The effects of social solidarity on moral emotions and morality

• Author: Ioana Anisa Atudorei
• Position: Transilvania University of Brasov
• Pages: 109-116

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law • Vol. 10 (59) No. 2 - 2017

THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL SOLIDARITY

ON MORAL EMOTIONS AND MORALITY

Ioana Anisa ATUDOREI1

Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of social solidarity on moral

emotions such as embarrassment, shame and guilt at a social level. The effect

of moral emotions on individual morality is presented. The paper emphasizes

the fact that solidarity, which is generally perceived as having positive

effects, may also produce social anomie. This situation is reached by a silent

agreement concerning intellectual fraud which goes unpunished at a social

level and can, thus, lead to deviant behaviour being considered tolerable as a

result of rational reasoning which could shake social structure.

Key words: social solidarity, moral emotions, social anomie, deviance,

tolerable, social structure.

1. Introduction

The study of society and of the laws by which it develops represents a permanent

preoccupation for each sociologist. In order to study this evolution, I shall refer to the role

of social solidarity as far as moral emotions are concerned which should represent the

guide of human actions, so important in the development of social deeds, which, in their

turn, determine the evolution or involution of society in a certain direction.

If some of the founders of sociology, chief among whom Émile Durkheim and Max

Weber placed high importance on morality, when the latter got to a secondary place

Richard Stivers (1996) published the article „Towards a Sociology of Morality”, in order

to bring sociology to the fore again and to revive the interest of scientists and especially

of sociologists in the study of morality. The author mentioned that “certainly, the absence

of a sociology of morality is one of the biggest weaknesses of academic sociology, it is a

mysterious absence” (Stivers, 1996, p. 1).

The new element in this paper is represented by the analysis of the consequences of

intellectual fraud committed by students for the social structure starting from the

toleration of intellectual fraud.

In recent studies on morality and social solidarity, Gert H. Mueller and Joseph R.

Pearce (2014) appreciate that ideology and morality involve the greater conscious effort

and enhansed power to convince, belives that solidarity is as elementary as it is

unreflexive, at as analyzes social stratification as labor, wealth and power, the moral

1 Transilvania University of Braşov, ioana.atudorei@unitbv.ro