Call for Papers : Ethics and morality in everyday life
Ethics and morality in everyday life
What do we mean when we talk about the “good life?” What is the relationship between “good life” imaginations and conceptualizations of “right” and “wrong?” Are there universal social rules that facilitate living together? How might we overcome potential tensions between processes of self-realization and those of the actualization of the common good? Ethics and morality have, for centuries, been investigated in philosophy and different philosophical traditions have produced diverse conceptualizations and formulae to answer these questions. Today, social sciences have allowed for a move away from some of these approaches like for example Kant’s principle whereby our rationality is supposed to guide us not only towards scientific truths about the “starry heavens” but also to discovering universal moral laws which then it is our duty to follow. More novel social scientific studies instead treat ethics and morality as based on aesthetic narratives, metaphors and everyday life experiences which are necessarily imbued with power relations.
Our purpose with this issue is to ground ethics and morality on the field and to study their everyday manifestations. We wish to highlight ethics and morality as necessarily saturating the everyday, as relational, contextual and negotiated social scientific concepts and to investigate the inconsistencies and ambiguities in these processes of negotiation. As such, we look to present a social scientific contribution to the multi disciplinary study of ethics and morality.
This issue will include articles that adopt this approach from diverse disciplines, looking to answer some of the following questions:
- How do written rules (laws, regulations, etc.) come into contact with unwritten codes (conventions, customs, etc.) in social life? How do these encounters contribute to people’s or communities’ understandings of “right,” “just” or “good?”
- How do people who relate differently to power and who have diverse priorities negotiate or express what they think is “ethical” or “moral” as based on different contexts and contingencies?
- How does group belonging or loyalty (to family, community, nation, region, etc.) shape people’s evaluations of ethics and morality? What kinds of conflicts arise during these processes?
- How do people resolve ethical or moral dilemmas or conundrums; how do decision-making processes unfold in these situations?
- What is the lexicon of the ethical and the moral on the ground, in the field? What are words or notions besides or other than “good,” “right,” “fair,” or “just” that people use to express similar evaluations?
- How to researchers who focus on ethical and moral evaluations in society position themselves, their own subjective conceptions of the “good,” the “fair” or the “right?”
February 2022 – Call for papers
Submission deadline: October 20, 2021
Special issue editors: Yağmur Nuhrat, Gülay Uğur Göksel
