What is society?
We are faced with a preliminary challenge in our anthropology of morals. Anthropology is the study of human society, and an anthropology of morals, under my account, is the study of the way in which morals are preached and practised in a society. It includes not merely a taxonomy of the kinds of moral judgements and practices, but also the ways in which they are justified by the society that preaches and practises them. But this seems to presuppose in some ways that society can be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms.
This is not a claim with which everyone would agree. Lord Devlin, for example, comes close to defining society in terms of morality in his essay "Morals and the Criminal Law": "Society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics morals and ethics, no society can exist."1 Although it does not state as much explicitly, it seems strongly to imply that it is simply part of what we mean by society that it contains some sort of morality--hence, the test of this claim seems to be, can you have a society without ipso facto having a system of morality?
A related claim, however, is, can you have a collection of individuals without having a society? For if we found a society that did not have a morality, then one might object that it was not really a society, but just a bare collection of individuals. But this seems simply to be a semantical game at that point. That certainly sounds as if a collection of individuals is a sufficient condition for society.
However, I can think of a counterexample to that claim as well. For we could have a collection of individuals that were chosen at random from different parts of the world, and had no interaction with each other. It does not follow that they belong to the same society. Is interaction with each other, therefore, a necessary condition for being members of the same society?
It seems that this cannot be the case. For there are so many people in society that no one individual could ever interact with them all. Yet we do not thereby conclude that the people with whom one does not interact do not belong to the same society as one does. One thing that we can claim, however, is that the people in a society all belong to some gigantic network of communication, or interaction.
Can this, then, be the necessary and sufficient condition for a human society: a network of interactions? If this is so, then the whole world must already be living in a single society today. For everyone forms part of the network of a nation, and all nations form part of a network that connects all other nations in the world. An entire global society was created, on this account, the day that the last isolated nation came into contact with the rest of the connected world.
Yet there seems a difference between the people of the world and the people we consider to be part of the same society. Society more typically refers to everyone in the same country or city, rather than everyone in the whole world. Such people typically exhibit many more things in common that seem to be social attributes, of a cultural and legal nature. Different countries have different laws and cultures, and some seem more integrated into a global system than others.
This difference does not seem to be without foundation. Suppose that there were a group of different networks of people, whose members only came into contact with each other sporadically. There may be no established rules or protocols for their interaction when they meet; each interaction is merely sui generis. It does not seem, in that instance, that a proper global society exists to connect the smaller networks.
A society, therefore, requires certain rules to govern the ways in which different people interact. This, however, is not a problem for the notion of a society as a network of interactions. Just as one cannot have a network without protocols, so one cannot have a social network without social protocols, which may include such things as morality. The question therefore becomes, can you have a social network with no moral protocols?
1The Philosophy of a Law, ed. R.M. Dworkin, Oxford Press, 1977, cited in "Law and Morality" by Dr Mark Cooray (search: "Devlin 'society means'").
This is not a claim with which everyone would agree. Lord Devlin, for example, comes close to defining society in terms of morality in his essay "Morals and the Criminal Law": "Society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics morals and ethics, no society can exist."1 Although it does not state as much explicitly, it seems strongly to imply that it is simply part of what we mean by society that it contains some sort of morality--hence, the test of this claim seems to be, can you have a society without ipso facto having a system of morality?
A related claim, however, is, can you have a collection of individuals without having a society? For if we found a society that did not have a morality, then one might object that it was not really a society, but just a bare collection of individuals. But this seems simply to be a semantical game at that point. That certainly sounds as if a collection of individuals is a sufficient condition for society.
However, I can think of a counterexample to that claim as well. For we could have a collection of individuals that were chosen at random from different parts of the world, and had no interaction with each other. It does not follow that they belong to the same society. Is interaction with each other, therefore, a necessary condition for being members of the same society?
It seems that this cannot be the case. For there are so many people in society that no one individual could ever interact with them all. Yet we do not thereby conclude that the people with whom one does not interact do not belong to the same society as one does. One thing that we can claim, however, is that the people in a society all belong to some gigantic network of communication, or interaction.
Can this, then, be the necessary and sufficient condition for a human society: a network of interactions? If this is so, then the whole world must already be living in a single society today. For everyone forms part of the network of a nation, and all nations form part of a network that connects all other nations in the world. An entire global society was created, on this account, the day that the last isolated nation came into contact with the rest of the connected world.
Yet there seems a difference between the people of the world and the people we consider to be part of the same society. Society more typically refers to everyone in the same country or city, rather than everyone in the whole world. Such people typically exhibit many more things in common that seem to be social attributes, of a cultural and legal nature. Different countries have different laws and cultures, and some seem more integrated into a global system than others.
This difference does not seem to be without foundation. Suppose that there were a group of different networks of people, whose members only came into contact with each other sporadically. There may be no established rules or protocols for their interaction when they meet; each interaction is merely sui generis. It does not seem, in that instance, that a proper global society exists to connect the smaller networks.
A society, therefore, requires certain rules to govern the ways in which different people interact. This, however, is not a problem for the notion of a society as a network of interactions. Just as one cannot have a network without protocols, so one cannot have a social network without social protocols, which may include such things as morality. The question therefore becomes, can you have a social network with no moral protocols?
1The Philosophy of a Law, ed. R.M. Dworkin, Oxford Press, 1977, cited in "Law and Morality" by Dr Mark Cooray (search: "Devlin 'society means'").