Drug Abuse

CHAPTER 4 Analytic and Empirical Approaches to the Study of Morality

WE TURN NOW MORE SYSTEMATICALLY TO THE question of what is variously meant by the term "morality." Two complementary strategies will be used.

The first strategy is the identification and description of the substance of common-sense theorizing. We look at what people describe as "moral," attempt to analyze the processes of choice and rejection, and focus observations upon what is done once behavior is so characterized. The observer can never look simply at the behavior to find its moral character revealed. Cheating, lying, stealing, adultery, and even premeditated murder are conditionally and situationally identified and approved. Honesty, fidelity, and virtue are situationally disapproved. Though we must look at the context in order to understand when and why morals are invoked, this is specifically contrary to common-sense theorizing and usage of the term. Morals come down as categorical directives, not infinitely qualified guidelines. Yet, when the very rich steal money, it can not be handled with the same "moral" force as when the poor steal, partly because it makes less "sense." It is this "making sense of" action that provides behavior with its moral or immoral categorization, not the pilfering of the till. (I have already emphasized that it is the "making sense" of heroin, use that made it moral in 1900 but immoral in 1969.) History and logic reveal that there is nothing intrinsically moral or immoral about injecting an opiate into the human body. Yet, many have come to believe that there is, and this problem has been one of the primary concerns of the other nine chapters.

A second strategy involves the observer in the task of separating the foundation of common-sense theorizing about morality from the internal logic or process of that theorizing.

One of the enduring credits of Parsons' work for social science research has been the greater recognition of the necessity of clearly specifying the unit of analysis. After Parsons and others, the analytic unit in the behavioral sciences could be: (1) the individual [personality system]; (2) the community or group [social system]; or (3) the larger culture [cultural system].1

The approach to the study of any problem will vary in relation to which of these three units is the intended subject. This is demonstrably true with the study of"morality," where there are three correspondingly different levels of moral issues that might be investigated. It is imperative that they be kept separate in order to avoid conceptual confusion.

The first level focuses upon the individual. In reference to morality, the subject matter pertains to how the individual manages a set of principles of behavior. The psychologist of personality might investigate the consequences of the management problem for psychic integration or disintegration. Even though he may take into account the external pressures from the social system to conform, the psychologist's focus is upon the personality as a unit. The pacifist or conscientious objector in a community that supports war and institutionalized killing faces at least the internal mor.nl crisis that results from introspection about the meaning of his own behavior in that community. To be sure, there are consequences to his actions that may be viewed by a sociologist as social or communal in nature. If, for example, he burns his draft card or his country's flag, the symbolic gesture may enrage his fellows to the point where they impose severe sanctions. Or, from an anthropological perspective, an observer might raise the question as to why reports of the symbolic gesture enrages a community more than reports of actual human slaughter. (The same men who become emotionally upset at the sight of long hair on males may sit passively at the evening television news reports that "hundreds were killed this week in bombing raids." Whether the bomber was crew-cut or longhaired takes on greater "moral" proportions than his bomb dropping.) However, if it is kept firmly in mind that the unit of analysis is the individual, then the problem does not get twisted into issues that are primarily communal or cultural. Where no reference point of social or cultural values is introduced, the individual's morality concerns the relationships between his own behavior and his beliefs. One difficulty, of course, is that we typically avoid saying that an individual is behaving "morally" when his principles are contrary to our own. We can applaud as a moral man the German of 1938 who stood firmly agairct the National Socialists. He is said to be "true to his principles, possessed of integrity," and so on. But we have difficulty applauding the contemporary Nazi who "stands up for his beliefs" in a hostile community. Men typically shift the level of their moral perspective to coincide with their own principles. That is, when someone behaves contrary to a community in a manner that we approve, we say that he has integrity and is moral. However, when his principles differ from our own, we usually shift ground and talk about a higher or communal morality which transcends that of individuals, and sharply criticize the individual who holds to "his own principles". In common-sense theorizing, at one point in time it is whether a man is true to his "own"2 beliefs that makes him "moral," while at another it is the degree to which he subscribes to "transcendent" values that makes him "moral." For the observer, confusion is eliminated by keeping the units distinct and separate.

In the following statement by an American draft card burner, there is a clear illustration of the difficulties of viewing individual action in terms of principles that may be seen either as (1) his "own,"3 (2) transcendent cultural principles, or perhaps (3) a coalescence of the two. In any case, the subject below is quite aware that his actions may offend the current community moral views.

Those of us who join today in burning our draft cards will be called traitors by some, Communists by others, and "misguided" by almost everyone, including those good friends of ours in the liberal community who agree with our opposition to the war in Vietnam. Yet I hope that some small part of what motivates us may be communicated to our fellow citizens, even in this time of tragedy and of war hysteria.

And what I most want to communicate is that by burning my draft card I am trying to live by the values this nation has taught me. I am trying in the clearest way I can see, to act as a responsible American citizen, true to the deepest and best traditions of this nation of which I am so deeply a part.

