Gabriel Abend’s The Moral Background is a big, ambitious book with two main goals. The first is to develop a theoretical concept—the moral background—that will be useful for the empirical study of morality. The second is to use this concept to investigate the development of business ethics from roughly the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
The book’s basic argument is simple. Those who have written about “business ethics” (under various names) have always encouraged business people to be honest, fair, and trustworthy. But below this surface agreement lie two very different moral backgrounds—“Christian Merchant” and “Standards of Practice”. Moral backgrounds are not about what is right or wrong but rather what makes things right or wrong. Abend argues that moral backgrounds vary on six dimensions: groundings, conceptual repertoires, objects of evaluation, methods and arguments, beliefs about metaethical objectivity, and metaphysical assumptions. The Christian Merchant background, for example, prescribes honesty because an omniscient God can see into our hearts. The Standards of Practice background, by contrast, prescribes honesty because it is good for the bottom line and for society. The conclusions are the same but the grounding is different. The story of the development of business ethics is therefore not the story of changing ethical injunctions but rather of the shift from a religious to a scientific grounding of ethical business practice (as incarnated in the rise of the university business school).
Abend succeeds in making his case that the moral background is a useful concept for the comparative study of morality. Contemporary sociology, with its reliance on instrumental ideas like “cultural capital”, has few good tools for asking important questions about the metaphysical assumptions behind our ethical commitments. Though the concept of moral background is novel in the context of today’s cultural sociology, it is in many ways a (needed) reappropriation of older concepts like Geertz’s “worldview” and its relationship to “ethos”. Most directly, Abend is developing Charles Taylor’s notion of an “immanent frame” of assumptions about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Although Abend draws on many sources inside and outside sociology, his greatest debt is to Taylor, whose ideas have long deserved a more central place in cultural and historical sociology.
What light does the moral background shed on the development of business ethics? Although I see great promise in the moral background as a concept and am persuaded that there has been a shift from Christian Merchant to Standards of Practice, I am not sure that this is an ideal demonstration project. As Abend argues, the realm of “first-order morality” (norms and behaviors) is all but untouched by this “second-order” (background) transformation. More materialist or pragmatist scholars might argue that practices and institutions are the real grounding and that the moral background is a mere post-hoc justification. I think this would be wrong (or at least woefully incomplete). But an empirical case that linked changes in the moral background to changes in “first-order” morality might have been more persuasive. That said, the story Abend tells about the moral background strikes me as essentially correct.
In addition to these two main objectives, Abend has one additional aim, pursued primarily in the conclusion, which is to offer a sociological corrective to the explosion of psychological and neuroscientific research on morality. I fully agree with Abend’s claim that these fields have focused too much on “thin” cases such as how people make appropriateness judgments about hypothetical actions and not enough on “thick” cases such as how people determine what kind of person they ought to become. It is unclear to me, however, how this argument is intended to reach scholars in these fields. My fear is that sociologist readers will use this critique to pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they “do morality” better than psychologists. It may, however, be more valuable to look for bridges. For example, Elliot Turiel’s work on the role of informational assumptions (e.g., do I have a soul?) in moral judgment may be compatible with Abend’s theoretical account.
Although the book is basically successful in its aims, it contains some elements that detract from its overall effectiveness. At 386 pages, it is probably too long. It draws somewhat haphazardly on the philosophical literature (e.g., Searle, Heidegger) and does not seem to engage deeply with (or really need) many of the specific ideas it invokes. The dimensions of the moral background—so carefully distinguished in chapter 1—are often muddied in later discussions. Abend seems to vacillate between claiming that backgrounds are verbal accounts (“public moral normativity”) or that they have real psychological power (“Christian Motives”). The book alternates between a rigorous presentation style (e.g., labeled premises, logical notation) and an informal, almost mocking tone that seems to emerge from nowhere. These features diminish the clarity of the argument.
But despite its faults, the Moral Background is an intriguing and useful book. Abend develops and promotes an analytical concept that contemporary sociology desperately needs. I think it will be influential as cultural sociology continues to seek the right balance between culture as a repertoire of skills and styles and culture as something deeper—something that shapes the thoughts we think and provides the menu for the kinds of people we can aspire to be.
