Durkheimian Revolution in Understanding Morality: Socially Created, Scientifically Grasped

Abstract

The question of how we should act has, for many centuries, remained under the guard of philosophy. The many philosophical schools that have succeeded each other since the founding times of Plato and Aristotle have offered different answers to this question, always maintaining the concern to offer a well-founded ethical principle to guide human action. In the nineteenth century, however, the emergence of the human sciences produced important challenges to philosophical discourse, shifting the question of how things should be to the question of why things are what they are. Émile Durkheim was one of the important figures on this journey, with his efforts to found a new discipline, Sociology, guided by the central concern of unveiling the social origin of morality. This text presents this sociological project from four fundamental axes. First, it situates the author in relation to the social, political, and intellectual context of his time, so as to justify his methodological choices and his main interlocutors. In the second axes we have a discussion of the main constitutive elements of morality according to this theoretical perspective. After that, fundamental concepts from his sociology of religion are mobilized, which are considered necessary to complete the framework of his moral theory, revealing the full potential of Durkheimian sociology for understanding contemporary society. Finally, there is an exposition of his defense of the ideal of the human person, accompanied by a discussion of how it is possible to take a position on moral phenomena without exceeding the limits of science.