Here is the clear act of invoking "the larger or cultural morality" to counter charges that the act of burning the draft card is immoral, because people in the "local" community invoke a provincial communal morality. He begins his case by identifying his actions with "the deepest and best traditions of this nation."

My act is not directed against the American people but against the present Administration. It is the government which would subvert our traditions. As an American citizen I have no choice but to express my opposition to that government. If I failed to do so then I should have failed my duty as a citizen.

He now shifts the grounds of moral judgment to the level of the individual as the unit actor, and asserts that the only moral action for the individual is that which is consistent with the individual's own beliefs.

The present government has openly violated the Charter of the United Nations both in Vietnam and in the Dominican Republic. It has openly, repeatedly, and flagrantly violated the Geneva Accords by its actions in Vietnam. It has openly and ruthlessly violated solemn international treaties with the states of Latin America by its military intervention in the Dominican Republic. There is no responsible man today in the American government who would not admit, in private, the truth of these charges, no matter how strongly he might deny them in public. Our only defense is that our national interests were involved. Such a defense carries us back to the law of the jungle, moving us away from a responsible world community.

The present government has repeatedly distorted the facts about Vietnam in its statements to the American people. The present government violates the values of compassion and decency by its barbaric military campaigns against the civilian population in Vietnam.

As a child in church and in public school I was taught that torture is wrong, that lying is wrong, that wanton violence is wrong. I was taught that aggression is wrong. I was taught that Germans committed a sin by bombing the open city of Rotterdam early in World War II. I believed what I was taught. I believe that I learned values that have merit and by which I seek to live. What can I do now about a government that condones torture, engages in lying, is proud of its violence and is without any trace of remorse for its aggression? As an American I must oppose that government even if it is my own. President Johnson has destroyed solemn treaties. In response I destroy this visible link with this government—my draft card. And by this response I say that the government in Washington which orders the dropping of napalm on villages in South Vietnam is now my enemy, and the enemy also of every American who has not forgotten the religious and moral values he was taught as a child.

Here is the invocation of "transcendant morality" again, combined now with the consistency of individual belief and action. The outcome is termed "moral action" on two grounds. First, the individual is being true to what he believes. Second, he is acting in accord with those cultural values he was taught "as a child in church and in public school."

Second, I act because the values I was taught are not merely American values, but universal values, valid for all times and places. If I condemn the Communists for their murderous actions in Hungary in 1956—and I did condemn them for that act—can I exempt my own government for its even more wanton actions in Vietnam? If I applaud those German troops who refused to obey the orders of Hitler to fire upon civilians, can I do less than to appplaud those American pilots who increasingly doubt that it is right to carry out orders to bomb villages which contain only civilians?

More than simply resting his case on the transcendency of cultural values in Western Civilizations, however, he now sees an identity of his beliefs and universals. It is no longer a matter of simply being consistent in belief and action, it is simultaneously a direct responsiveness to timeless morality.

The blind and foolish men cry "my country right or wrong" and mistake that cry for patriotism. But such men do America a great injustice. Patriotism is not measured by blind loyalty to the State, but by determined loyalty to values that transcend even the State. America was not built by conformists—by men of the timid heart, like T. Edgar Hoover, who see treason in dissent, and who secretly fear the turbulence of freedom and the workings of democracy. These were not the men who rebelled against English rule. Our freedom was created for us by men with the courage to dissent, to rebel, to act as individuals. Not a single one of our freedoms was won by conformity to the will of the majority or by loyalty to the State. Every freedom we have—religious freedom, political freedom, the freedom to speak and to write and to assemble—was a freedom won by solitary men or small groups of men who risked their own comfort and in some cases their own lives to oppose the majority when they felt the majority was wrong, or to oppose the State when they felt the State was wrong.

It is to keep faith with these men who won our freedom that I burn my card. We are not the traitors. The traitors are those who preached peace, who were elected on a platform of peace, and who then made war. They are the ones who weaken the democratic process by making a mockery of it. They are the ones who would cruelly waste American lives and Vietnamese lives solely in order to save face, and to avoid admitting their Asian policy was wrong to begin with. In the years to come, long after American troops have been withdrawn from Vietnam and long after the current hysteria has died away, historians will wonder why the American people allowed Johnson to remain in office so long without impeaching him. They will wonder why the Senators and Congressmen were silent when the Pres_lent was so clearly wrong, both morally and politically. And, in that day to come, the honor of America in these sad hours will not prove to have been defended by the J. Edgar Hoovers or the William Buckleys in our midst. The honor of America will rest upon those of us who resisted what was evil in order that our own sense of justice could sun :ve, and in order that our nation would not be entirely dishonore4, by silence. It is a sad thing that a man must risk his freedom in order to defend it, and I wish I did not feel the risk was necessary. But, in taking this risk, I do so not as a brave man, which I am not, but as an American who knows that he can only keep faith with his county} by keeping faith with himself.

