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This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience-or that they expect others to perceive- as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity.
After several decades outside the limelight of sociological theorizing, moral action is back at the center of attention. This reflects a broader swinging back of the theoretical pendulum. If "toolkit" and "repertoire" theories of action went beyond the sociology of norms and values that once dominated the intellectual landscape (e.g., Lamont 2000; Swidler 1986; see also Silber 2003), the new sociology of morality attempts to return sociology to the deeper existential meanings that people give their actions, to the question of "the moral" (e.g., Abend 2008, 2010; Hitlin and Vaisey 2010; Smith 2003).
While this focus makes the sociology of morality a potentially valuable enterprise, there is a problem: the conceptual position taken by most sociologists of culture who deal with morality precludes any meaningful comparison between cases. As most cultural accounts of morality lean toward agnosticism and description, assuming (at least methodologically) that we should not start with our own definition of the moral, sociologists usually end up being only able to provide specific and situated descriptions of what their interlocutors term "moral" or "good" (see also Abend 2008).
But this descriptive position is limited. Although it may be philosophically prudent, it precludes any attempt to arrive at comparative or general statements about processes, mechanisms, or aspects of moral action. The most that a descriptiverelativist sociology of morality can provide us with is genealogy, comparing cases that already share the specific category of "the moral." Otherwise, as I argue in more detail below,...