Jason Turowetz and Doug Maynard, "Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life"
Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life
Jason J. Turowetz and Douglas W. Maynard
Introduction
Recent advances in neurobiology, brain imaging, and evolutionary psychology have generated much debate and discussion about the nature of moral cognition. At the center of these crosscutting dialogues is a protean self whose moral sensibilities are being (re)-specified in terms of synaptic junctions, evolved dispositions, and the exigencies of psychosocial environments. These various lines of research, though enlightening and provocative, are linked together by a common thread, namely, their conception of moral cognition as something that happens primarily in the cognitive space of people's heads. "Social cognition" is the name that social psychologists give to this perspective, which regards moral reasoning as occurring outside of, prior to, or alongside social interaction. This, in turn, points to a conception of mind that Ryle (1949:32) memorably dubbed, "the ghost in the machine." Mind and body are partitioned into two separate entities, with the former thinking, planning, desiring – in a word, having thoughts, and the latter executing, or doing, them. This dualistic position invites the inference that actions are caused by internal states of mind, leading to questions about where the causal mechanisms are located and how they operate.
The present essay examines scholarship in two closely related traditions, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), that take a markedly different approach to matters of moral cognition. Rather than locating morality or cognition more generally in people's heads, these lines of inquiry treat moral reasoning as a property of the embodied interactional practices by which members of society engage. A situation has intrinsic moral significance through the concerted actions by which its character is established, negotiated, and elaborated (Drew 1998). The EM/CA approach does not demand an outright rejection of cognitivist conceptions of morality, much less a commitment to any variant of behaviorism. It does, however, recommend an agnostic stance on the existence of a "mind" that has thoughts, moral or otherwise, and proposes to treat cognition as a phase or component of action, instead of its precursor (Maynard 2006:106, Heritage 1990–1991). In this respect, EM and CA display affinities with the progenitors of pragmatism (Mead 1934, Dewey 1896) and its contemporary revivalists, along with certain strains of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1962), and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein 1953, 1965, Anscombe 1957).
If the moral status of an action or matter is not given in advance it is, however, constituted through the understandings and orientations parties display, or can be taken to display, to one another in an interactional setting. Morality in interaction is to be distinguished from the morality of interaction, which concerns the rights and obligations accorded people by dint of their membership in the interaction order of society (Bergmann 1998, Maynard 1998, Goffman 1983) and adheres to what Schutz (1962) and Garfinkel (1967) call the attitude of daily life.
The attitude of daily life involves a coproduction of features of social life through taken-for-granted, seen-but-unnoticed practices and methods which achieve the very intelligibility of our daily lives. We certify others and ourselves as competent, morally accountable members of society by selectively attending to unremarkable gestalts as assembled through our practices, by means of which we also produce the apparent naturalness of the social order. Deviations from this natural universe have a visceral effect on us, and occasion efforts to repair a breakdown of shared understandings. Further, this orientation, or "natural attitude" to a shared life-world (Schutz 1962:7–8) is something that members actively display for one another by artfully bringing their actions into line with social norms and rules, and rationalizing failure to do so through an appeal to behavioral accounts that others see as reasonable in light of local circumstances.
The moral order of interaction – what Bergmann (1998) calls "protomorality" – is the deep set of mutual assumptions and orientations by which members fashion moral claims and consequences at the surface level in talk and social interaction. Although these assumptions about what is normal and natural can be analyzed in the abstract (as in theoretical discussions regarding the attitude of daily life), their concrete manifestations are inseparable from the way they undergird the sequential, turn-by-turn contexts occasioned in and through speech and practical action. When we turn from the deep moral order of interaction to moral order in action, we find that people engage in practices to justify, impugn, excuse, praise, exemplify, exculpate, and otherwise account for and perform a wide variety principled actions.
