In the social sciences, morality is understood in two main senses: normative and descriptive. In the normative sense, morality refers to universal standards of right and wrong based on principles such as justice, fairness, and the avoidance of harm. Moral individuals and practices are considered fair, just, and concerned with promoting the well-being of others. This perspective, common in moral philosophy, ideology, and theology, focuses on determining what people ought to do rather than simply describing how they behave. It seeks objective principles that guide ethical decision-making and define the duties of individuals and communities.

In the descriptive sense, morality refers to the values, beliefs, customs, and norms through which different societies distinguish right from wrong and desirable from undesirable behavior. These moral standards vary across cultures and social groups and are not necessarily universal. From this perspective, morality encompasses the accepted rules that guide individual conduct and social relationships within a particular community. These norms are shaped by broader cultural, religious, and philosophical worldviews, which provide the underlying values that define appropriate behavior. Thus, morality serves both as a system of social regulation and as a framework for understanding how societies establish and maintain standards of conduct and conceptions of the good life.

Sociologists most often study morality in its descriptive sense, trying to understand how identities, narratives, institutions, symbolic and cognitive schemas, and history shape and are shaped by morality in a society. Sociologists of morality focus on average actions of individuals and institutional arrangements.

                          Early Sociology of Morality

Georg Simmel viewed society as an area of psychological interaction between individuals and groups. In that sense, society, in essence, represents a process of association, where not every psychological interaction is at the same time an association. For the association to form, over time, from simple interaction, there must be unity around common values and common goals. There are various forms by which unity is achieved around values and goals: law achieves external goals by external means; morality achieves internal goals by internal means; honor achieves external goals by internal means. The law regulates the narrowest part of common values, while morality is the most comprehensive.

Ferdinand Tönnies, in Community and Society (1887), argues that social norms are rules (commandments and inhibitions), which have general validity, and they are used to regulate the behavior of all individuals. Norms can be autonomous or heteronomous, depending on whether they are consciously and voluntarily accepted (autonomous), or imposed from outside (heteronomous). Norms within the community are formed based on general consent, habits (customs), and religion. Norms within society arise from conventions, legislation, and public opinion. There are three main types of norms: 1) order (created based on general consent or convention); 2) law - enforced by courts, and may be based on customs or legislation; 3) morality - a set of norms that act as if they are applied by an imaginary judge (some higher power or conscience) and derive from religion or public opinion. Law, which arises through a truly democratic process, must be based on public opinion.

Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of the sociology of morality, argued that morality should be studied objectively as a social fact rather than as an expression of individual moral beliefs. He maintained that morality consists of shared norms and values that provide the external constraints necessary for social order. According to Durkheim, human beings require both social regulation and integration because human nature alone cannot sustain an orderly society. His concept of homo duplex describes individuals as possessing both egoistic and social (moral) impulses. When moral norms are weak, egoistic tendencies dominate, threatening social cohesion and the stability of communal life.

Durkheim, in Division of Labor in Society, observes the development and evolution from primitive to civilized societies, and pays special attention to the relationship between the type of economy and the division of labor, on the one hand, and the type of solidarity and morality is society, on the other hand. To explain this relationship, he introduces a division into two basic types of solidarity in society - "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity".

In societies of mechanical solidarity, the division of labor is very limited, societies consist of segments that are functionally the same, while kinship relations govern relations within and between segments. This way of life and work influence the creation of "collective consciousness" which is completely within the individual consciousness, so individuals blindly obey the opinion of the majority and live following traditional rules. Individuals, among themselves, have the same patterns of actions, emotions, and attitudes, so they do not form separate personalities. The legal system is aimed at retributive sanction, that is, at punishing those who violate collective rules. The goal of the regulatory system is to establish moral balance. Moral and legal responsibility falls on the entire collective, while social status is mostly hereditary.

