly original step of exploring what the massacres in the Balkans and Rwanda, the Holocaust and the slaughter of Vietnamese peasants at My Lai might mean to the relatively safe and secure individuals in the West. Increasingly in the West, horror is experienced only through television and cinema screens. Tester looks at the moral possibilities and implications of this, and what it means to those who are its consumers. He also addresses the pressing concern of whether or not this is a time of moral decay. He uses a wide range of literature to explore these questions and develops his account around debates raised by Arendt, Simmel, Riesman and Bauman.Moral Culture will be required reading for students of sociology, political science and moral philosophy.Read More