Therefore we stand firm in our resistance to this government in order to be loyal both to those moral and religious values which transcend all national boundaries, and loyal also to this culture, this nation of peoples, this vast land, America 4

Americans who read this statement will disagree among themselves as to whether the writer's action is moral or not and their disagreement will only in moderate degrees reflect the extent of their support of the United States role in the Vietnam war. The disagreement about the war is to be understood in terms of the different political commitments, but the disagreement as to whether the writer acted morally is a consequence of confused and inconsistent usage of the concept of morality. A close examination of the statement reveals that the author conceives of his action as an individual statement of sympathy with what he terms the larger and enduring values of his country. (He is very aware that his action will violate the contemporary community's view of moral actions. Indeed he elects to perform his dramatic deed in order to dramatize the difference between his views and the community's.)

At the individual level of action in terms of beliefs, the actor must be described as moral. His violation of the contemporary consensus of moral action means that at the community level, his critics can accuse him of immorality. These first two levels are rather easy to address empirically. However, the cultural level is more the subject of debate. In the above example, both the individual and his community claim to be in sympathy with the cultural values. It is not the purpose here to resolve that issue, but rather to point out the sources of confusion over the charge of "immorality" and to illustrate that the characterization of moral action can be tapped empirically so long as the empirical referents said to reflect moral action are kept distinct.

When the question is asked, "Is it moral action?" a reasonable answer cannot be given unless or until the question itself is clarified; moral vis-à-vis what behavioral referents said to reflect the action?
If the question is intended to get at whether or not the individual subscribes to the existing community morality, a quite different answer can be expected than if it concerns only the principles of the individual. Consenting adult homosexuals in the United States may clearly subscribe to all of their own principles of moral conduct, yet be treated as immoral in a community of heterosexuals.

At the first level, an investigation of individual morality might focus upon psychological issues of how the personality copes with some degree of disjunction between the morality of the self and the morality of the community.

The second level moral question to be investigated by behavioral science concerns the community (or social system) moral order. Communities are held together partly by pressures external to actors, partly by a set of beliefs held in common. Sociologists and anthropologists are generally agreed that a sharing of values and beliefs are important elements in the maintenance of community. What disagreement there is revolves around the minimal conditions and the manner of sharing. Even those societies which Durkheim describes as "functionally interdependent" because of well-developed specialization are bound by common orientations towards the world of (specialized) objects.' As every social philosopher and theoritician of social order has noted in some form, men grow up in communities learning what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior, then become emotionally committed to those things considered most appropriate.

Introductory textbooks in sociology often go back to the writing of William Grahm Sumner for a description of mores and folkways. For Sumner mores are rules about which community members feel strongly enough to punish severely their violators. Folkways, on the other hand, are simply customs that are enforced, but are not "moral in their implications." Presumably, the empirical test or criterion of how strongly people feel in a given area is the degree to which they are willing to impose punishments. The matter of social system morality quickly gets translated into the behavior of men in the community toward various public or publicly known violations of community rules. There is no need to remain abstract in a discussion of morality. More clearly than in many areas of sociological discourse, the theoretical statement of the concept is directly tied to the empirical issue.

The third and final level of an analytic approach to the study of morality is wholistic. The primary concern is not how the community sanctions and maintains its own moral order. Instead, the focus is upon those elements that permeate a whole culture and to which members generally subscribe in order to persist in that culture.

Here the meaning of morals comes very close to the meaning of values, and if isolated empirically it must be done in the saine manner. It is a primary value of an egalitarian democratic culture to state that one man should not be born to a fixed higher social position (such as nobleman) than any other man. That is more than a communal statement of appropriate behavior, though it can also be regarded as a moral directive. The wholistic analytic approach to the study of morality asks "cultural" questions. For example, how the France of 1785 was to survive as a culture was an issue which brought forth moral questions greater than those relevant to single French communities.' The political issue of a monarchy versus a republic was intertwined with other issues. Should men be treated equally before the state? Should reason dictate the administration of justice, or should unquestioned faith in royal or ecclesiastical judgment be the basis? These are the larger cultural issues. Men find themselves collectively invested on one side or the other. Those victimized by a violation of the collectively seen good have recourse in the greater society. Such issues even concern the question of knowing and of coming to truth by culturally prescribed paths. McHugh and Platt have insightfully set forth some of the consequences of this approach in another context.'

This work is concerned neither with transcendant cultural morality nor with the moral issues relating to individual personality. The two are discussed here to emphatically distinguish them from and contrast them with social system issues (the moral order), the primary analytic units throughout. Because the tern "morality" means so many different things to different people, it is fruitful to elaborate what will not be meant by the term as well as what will be meant. "Morality" will not mean individual management of one's own principles of behavior, nor will it mean a set of transcendent directives from a cultural ethos. Rather, the analytic approach will focus upon the communal sanctions by those representing, often by fiat, "the community."

An Empirical Basis for Discussion of Morality

The elementary question in this chapter concerns ways in which the concept of morality can be grasped empirically. In the first chapter, one was simply urged to accept on faith that certain aspects of life take on moral character while others do not. The assertion was made that drug use in the United States in the middle twentieth century is one of those moral areas. Up to this point however, the empirical basis for that assertion has not been firmly established. The focus now turns to this empirical problem.