In societies of organic solidarity, which appear with the emergence of civilization, a complex division of labor is developing. Different experiences and functions in society lead to the creation of different personalities. The connection between individuals is based on different and complementary functions they perform, so this type of solidarity is called organic, because, as in a living organism, where each organ performs a specific function, effective cooperation is necessary for survival in this type of society. Since each person has a different function, there is a development of morality that promotes individualism in society, but individualism in which each person develops their own specificity, to better develop themselves and thus give the greatest contribution to the common good. At the same time, with the development of individualism, there is a decline in the collective consciousness. Durkheim rejects the idea that selfishness and selfish individualism can be the basis for building any kind of solidarity and cohesion in society. In a society of organic solidarity, the legal system is focused on contract law and the restitutive sanction.

For Durkheim, the basis of social change and the increase of the division of labor does not lie in the aspiration of individuals to increase economic productivity and thus achieve a higher level of economic consumption, instead, the division of labor is a consequence of changes in socio-morphological structure. Due to the large natural increase of people, there is an increase in population and an increase in population density, and this represents an increase in the physical density of society. Increasing the physical density of society leads to increased competition in society, hence individuals are forced to specialize economically in order to survive. The increasing physical density of people further leads to an increase in moral density, because greater specialization in the division of labor requires higher levels of communication and interaction. If the division of labor does not lead to an increase in cooperation and communication in society, a pathological form of "anomic division of labor" occurs.

Durkheim states that every religion is presented as something sacred and untouchable, as something that is much more important than the individual, and gives moral rules of conduct and punishes if those rules are violated. However, what is really sacred and gives moral rules and sanctions, is society itself. Religion is thus only a symbolic expression of the sacralization of society itself.

Max Weber studied the normative order of society and the types of government that exist in different societies. The basic types of normative order are law and moral conventions (ethics). The law achieves the maintenance of the moral order by creating a special group of people who must enforce laws and sanction those who violate them. Moral conventions, on the other hand, are enforced diffusely because the whole society acts in such a way as to sanction those who violate moral rules. Individuals may view the moral order as legitimate or illegitimate. While power relations can be a product of circumstances, authority relations are never a product of chance because authority represents institutionalized relations of superiority and subordination, so they are always part of the established moral order.

Weber argued that sociology cannot determine what people ought to do; rather, it can only examine morality in terms of how it influences the actions and behavior of social actors.Weber showcased this approach when he studied how protestant morality differed from Chatolic morality in his book  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He wasn’t concerned with theological discussions, but on how this Protestantism influenced actual everyday moral actions of believers.  

William Graham Sumner argued that it was necessary to study social phenomena objectively and that sociology should be freed from the influence of metaphysics, psychology, but also any kind of moralization. In his book Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906), Sumner  gave a theoretical explanation of the origin, nature, and dynamics of these social and cultural patterns. Sumner starts from the evolutionary theory of human behavior and innate instincts. Through his animal ancestors, man inherited an instinctive ability to distinguish pain from pleasure, which enabled him to adopt, through trial and error, types of group behavior that gave a group a better chance of survival.

According to Sumner, the four main types of innate instincts or motives for human action are: hunger, sexual desire, vanity, and fear. These motives form the basis of specific "interests" that people, in their lives, try to satisfy. Society creates patterns that regulate the right ways to meet these interests. These right ways of satisfying interests are "folkways". Folkways or social „customs“ include all established patterns of behavior, from the way of spending free time, to the most important moral rules. Customs work in an unconscious habitual way and are strengthened, over time, by tradition, habits, and religious sanctions. Sumner calls the process of developing and establishing customs a "ritual." Because people believe in the wisdom and usefulness of customs, it allows them to perform a huge number of daily activities without rational thinking about the purpose of each individual action. Sumner believes that if individuals were forced to always make a rational judgment about every action, the psychological burden would be unbearable.

Different societies have different folkways of life, that is, different customs, rules, taboos, and conventions, so it is necessary to apply ethnographic research to determine specific customs for each particular society. Often people in a society are not even aware of all the customs in their society until they get to know societies that have different customs. Since social mores and customs are specific to each society, there is no absolute or universal morality. Social conventions also change over time in a particular society. Sumner believes that customs originate, develop, change, and die out, similar to living beings. Changes in social customs arise from an unconscious collective effort to adapt customs to changing circumstances and the interests of society.

