How to Spot a Moral Happening

One of anthropology's long-standing contributions to the study of ethics has been the documentation of diversity in human values. Anthropologists have challenged unifying accounts of ethics in philosophy and psychology by presenting ethnographic examples that defy ethical categories that seem intuitive to Western scholars (e.g., Benedict, 1934; Douglas, 1966; Mauss, 1967; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1985). Indeed, within anthropology, the basic intuition is

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arguably that anything can be made a matter of ethical concern. Some have taken this great diversity to be evidence of the arbitrariness of ethical values, while others have continued to insist on moral realism or objectivity. Regardless of their positions with regard to debates about

"moral relativism," however, anthropologists have often been at pains to avoid overly narrow definitions of the moral domain. Most often, the refrain has been: "this too is ethics."

Ironically, this insistence on expanding the range of the ethical has been central to recent accusations that the old "Durkheimian" anthropology of morality conflated the moral domain with social life as such. On the one hand, earlier anthropologists have been criticized for following Durkheim in seeing morality in everything, thus allowing it to dissolve out of view (Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014; Laidlaw, 2014b; Robbins, 2007; Zigon, 2008). On the other hand, the basis of this problem has been described as an overly narrow focus on obligations (Laidlaw, 2002, 2014b) and moral codes (Zigon, 2008). Thus, proposals for overcoming the so-called

"Durkheimian collapse" (Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014) have sought to scout out new moral territory, paradoxically countering the alleged tendency to see ethics everywhere by uncovering it in an ever wider range of social phenomena.

Unfortunately, major proposals for the new anthropology of ethics appear to reintroduce problems that are analogous to those that they criticize in Durkheim. For example, Laidlaw has proposed a Foucauldian/neo-Aristotelian anthropology of ethics as practices of freedom, which would make self-cultivation (rather than Durkheimian social coercion) central to ethical life. But even though Laidlaw insists that he employs freedom in a culturally-situated way (Laidlaw, 2014a), others have taken issue with his placement of a core Western value at center stage

(Keane, 2014; Robbins, 2009). Similarly, while Zigon's anthropology of morality is ostensibly an expansive project, he also makes Heideggerian existential comfort central to his conception of

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ethics, describing it as the fundamental aim of all ethical life (Zigon, 2010; Zigon & Throop, 2014). Certainly, both of these approaches have drawn attention to previously neglected aspects of ethics. But by making certain values or concerns fundamental to the very definition of the moral domain, these proposals prematurely constrict our view as well.

Some anthropologists attempt to tackle this problem with definitions that specify the minimal formal features of ethical evaluation while allowing for maximal diversity of values.

Thus, Shweder and Menon argue that reference to objective standards is a defining feature of moral judgment that sets it apart from other varieties of evaluation (Beldo, 2014; Shweder et al., 1985; Shweder & Menon, 2014). A distinct but related proposal is that moral values are "goods in their own right," valued without reference to any further value as justification (Keane, 2016).

Unlike the proposals above, both of these ways of delimiting ethics are agnostic with respect to the content of ethical principles and the range of concerns that can be related to these principles.

One could conceivably take anything to be objectively good/bad, or good/bad in its own right.

Moreover, both definitions build on key concepts from Western moral philosophy and are intuitive (if contested) from this point of view; they resonate with what "we" mean when we talk about ethics. In short, these definitions cover the kinds of diversity with which anthropology has been concerned while also distinguishing ethics from other evaluative domains.

Difficulties arise, however, when trying to use these formal definitions to determine whether a particular evaluative act is "ethics." For example, it is difficult to determine whether Ali and others take cookies to be objectively bad or, alternatively, whether they consider cookies

"bad in their own right." Part of the problem is that both of these definitions focus on the kinds of reasons invoked by a particular evaluation, leading us to ask, for example, whether Ali justifies his claim in terms of objective standards. But Ali is not very explicit about the reasons that

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cookie eating is bad. His talk of wanting to "bring the children along in a certain way" may feel intuitively ethical, but he does not elaborate on why this "certain way" is good. The ambiguity here raises the question of how an analyst knows what reasons are being invoked in an

evaluation and whether or not those reasons qualify as ethical. What would we have to hear in Ali's words or see in the reactions of those gathered around to recognize this as an invocation of an objective standard or an absolute good? Of course, one might argue that the ambiguity of Ali's reasons is a problem for our example, not for these definitions. But to limit ethical evaluation to the utterance of reasons having a particular logical form would be a narrow circumscription of ethics indeed; surely, this is not what the proponents of these definitions have in mind.

The analysis presented here takes a related but somewhat different approach, inspired by Michael Lempert's insistence on the centrality of reflexive processes of "moralization" to the ethnographic study of ethics. By tracking processes of moralization, we can take ethics as an object of study without assuming where we will find it or what it will look like. Like the definitions tying ethics to "objective goods" and "goods in their own right," this approach

circumscribes ethics formally without privileging particular topics or values as inherently ethical.

But here, we are watching for a sort of social process or event, rather than a sort of reason.

What sort of process should we be looking for? One way to approach this question is to take a close look at what seems (if only intuitively) to be an ethicalization and work backwards, asking what it is that makes this seem ethical. Through a close analysis of fieldnotes, audio, and video of interaction before, during, and after Ali's condemnation of cookie eating, I describe the contentious process by which the ethicalization of cookie eating was achieved, resisted, and overcome. I interpret this process in light of two years of ethnographic research among this group of environmental and social activists. The logic of such an account is limited; an analysis

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of what makes the cookie controversy seem to be a moral happening cannot produce a claim about what is necessary and sufficient to ethics as such. Indeed, such an account is inherently dependent upon our pre-existing notions of what ethics is all about. Nonetheless, by indicating how key features of the cookie controversy speak to the notions of "objective standards" and

"goods in their own right," this analysis helps to clarify what we might mean by "ethical import"

and what the attribution of ethical import looks like in interaction.