Partial and Total Identities

An elementary license for membership in a group of men is the presented evidence of cobelief in certain ideas of appropriateness in behavior that are moral in their character. The question arises as to why certain kinds of issues achieve a moral status, while others are simply customs of preferred behavior.

All societies have an order of command, whether based on age or sex, whether traditional caste system or open class system, whether highly individualistic and competitive or relatively cooperative. Here is one example of how sociologists have theorized that certain issues might have achieved moral status: Those on the top of any social order usually have a strongly vested interest in maintaining themselves there. If they are to remain on top, they must convince others in that social system that things ought to be that way. Bendix makes this point in discussing managerial ideologies.8 The men who govern must do so by "right." Any issue which is believed to possibly alter the "right" to be on top is a likely candidate as a moral issue in which men have strong commitments. Theft and murder become primary moral issues in most societies, especially where theft attains a scale to alter the stratified order of men.

The empirical question for the observer of moral order concerns the procedures of how that moral order is invoked and maintained. Variously placed individuals and groups in a community may act either to allow or disallow full membership, rights, and privileges to members of their community. In this there is a continuum from complete acceptance to almost complete rejection. For example, in feudal times, the serfs were largely excluded from participation in the political life. Until the twentieth century, women were also excluded from direct political participation in Western civilization. One could go on enumerating hundreds of examples of how communities through various representatives and interest groups have chosen to include or exclude a portion of their population from certain areas of life, with illustrations ranging as far back as slavery in Aristotle's Greece to slavery in nineteenth-century America to voting rights in contemporary America and South Africa.

There are cases whereby individuals are categorized in a totally dichotomous way through a procedure which grants or denies membership in the community. There are kinds of specific behaviors that strategic members of a community regard as thoroughly indicative of the person. A person who exhibits this presumably obvious special kind of behavior (immoral, in this instance) is identified in a complete sense through a particular label; thus generating total identity. The idea of a total identity is not to be confused with the concept of stereotype, nor with prejudice. The man who has the stereotype that "Germans are scientific and militaristic" can still conceive of a German in many other partial terms that have nothing to do with militarism or rational empiricism. While for such a stereotype-holder, Germans may never be able to evade that particular prejudgment about their personalities and characteristics, the very specificity of the categories means that other things about Germans may be held open to question.

Everett Hughes' "master and subordinate statuses" is another way of looking at the problem raised here concerning two different ways of identifying people for moral j udgment.9 Becker has developed Hughes' notions in the area of deviance in much the same way as "total and partial identities" are used here:

Some statuses, in our society as in others, override all other statuses and have a certain priority. Race is one of these. Membership in the Negro race, as socially defined, will override most other status considerations in most other situations; the fact that one is a physician or middle-class or female will not protect one from being treated as a Negro first and any of these other things second. The status of deviant (depending upon the kind of deviance) is this kind of master status. t o

Stereotypes exist for both totally and partially identified persons, and the saine is true for prejudices. One may be highly prejudiced against females as drivers of automobiles, but this partial identification of the character of women may not spill over into other areas of competence or incompetence. The same party who thus feels strongly about women drivers may not be surprised by the fact that a woman could be a nuclear physicist of great competence, a cellist, or even a motorcyclist. In most areas of life, even where there are strong prejudices and stereotypes, men deal routinely with partial characterizations of other men.

There are few characterizations of men that are total. Those that are tend to be in moral areas.

The person designated as deviant in society may be considered deviant in only one way, but the community reaction to him can be total. For example a pregnant high-school senior may be quite capable of finishing her studies successfully before graduation, but the total response, stigma, and ridicule may lead her to take leave; a homosexual may be as competent as the next person in the government bureaucracy and similar in every other way except for his sexual appetite, but may be treated as though he is totally different."

This matter of one's total identity as morally good or evil has been viewed as having roots in a specific strain of Western thought, and more particularly, in the northern Protestant conception of the evil and immoral. Ranulf and Weber are among the many observers who have noted that Roman Catholicism has a more wholistic integrated view of "good and evil" in human action.12 The Roman Church has always acknowledged both the attainment of virtue and the existence of evil and sin in all men. Perhaps the essence of the problem is demonstrated in the manner in which the southern Catholic countries view forgiveness of sins. Quite the opposite, the Lutheran and Calvinistic strains make no allowances for sin and are thus "religious doctrines without forgiveness."13

It is commonly acknowledged that contemporary society is secular, but this has blinded social science to empirical investigation of present conditions through study of the nonsecular roots and the powerful centrifugal force of the sacred traditions of the very recent past. The empirical issue is that one need not be a practicing Protestant, believer, or even a churchgoer to have a world-view of the moral order that is a reflection of the Calvinist-Lutheran views. Men in Protestant nations are said to see men as either "good, upstanding, righteous" members of the normal community, or as "bad, evil, and immoral." Such men will typically ridicule the Catholic confessional as a futile exercise in momentary purgation, or at its worse, ephemeral truth overladen with a few layers of hypocricy.