             Classifications of Moral Systems

There have been many attempts to classify different moral systems into several basic types. Based on the internal logic in determining what makes actions morally right or wrong ethical systems are often divided into four types: deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and care ethics.  

Deontology evaluates actions according to duties, principles, and moral rules rather than their consequences. Its leading proponent, Immanuel Kant, the most famous proponent of deontology, argued that morality is based on reason and universal moral laws. His categorical imperative requires individuals to act only according to principles that could be accepted as universal laws and to treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means to an end. One of the most influential modern versions of deontological morality was devised by John Rawls.

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls takes inspiration from the political philosophers of the social contract tradition, especially Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, in order to develop his political philosophy. As the philosophers mentioned above, Rawls wanted to paint a picture of the best society for all people. To do so, he starts by proposing a fictional hypothetical scenario, kind of a “thought experiment”, in which hypothetical individuals start from what he called “the original position.” In that original position, individuals are rational actors who have to conjure the best society, but the challenge they face is that they are faced with “the veil of ignorance.” The veil of ignorance refers to the fact that those hypothetical individuals do not have any knowledge about their individual characteristics: ‘‘no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like’’ (Rawls 1971, p. 12). Rawls presupposes that people would use the method of  “reflective equilibrium”, that is, common agreement is to be achieved through rational deliberation and mutual adjustment, based on general moral principles, of which justice is the most important one. The goal is to create norms for the distribution of “primary goods” – rights, liberties, political and legal institutions, and wealth – that are created by social cooperation. Individuals participating in this thought experiment should create the “basic structure”  - the most important political, legal, and economic institutions – that will be responsible for the distribution of primary goods to all. Rawls argues that the only rational solution for the framing of the basic structure, that incorporates the conception of justice, is the one based on two principles – the “principle of liberty” and “principle of difference”. The principle of liberty states that everybody has the most extensive basic liberties, insofar as they don’t restrict similar liberties of others. Liberties afforded to all people would include: ‘‘political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law’’ (Rawls 1971, p. 61).  The principle of difference states that social and economic inequalities are permitted only to the extent that they are based on individual contributions that benefit all, in the conditions of equal opportunity for all to access every position or function in a society, otherwise, the system should redistribute primary goods in a way that would give the most benefits to the people with the least advantages. This system would guarantee the best outcomes (maximization of primary goods) for the ones who are in the worst position. Similarly, equality of opportunity goes beyond legal equality and necessitates equal access to education, training, and other resources. Rawls sees his approach to justice as “justice as fairness”, that is, the one that would lead to a true meritocracy.

Consequentialism, in contrast to deontology, judges the morality of actions by their outcomes. The best-known form, utilitarianism, maintains that an action is morally right if it produces the greatest overall happiness or well-being for the greatest number of people. Under this approach, the consequences of an action determine its moral value. The most influential proponents of utilitarianism are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Bentham’s utilitarianism was shaped by three defining ideas: the principle of the greatest happiness, universal egoism, and the artificial identification of someone’s interests. In the book On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill proposed what he called a very simple principle, which refers to the notion that the government cannot impose any restrictions on individual freedom and liberty apart from preventing someone from causing harm to others. This principle also states that the state has no right to introduce restrictions on an individual’s behavior to protect his moral or physical well-being. Mill wanted society and individuals to achieve moral progress, although not by coercion but through liberty, as freedom of speech and thought can bring about innovation, experiments, and new ideas and thus create new social forms, new forms of domestic life, and new types of economic organization. This would ensure that society overcomes mediocrity and stagnation. In that way, liberty ensures the greatest utility for everybody.   

Mill, in his book Utilitarianism(1863), made important modifications to Bentham’s utilitarianism. Mill argued that knowledge of the social and historical context that shaped some social institution is needed to judge the utility of that institution. Another alteration to the principle of utility concerns the possibility of distinguishing between higher and lower qualities of pleasure. As pleasure is the source of happiness and utility, we need to study both the quality and quantity of different pleasures to determine the greatest utility for an individual. Mill sees altruism, higher feelings, and intellect as some of the important sources of higher pleasure. While Bentham studied utility from the point of the individual, to regulate individual actions, Mill argued that the principle of utility should be used on the level of society, to shape its practices and institutions. Mill stated that utility shouldn’t replace conventional morality.  

