Social Justice as a Field

Abstract

This chapter proposes a field theory approach to morality and offers analysis of contemporary social justice as a moral field. Unlike moral formalism or moral background theory, moral field theory provides the sociology of morality a way of theorizing morality as objective while avoiding the philosophical tangle of realism and relativism. Moral field theory puts the onus on the construction of objective possibilities for moral belief and action, as moral fields emerge from an accumulated history and are produced and reproduced by socially constructive (orienting) loops between expectations and chances. As a field, morality is not subjective, neither is it conventionally group-based or directed by solidarity concerns; this allows it to assume a variety of forms capable of creating their own distinctive common sense. Moral field theory provides a framework that can account for morality as sui generis and thus it offers an at least partial affirmation of the intuition that history (“the arc of the moral universe”) can bend toward justice.