The argument continues that the "deviant" in Protestant nations is viewed in ternis of his total evil or total deviance, and it follows that such a strong moralistic conception of the deviant seeks total condemnation and total punishment. It is simply incidental that such nations also desire total rehabilitation, since the essential problem is that this very conception of the deviant in total moralistic terms precludes even partial rehabilitation.

It is this total response to the deviant, be that a pregnant high-school senior or a drug addict, which sets him apart from his fellow-man. It is the total reaction of "normal men" in society which isolates the deviant for such gross and all-encompassing treatment, as though every aspect of his person were infused with the germ of his specific deviancy. Treating deviants as though they were wholly deviant (although in fact the deviance is quite specific) often results in the creation of some very real differences. Becker has this to say about the circle of labeling a deviant:

Treating a person as though he were generally rather than specifically deviant produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sets in motion several mechanisms which conspire to shape the person in the image people have of him. In the first place, one tends to be cut off, after being identified as a deviant, from participation in more conventional groups, even though the specific consequences of the particular deviant activity might never of themselves have caused the isolation had there not also been the public knowledge and reaction to it.14

The task for the analytic observer of attributions of deviance is to study the conditions under which the imputations of a total identity arise, and once imputed, the conditions under which the moral deviant can be reinstated to normal status in the society.

For the heroin addict, as with others who are accused of moral deviance, the achievement of the status of deviant requires more than a simple assertion by one or several people in the community. It requires first that publicly constituted authorities so characterize him or, that people believe he has been so characterized. Once the designation is public, the individual becomes the subject of a total characterization, and is from that point forward eligible to be treated as a single and total identity. The essential ingredient of the total identification is that, with a single attribute, members of the "normal" community know literally "all that they need to know" about the deviant in order to respond to him appropriately.

The female publicly "known" in the community to be a prostitute is known to that community as a totally identified person. She is known as a prostitute, and that characterization is sufficient for all purposes of how to think about and how to treat her. There is nothing of social consequence in the fact one is a prostitute, it is all in the fact that one has the reputation among ones fellows in the community that calls for moral judgment and differential treatment. There is nothing in actually being a heroin or morphine addict that evokes the total identity and the moral response, since there are many who are addicts but who go undetected. To use a more dramatic illustration, the quality of being a murderer is not what produces the moral response, since many innocent men have been hanged and guilty ones have gone to their graves unpunished by their community. For all categories of moral deviance the essential ingredient is the public characterization of the deviance, which carries with it the ultimate sanctions of the community of co-believers.

As Garfinkel has pointed out, any theoretical problem can be fully traced in its implications by restating its basic postulates in terms of the procedures by which the theorized state of affairs came about.l s The issue is what must be done to an individual in order for the community to respond to him as though he is totally and completely a deviant, or in this instance, a heroin addict. As has been suggested, it is important that law enforcement officials publicly designate him. Once publicly stigmatized, there is no way that the moral deviant can reenter the category of normality insofar as the home or knowledgeable community is concerned. The significance of this for the futility of rehabilitation attempts will become apparent when the focus shifts to that problem.

On the question of partial versus total identity, the degree of permanence to the stigma is an important matter in determining the strength of the moral interpretation. Indeed, this can be one of the empirical measures of the degree of moral judgment in a given issue. For how long is the stigma attached? For how long is the effective treatment of the offender moralistic? The political scene in the United States provides an example of transitory moralistic treatment. So long as the individual takes a political position at the extreme of his community, he is treated by them as though he were a moral deviant.

However the stigma of moral deviancy in political immorality is not indelible. Those charged with being politically immoral can reenter the community of co-believers simply by renouncing an errant past to the welcoming community. There are countless cases at Berkeley of old-line Trotskyites who have moved to the suburbs of America in every sense. What is of significance here is that having made the move, they are welcomed. Political converts are legion and acceptable. Ronald Reagan could have been a liberal Democrat, but the Right can now vote for him. Russia and China welcome American defectors who have "discovered the errors of their ways," just as Americans welcome Russian and Chinese defectors who "flee an errant past." And if the Berkeley hills have their share of ex-Trotskyites, the Vietnam Day Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society have had more than their share of defectors from the well built-in middle class of American society.

The politically immoral outside of the community of co-believers have a total identity, but that identity lacks complete permanence in that the co-believers conceive that conversion is possible. The total character of the identity is documented by the fact that the politically immoral person is seen as so fully infused by his deviance that "one could not consider seriously having him for a friend." Further, one is dismayed by the discovery that a person for whom one previously had great respect is discovered to be on the other side of the political fence, and the respect for the person is thereby diminished considerably, if not completely. This is the pain of the ardent music lover with contrary strong political convictions who discovers that Gieseking played for Hitler or that Shostakovitch composed for Stalin; it is the pain of the suburban housewife because Dr. Spock wants her country to get out of Vietnam; or the pain of the segregationist Southerners who loved On the Waterfront seeing Brando march with the black voter registrants.

If you are a young radical, and you have previously honored a great artist, you are pained by the sudden information that this artist is at politically opposite extremes from you. This is the problem of total identity, the problem that men infuse other men with total qualities that permeate their whole existence, even their music or their expertise on specifics of "no relevance" to the issue.