Virtue ethics, rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle, shifts attention from actions to the moral character of the individual. Rather than asking what a person should do, it asks what kind of person one should become. It emphasizes the development of virtues, such as honesty, courage, and wisdom, that enable individuals to lead flourishing and ethically meaningful lives, especially in situations where strict rules or predictable outcomes provide limited guidance.

Finally, care ethics, developed by feminist philosophers including Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, emphasizes the importance of relationships, empathy, and responsibility toward others. Instead of focusing on universal rules or consequences, it views morality as arising from caring relationships and attentiveness to the needs of others, highlighting the ethical significance of compassion, interdependence, and human connection. In her book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan criticized theories of the stages of moral development of Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, as too male-oriented. Gilligan, instead, believes that women's gender identity develops through personal relationships, while men's gender identity develops through separation and autonomy. This way of developing oneself and identity affects the differences in morals between women and men. These differences are most pronounced in moments when there are moral dilemmas. Women develop ethics and morals focused on caring for others and maintaining personal relationships, while men develop ethics focused on justice and individual rights issues. Both ethical approaches are key to maintaining morality in society, as they form the basis for political and social change. Gilligan also believes that patriarchy, in addition to representing a hierarchical system, forces people to focus on heterosexual love relationships, and influences them to neglect other forms of human connection. She calls her approach to the relationship between gender identities and ethics "development of voice". She also studies topics of ethnicity and ethnic relations.

Pitirim Sorokin, in Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (1937-1941), studied the fluctuation of ethical systems. He believes that all organized groups have ethical values, but that only some cultures develop highly integrated ethical and philosophical systems. Although he notes that concrete practice may differ from prescribed moral values, Sorokin pays the greatest attention to the idealized form of moral values, and not to concrete practice. Sorokin identified three basic ethical systems: ideational, sensate, and idealistic. The ideational ethical system bases its principles on sacred religious sources and commandments; it is absolute and rigid and does not allow the relativization of values, and the purpose is not to increase sensual happiness but to ensure observance of sacred rules. A specific variant of ideational ethics is the ethics of love, which imposes infinite and unlimited love and sacrifice towards God, and the best examples are the ethics of Jesus and the ethics of St. Francis of Assisi.

The sensate ethical system strives to achieve the greatest possible sensual happiness, comfort, and satisfaction; the rules are relativistic and prone to change following the change of sensory conditions. Variants of this ethical system are: 1) eudemonistic ethics - values are nobler and more lasting; 2) hedonistic ethics - the greatest value is the maximization of sensory and sensual pleasures at all times; 3) utilitarian ethics - the emphasis is on the means to which happiness is achieved, so priority is given to the efficiency of methods of achieving happiness. Sensate ethical systems can be individualistic, striving only for individual happiness, or they can strive for collective happiness; while the collective itself can be a narrow group, the whole society, or the whole of humanity. The idealistic ethical system takes the main principles from religious and absolute authorities, while other, variable, rules are derived from reason and life experience.

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel created the so-called Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World. They classified all the countries from which they had empirical data on a chart with two dimensions: 1) traditional values - secular rational values and 2) values of self-preservation versus the values of self-realization. All countries are classified into nine major cultural fields: Confucian, European-Protestant, Catholic-European, Orthodox, Islamic, African, Latin American, South Asian, and English-speaking. 

In Habits of the Heart (1996), Robert Bellah and his colleagues drew on historical sources and qualitative interviews to examine the moral landscape of contemporary American society. They identified four overlapping moral traditions present in the US: expressive individualism, utilitarian individualism, civic republicanism, and the biblical tradition. Rather than analyzing morality in terms of abstract norms or values, the authors focused on influential historical figures and the moral narratives through which individuals interpret their lives and society.

Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, in On Justification: The Economies of Worth (1991), introduce a pluralist framework that analyzes how individuals justify their actions by referring to different standards of worth. The authors identify six models of justice, or “polities,” to analyze how people negotiate disputes about fairness. Six polities and their main proponents are distinguished: the domestic polity (Bossuet), the inspired polity (St. Augustine), the polity of fame (Hobbes), the civic polity (Rousseau), the market polity (Adam Smith), and the industrial polity (Saint-Simon).

                 Later Research on Morality

Bauman studies morality by analyzing Nazi crimes in his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). He wants to understand the causes of the Holocaust, but also the meaning that the Holocaust has for the social sciences. Bauman believes that sociologists have not dealt enough with the Holocaust and that they have generally viewed it as the only exception in civilized modern society. Bauman, on the other hand, believes that it is precisely the specific characteristics of modern society, in general, that have made the Holocaust possible. Modern technology and bureaucracy have enabled the Holocaust to be carried out quickly and efficiently, and, on the other hand, technology and bureaucracy have enabled individuals to renounce their own moral responsibility for crimes. The racist ideology and the centralized German state, which destroyed civil society and trade unions, freed up space for unfettered genocide. Bauman believes that it is necessary, in order to defeat evil in society, for people to choose moral duty instead of rationalization and self-interest when they are faced with a choice between evil and good.

Bauman also challenged Émile Durkheim’s view that morality is primarily a product of society. He argued that if morality simply means obeying social rules and authority, then those who carried out the Holocaust by following orders could be considered moral, while those who rescued Jews would appear immoral because they defied social expectations. Bauman rejected this conclusion, arguing that genuine morality does not arise from conformity to social norms but from an ethical responsibility to other human beings. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, he maintained that individuals have a pre-social moral obligation to care for and respond to the needs of the Other. According to Bauman, society—particularly under totalitarian regimes—can suppress rather than promote morality by encouraging obedience over ethical responsibility. True moral action, therefore, often requires resisting unjust social norms and authority in order to uphold fundamental human values.

In Morals and Markets (1979), Vivien Zelizer examines changes in approaches to life insurance in order to explore changes in understanding the role of family members. While in the 18th century, families that were left without a father were taken care of by the wider family and neighbors, at the end of the 19th century there was a transformation from a "gift" economy to a market economy. In the market economy, a social expectation has been established that a father, that is, a man, should protect his family even after death. To achieve that, the practice of paying for life insurance spread, so the practice of life insurance, from immoral economic behavior, became responsible behavior towards the rest of the family.

Steven Lukes, in Individualism (1973), explores how the concept of “individualism” has been understood across different national traditions and intellectual contexts, breaking it down into its core ideas and doctrines. He argues that, in its contemporary form, individualism serves a harmful ideological function: it presents a seemingly unified but actually constructed set of ideas that is used to claim that redistributive policies are impractical or undesirable, and to deny the possibility of alternatives to a market-based system. Lukes has also, in his books and articles, explored topics such as rationality, moral philosophy, and the sociology of morality, political and social theory, the relationship between Marxism and ethics, the category of the person, and the history of ideas.

In the book Moral Dimension (1988), Amitai Etzioni studied the motives of individuals that influence their social behavior. The behavior of individuals is guided by two key types of motives: achieving happiness and fulfilling a moral duty. The relationship between these two motives is changing from society to society, as well as throughout history, so social theory must understand the dynamics of forces that affect these two forms of motivation.

In “Thick Concepts and the Moral Brain” (2011), Gabriel Abend distinguishes between thin and thick conceptions of morality. Thin morality focuses on evaluating the rightness or wrongness of specific actions in particular situations, emphasizing judgments about permissibility, good and evil, or appropriate behavior. Thick morality, by contrast, takes a broader perspective by examining moral identities, character, and social practices over time. It considers how moral values are embedded in institutions such as education and the marketplace and includes a wider range of virtues and vices, such as dignity, hospitality, exploitation, fanaticism, and piety. In essence, thin morality asks what one should do, while thick morality asks what kind of person or society one should strive to become.

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