CLASS MORALITIES? ETHICAL DISPOSITIONS AND SOCIAL POSITION IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

The sociology of morality has often thought of morality in the singular by delivering the exegesis of philosophical or juridical texts. While a quantitative tradition has emerged in the field of the sociology of values and while the sociology of morality has gone through a recent revival, interpretations in terms of social class remain scarce. Yet, material and symbolic inequalities shape the perceptions of fairness and unfairness as well as moral preferences. Like tastes and distastes, moral preferences owe much to the belonging to groups that occupy differentiated positions within the overall social space. By relying on an original statistical survey that bears upon different fields of application of morality, we identify the principles that develop and legitimize the distances between various social groups. We show that the geography of moral standpoints is structured around two sets of oppositions (distance vs proximity to cultural legitimism, principles vs consequences) and that these differentiated moral positions are what makes it possible to understand the conflicts between groups, if not within them. Moral preferences have social foundations, and the analysis of these foundations sheds light on the structure of today’s social space, which is characterized by a gradual convergence between cultural and economic elites, and by a fragmentation of the lower middle classes.