Some women who revered Dr. Spock for his sane child-rearing advice have written venomous letters to him when they found that his political ideology was different from their own. Some said that they would never take his advice again. Young pianists who respected Gieseking the artist have smashed his records when they came to know that his political position was suspiciously close to a position antithetical to their own. But to repeat, conversion is possible in political communities. One can return to the community of co-believers simply by asserting that the old belief was wrong and that one is willing to accept the terms of the true belief. In this, political immorality and political conversion to a system of beliefs have precise parallels with religious immorality and religious conversion.

The avenue is always open for the Christian to accept the Moslem, the Hindu or the atheist, if he will only renounce his past and join the community of believers. Every major religion provides for the conversion to the faith, and the most religious people are among the most willing to accept the newcomer. The nonbeliever or heretic is totally infused with an identity however, just like the political nonbeliever. In a sacred society, Torquemada could burn the heretics. That action attests to the total quality of the imputation about character. But even in a secular society, the faithful hold the heretic suspect in a manner that transcends a partial identification. The total identification is seen in the necessity of the faithful to completely revise his estimation of the other person once he finds out that the other is, say, an atheist. This is especially true when there has been the possibility of a beginning friendship between two persons. They may find that they are compatible in many areas, on many issues; that they have similar interests in athletics, literature, and music. When the religious question comes up, they may discover an "irreparable" gap. The irreparability of the gap is a direct consequence of the belief that the religious difference between them can not be compartmentalized, but that it informs one of several other aspects of the totally infused person.

In both the political and religious areas then, the nonbelieving deviant becomes a moral deviant to the extent that his identity as deviant is believed to be total. However, because conversion to the community of the normal and moral is possible, because men can move back and forth between the communities, the political or religious deviant is not as intensely responded to as the _finally immoral man. The final measure of total identity is when the violation of a community's moral dictation has as its result a cutting off of the pathway back to the "normal and moral" community. Along a continuum of ways and methods of assessing the degree of moral strength and sanction, this is the most significant indicator.

With those moral outsiders who simply believe differently (the political and religious are two examples just cited), the community can choose to treat the deviance as something which the individual can himself control, and thereby can reenter the community. Even though heretics are burned and political enemies are bombed, the community retains the hope or the ideal that the violence may be corrective. For those men who believe that homosexuality is (i) immoral, (2) totally identifying, and (3) nonconvertible, the violence against the homosexual has an entirely different meaning. Psychologists and psychiatrists suggest that the gangs of roving Marines who go out on the streets to "beat up on homosexuals" do so more to reaffirm their own identities as men than to correct the ways of their victims, whom they find to be irretrievably lost. The addict, the prostitute, the bank-robber, the murderer; all are stained permanently as total identities in the minds of their fellowmen. We may suspend for the time the question of how the community comes to conclude that one among them belongs in such a moral category. Once so categorized, the individual's movement out of that category is hardly possible insofar as that community is concerned. Indeed, having a record of imprisonment (for most offenses) that is known to the community is sufficient to permanently stigmatize the individual as a moral deviant. Because his reentry into the community is precluded, the whole idea of rehabilitation from prisons is open to the most serious of questions. Rehabilitation or reentry into the normal community is possible only when that community does not know of the history of moral deviance. However because of the strongly believed security risks that a community takes when it receives an exconvict (a totally identified man), all communities force that history out of the exconvict when he seeks to gain a livelihood by almost any kind of employment. Thus we insist upon calling for the very information which makes rehabilitation or a normal return to the community impossible. As will be seen in a later chapter, the high rate of recidivism among addicts is explained as much by this consideration as by the psychological proclivity to deviance or the power that habituation to drugs has over the individual. Unless we are willing to impute a similar proclivity to return to prostitution, bank-robbing, and check-forging based upon psychological habituation, we must be willing to hold as problematic this charge about the addict.

Empirical Approaches of the Study of Morality

The primary concern of this work is with the second level of analysis of moral issues, that which concerns the sanctioning of men in a community. The empirical boundaries for the study of the problem may therefore be delineated in a manner that is more than arbitrary.
Following Garfinkel, a good place to begin the study of sanctions is with those whose task it is to construct or alter the rules or laws. In a very timely piece of research, Blum and Funkhouser have studied the attitudes of members of the California State Legislature on the drug problem in that state.' 16

The expressions of the lawmakers are informative of the kind and degree of moral interpretation of narcotics use that has been outlined to this point. The largest single group of legislators were in favor of confinement and punishment for the handling of the drug problem. Although many expressed their own personal firm convictions that this was the best way to deal with the narcotics traffic and narcotics users, the most frequent argument used was that the public demanded this. Thus, the legislators usually responded as though they were passive public servants, bending to the wishes of the electorate. It was noted that the strongest and the only effective lobbying was done by those forces who wanted stiffer laws and more punishment.

The more liberal drug bills were consistently opposed by the liquor industry lobby, the police, and church and temperance groups—strange bed-fellows.

