Collective Morality and Crime in the Americas

by Birkbeck; Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780415529815
• ISBN10: 0415529816
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Moral talk has intrinsic importance as the creator and sustainer of an imagined moral community, a community that symbolizes the existence and vigour of morality itself and confers a crucially important identity on its self-proclaimed members. This monograph examines the nature of collective morality as it materializes in public commentary about crime in North and Latin America. It identifies the ways in which the moral community is talked into being and the objects of concern that typically occupy its attention and maps the imagined moral universe of the virtuous and the criminal. Some social commentators lament the alleged demise of morality. This study finds morally significant utterances to be near ubiquitous, if not necessarily abundant, in commentary about crime. In this book, Christopher Birkbeck seeks to understand some of the underpinnings of moral talk prior to judging it, focusing particularly on the existential significance of words, and on the difficult intersections between moral, experiential and procedural discourses that inhere in many commentaries about crime.