Modernity and Morality in the Context of Social Change: Emotivism

Author/s: Muhammed Veysel Bilici

Year: 2019 Vol: 1 Number: 1

Abstract

This study aims to present a rough outline related to the basic transformations that morality has undergone in the social sphere and its institutional infrastructure due to placing morality in an individual field, and hence a psychological or transcendental field as well as an absolute and philosophical field. In this context, morality is perceived as a human phenomenon that becomes possible through the production of good, evil, right, and wrong in a way that transcends the conceptual dualities of good and evil and right and wrong. Similarly, dealing with morality on the axis of change from the understandings of its function and usefulness in individual and social aspects is acceptable by seating the moral individual and moralistic action within a historical and social context. Usefulness and functionality are phenomena defined and bounded within general social structure. From this perspective of every moral theory, benefit and function must be defined from both social and individual points. This dimension allows human beings to describe a moral world based on their existence in the social sphere instead of acting from a transcendental acceptance through its philosophical vicinity. In this respect, morality is addressed entirely through the mentality, language, and practices identifying dualisms like good/evil, right/wrong, and beneficial/harmful, which must be addressed within the likely historical and social conditions as a social phenomenon as well as identifying the vague areas between them. At the starting point of modern ethical theories lay the institutionally and epistemologically rupturing of the relationship between what is and what should be. The process that reveals or triggers this tension is not just being in a form parallel to the destruction of the traditional corporate infrastructure that has constructed, controlled, and proclaimed what is and what should be; at the same time, morality is reduced to a position that the market and modern political arena instrumentalize by embarking on control of the scientific-economic-political structure. Classical or traditional morality is justified either through language morality or a language grounded in the past, or through transcendence surpassing memory. This situation raises morality to a top position that constructs rationality as befits what comes from being an individual response. The placement of feelings on the basis of authentic morality lies at the root of the loss of coherence in culture by elevating emotions to a position that doesn’t recognize any higher authority. Emotivism in this context has moved a large chapter of life out of the entire traditional moral framework by developing a legitimate and instrumental ethical language and way of being that allow the modern political and economic order to construct and supervise individuals’ cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic awareness. The positioning of morality in accordance with the needs of the market and politics, as well as the loss of morality’s critical potential, has become possible through emotionalism under the guise of authenticity and autonomy

Keywords
morality, modernity, emotivism, politics, market