Legislators saw as supporters of the treatment-no-penalty approach the Friends (Quakers), American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, California Democratic Council, and the social welfare people. ... Wryly noting that "the addict has no friends," some observed that not only were the anti-treatment forces much stronger than the pro-treatment ones, but that the latter—for example, the civil liberties groups—were themselves under fire for their "subversive" activities or were decried for their attempts to "break down law enforcement in the state."17

Almost every state in the union has passed very strong legislation supplementing or even extending the penalties of the federal narcotics legislation, and California's legislature can be viewed as rather typical on this issue. If there is any difference, it is in the direction of the more liberal and permissive. It has led the movement to separate therapeutic-penal institutions for addicts. Nonetheless, the legal system at its very source is strongly committed to the harshest sanction that it can impose upon the addict, the felony. The fact that the state Supreme Court ruled in the early 196os that being an addict is not a felony is almost irrelevant for the treatment of the addict. The law enforcement agents need only to establish possession of the drug for felony convictions. If one is an addict, he will possess within fourteen to sixteen hours, and the police need only keep an eye on him for the arrest.

An empirical approach to the study of morality must take account of how the community behaves toward the immoral member through sanctions. A look at the legislative operation is not sufficient for these purposes. Rather, it is an informative point of departure, in that men in the community obtain validation for their treatment of the immoral from the public and official arena. When the lawmakers then use the public pulse as the incentive (or at least for the rhetoric of incentive) for strong punitive action, a circularity is achieved from which the moral deviant has no escape. The community's ultimate rationale against heroin or marijuana consumption has been that it is a felony, while the lawmaker's ultimate rationale for strong felonious law has been the public sentiment. What indeed is the public sentiment? What is the reaction of the community to the moral deviant in behavioral terms? Despite the fact that there is no single uniform reaction, it is possible to observe typical ways of responding to the moral deviant, especially in the vital areas of his life. The distinction should be made between the normal, everyday reaction of men to other men that they meet casually, momentarily, or engage only in the most temporary encounters, versus the reactions when men relate to other men concerning vital matters. In the latter case such things would be included as the nature of the restrictions in obtaining employment, housing accommodations, friends, and marital or sex partners.

To study these kinds of moral issues empirically is to study serious sanctioning behavior. Because it is possible to find instances where the behavior of a whole community is expressly in favor of one position while the actual behavior is quite the contrary, there is an important source of confusion, of which sex is a good example. Men may commonly say that they oppose promiscuity and adultery, but they may engage in it. Here one can observe the relationship between publicly visible violations and the degree of sanctioning behavior. In the first chapter, private versus public moral behavior were distinguished. Men do publicly express severe disapproval of adultery, while they privately engage in it. If it becomes publicly known, sanctions are imposed. There are instances where men are caught and punished severely for doing something which members of the community know is commonly practiced. Income tax evasion is a typically cited case in point. Price-fixing by the electrical companies is also a good example.' 8 Many businessmen confided later that their only surprise in the electricity trials was the reaction of a few outraged citizens. They certainly were not surprised, much less angered or annoyed, by the conspiracy. Yet these same unannoyed men could have given strong public support to the moral principles of the free enterprise system and the positive gains from an openly competitive market. One may "feel very strongly" in one direction and behave in the opposite direction. Again, a good example of this in the West is sexual activity. A strong sexual urge may be overcome or sublimated, on the one hand. On the other hand, one may engage in illicit sex and still feel strongly that he should not have behaved in such a way. In either instance, observation of the behavior may mislead an observer in his conclusions about the "strength of the feeling" of the individual involved. A disjunction of the individual participant's feeling and his behavior may result in extreme guilt, but it should be noted that an interest in guilt feelings focuses upon the individual.

The sociologist of morality concerns himself primarily with sanctioning or conforming behavior. He merely invites conceptual muddiness by failing to distinguish between the two units. As we have seen, when the individual is the unit of analysis, some see morality in terms of the degree to which the individual holds to his own principles. However, when the community is the unit, moral or immoral behavior is viewed in terms of the moral order. There are occasions where an individual may be characterized as moral in the first sense, but where his behavior violates the moral code of his fellow men. In these instances, it is imperative to specify boundaries. For the purposes of this work, "immorality" will be used only with reference to the community boundary. Though its importance is completely acknowledged for other interests, individual morality is not the subject matter here.

Morality has two components: The first is the behavior which is itself subject to communal sanction and control; the second is the nature of the sanctioning and control. The two are interconnected, because an act takes on a moral character in public places as a direct consequence of the way men "normally" respond to it. From a social perspective, there can be nothing intrinsically moral or immoral about a woman smoking a cigarette. If she smokes by herself, there is no issue for the community. However, if she smokes in public, the community may treat her behavior moralistically. It may choose to invoke sanctions to prevent her from continuing. A woman who smoked a cigarette in a public place in 1870 was thus treated as an immoral person. There is nothing abstract, mystical, or empirically difficult to grasp about the nature of her moral behavior or moral treatment. In the example cited, the smoking of a cigarette is immoral behavior, while the measures used by the community become moral control.

