In this essay, I will briefly cover the field as I see it developing, with an eye to its fundamentally interdisciplinary potential, highlighting studies and traditions that are worth incorporating into sociology. Morality as a topic of social science inquiry crosses the fields of psychology (developmental and social), sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and economics, and those of us invested in its development argue that is serves as an underpinning for all social organization and interaction. Implicitly, I take the position that the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) and the sociologist Christian Smith (2003) offer, that human beings are inextricably living within and shaped by webs of moral meanings, versions of the 'right' and the 'good'. Human beings are fundamentally moral, not in the sense of being conventionally altruistic or caring about others, but that human persons (SMITH, 2009) must, as a product of being social beings living in social space, take positions on issues important in those societies and groupings. People, as a rule, within my paradigm, anchor their senses of self within these moral positions, standards that offer an anchor from which to make sense of the world through a moral lens. A sociology of morality encompasses the formation of these beliefs, their relative immutability or the circumstances through which they change, their influence on action, and their retrospective reconstruction in the face of disconfirming feedback or social pressures.
Morality and interdisciplinarity; Moral psychology; Moral anthropology