Social Order as Moral Order

This chapter will argue that replacing the established focus on social institutions with a focus on constitutive orders of interaction has important implications for Ethics. Treating “social” facts as if they were “natural” facts has resulted in a focus on concepts in place of practices. Treating social facts as “instituted” has resulted in a conception of social order as contingent and of morality as relative to particular social institutional arrangements. However, social institutions are in almost all cases comprised of sets of rules for constructing and maintaining inequalities that are not moral in any general sense. A conception of constitutive order changes this. If the crucial social objects (including self) are understood as social and not natural objects, and their fragile character and dependence on constitutive orders for their existence (rather than on institutions) is accepted, then the whole question of morality and its relationship to society is changed. A relationship usually viewed as both relative and merely pragmatic (or functional) is recast in terms that transcend the particulars of institutionalized social arrangements, consummating a social contract position. There are implications not only for Ethics, but for a conception of democratic society in a context of modernity and diversity.