So long as a small minority of a community engage in immoral behavior publicly, then moral control of that behavior is effective. However, when there is public knowledge that even a sizeable minority (one fourth or one third) are behaving publicly contrary to a community's "moral" principles, then those principles cannot long persist. When many women began smoking in the presence of strangers, then would-be moral sanctioners could no longer be certain that any other member of the community would be sympathetic. In Mead's terms, the moral order is weakened considerably by the inability of the typical community member to know that any other member feels the same way.19

A sizeable minority of deviants thwart social control for another reason. In moral questions, the most extreme sanctions of a community are invoked. Violators are sometimes executed or imprisoned. Where the minority is sizeable, a community cannot use such serious sanctions as these without either (r) depleting the community of much of its human resource or (z) exhausting the resources of the community on punitive action at the expense of constructive development.
Legislation can have a dramatic effect on the course of moral behavior and moral control in those cases where the community generally fears the possibility of the law's enforcement. Thus, in the deep South up through the 195os, whites who opposed voting rights legislation for Blacks could not have their morality legislated because they did not fear enforcement of the law, even though their acts were public and victimizing. They had reason to believe that the local authorities, all the way up to the governor, would support their local suppression of Negro voting. By the saine token, Blacks who insisted on facing police dogs and hoses and electrified prodding by mounted police in the 196os could not have their morality legislated. They too did not fear the enforcement of the law sufficiently to not register to vote. Instead, they chose prison. When these tactics are routinely chosen by either party to a moral dispute, the old moral order cannot persist.

Where the law is enforced and where men fear that enforcement, public morality can be altered or sustained by legislation. Both components of morality are affected; the behavior itself and the public control mechanism.

There are instances where "the legislation of morality" in this sense has been remarkably effective. It is law of the United States which has made it immoral in the minds of the citizenry to imprison a man for his religious beliefs. In 1789, most communities probably did not regard such punishment as immoral because they could observe the imprisonment of a heretic without feeling any outrage and without attempting to intervene in the imprisonment. After several score years, however, Americans had swung around until the strength of their moral position equaled that of the law. By 1870, the idea of such powerful state sanction for disbelievers could evoke moral outrage and action on the part of the citizenry.

This is an example where morality was legislated and there were no strong feelings against the legislation. Prohibition is cited however, as the supreme example which proves that legislation is ineffective in influencing morality if the people really want to do anyway what the legislation forbids. But one can just as easily cite sexual desire, sexual behavior, and legislation on sex as a strong example on the other side. We have laws against prostitution and adultery, and there is no clamoring for repeal of these laws on the grounds that men are going to do what they really want to do regardless of law. The key to the puzzle may be the phrase, "where men fear the law's enforcement." Men have never really been punished for breaking the law and going to a prostitute. They have accordingly never feared that law's enforcement. In recent times, they have had little to fear from the laws against adultery, since prosecution is rare in proportion to incidence. The sanctions against a public display of an adulterous relationship have been very stringent in the past. There is a case of desire for activity which the law prohibited, where the legal prohibition was effective in sustaining the moral order of the community even though "men really wanted" to break the law. It is therefore foolish to cite Prohibition continually as a case which proves the ineffectiveness of laws in moral areas where men's desires are contrary to those laws.

One can anticipate the argument that Prohibition is a different case, in that most people felt that taking a drink was not really morally wrong, while people do feel that illicit sex is morally wrong even if desired. There is something to this argument which should be examined more closely. It tells us something more about the relationship between law and morality. Where the ideal-typical member of a community has a conception of the rightness of wrongness of an act, that act takes on a moral quality independent of whether men desire to engage in it or not. In communities where the consumption of alcohol is regarded as wrong, whether or not there is overwhelming desire for it is independent of the moral question. (The same is true for sex in the example above.) Whether laws against alcoholic consumption will be effective or not is therefore less dependent upon how strongly men want it than upon the conception of alcoholic usage as right or wrong.

It then becomes a fruitless chicken-egg argument as to which came first, the conception of right and wrong or the law. Either argument ends in a tautology once the position is stated that one always precedes the other. For example, those who argue that strong moral feelings always predate the law define the terms of the discourse in this circular manner :

Only laws which are in keeping with public morality can be effectively enforced. Laws which are contrary to public morality (e.g., Prohibition) are doomed to failure. If an instance is cited where a law was passed which seemed to be contrary to public morality and was effective, then it was not really contrary to public morality after all.

The preceding argument is a tautology because it defines effective legislation in terms of a morally sympathetic community Thus, wherever the law is effective the arguer simply retreats and asserts that it must have been the case that the community was in favor of that law all along. The tautology can be broken by an empirical approach to the study of morality, which sets apart analytically the two elements of morality and traces their relationship to laws and sanctions. The best test of the degree of morality in an issue is the behavior of the men in that community toward violators. If there are no taboos on the behavior, then it is impossible to speak of sanctions or immorality. Only when acts are seen as violations can one come to the empirical study or grasp of moral issues, because it is only with sanctioning behavior that one can assess empirically the moral investments. Logically and substantively it makes no sense to ask the question "Which Comes first, law or morality?" It is the nature of the relationship between them that can and should be the subject of inquiry.

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