The collaborative aspect of practices warrants remarking, as CA proposes that the moral sense of an utterance is fashioned as much by recipients as speakers. Consider a mundane instance in which A says to B, "He promised to take me to the movies and never called. He always does this." This utterance is designed as a complaint about some third party who broke a promise; further, the speaker, using the extreme case descriptor "always" (Pomerantz 1986) formulates this indiscretion as part of a pattern that ramifies to the offender's character. Whether this utterance actually gets realized as a complaint, however, depends on the way its recipient deals with it. Though B could treat it as a complaint by, for instance, aligning with the speaker (i.e., "that's awful"), B could just as easily orient to it as "just" news, using a receipt ("oh, really") that tends to discourage elaboration (Maynard 2003:Chapter 4; cf. Heritage 1984b). In the latter case, a complaint sequence is avoided in favor of a news delivery sequence, and one that foreshortens further topical talk. This move not only has consequences for the exchange at hand, but also the nature of the relationship between the parties that person-A projects in treating B as someone to whom s/he can complain about third-party transgressions (Drew 1998:Fn. 8). Extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), complaining (Jefferson 1984), news-delivery-receipts (Maynard 2003), and morally implicative characterizations of third-party transgressors (Drew 1998) are so many generic devices and tools that members draw on to shape, and manage, issues of morality in a local exchange.
The present chapter will provide an overview of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic findings about the patterned, orderly ways in which people use such devices to accomplish moral ends. We begin with a review of ethnomethodological studies that delineate how members constitute the social order as a moral order of everyday life (Garfinkel 1967). We then proceed to examine the closely related discipline of conversation analysis through a review of work on moral talk in institutional and non-institutional (everyday) settings. After explicating what we currently know about situated action, speech, and morality, we will then sketch possible directions for future research, with a focus on the kinds of knowledge that would repay inquiry.
Early Ethnomethodology
The insight that the social order is a moral one is worked out in research conducted by ethnomethodologists, conversation analysts, and cognate inquiries. As this body of research has been ably reviewed elsewhere (cf. Mehan and Wood 1975, Heritage 1984a, b, Maynard and Clayman 2003), we confine ourselves here to a succinct overview of some canonical texts concerned with the accomplishment of gender, the use of rules or codes as putative sources of orderly social relations, and the orientation of social actors to an obdurate world of everyday life.
Agnes and the Achievement of Gender
Garfinkel (1967) famously documents the experiences of an inter-sexed person named "Agnes" as she attempts to procure a sex-change operation. Because she was born a male, Agnes had to learn how to be a female by observing and emulating the practices that "natural" women take for granted. As a practical methodologist, Agnes highlights how being female is an achievement, a "doing," rather than a natural fact. Being a woman entails engaging in the methodical practices through which members constitute themselves as female, and deviations from this line of activity arouse suspicion, consternation, and indignation. The force of the natural attitude toward womanhood is exhibited in Agnes's insistence that she really is, in essence, a female and that it was only through a cruel twist of fate that she wound up with male genitals. Agnes further exhibits her orientation to the naturalness of womanhood by roundly condemning cross-dressers, homosexuals, and other gender outlaws who engage in willful acts of deviance. In contrast to them, she is naturally female and has only to correct the mistake that encumbered her with male physiology.
Agnes's efforts to "pass" for female do much more than illustrate the contingent nature of gender identity. They also train a lens on the deep sense of moral entitlement that permeates the natural attitude. Regarding herself as someone who really is, in actual fact, female, Agnes feels entitled both to an operation and to be treated by others as a woman. She can only claim this prerogative, though, if she orients to others' entitlement to interact with a woman in their dealings. Any slip-ups would eviscerate her claim to participate rightfully in the collaborative give-and-take behind which female identity is taken for granted in everyday life. In other words, Agnes' efforts to pass are the very means by which she sustains a deep moral sense of self as well as surface prerogatives attached to her gendered self.
Rules as Resources, Not Determinants
The case of Agnes reveals how the natural attitude is produced in and through the orderly, concerted actions of society's members. It also provides an example of how people actively bring their conduct into alignment with rules and norms, rather than passively internalizing them. Agnes does not simply orient to rules of social etiquette, but more or less skillfully uses them to design her actions in noticeably feminine ways.
In early ethnomethodology, the dynamic interplay of rules and practical action is poignantly expounded in Weider (1974) and Bittner (1967a, b). In Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code, Weider (1974) offers an analysis of the day-to-day routines that he observed in a halfway house known for being progressive in its encouragement of cooperative, transparent relationships among staff and house-members. This agenda was consistently frustrated by the rules and norms of a convict code, which house-members used as an informal means of regulating the conduct of fellow borders. However, the code was less a formal set of rules than an interpretive device that could be deployed to perform any number of actions, from justifying one's own conduct to impugning that of another. In other words, rather than being a set of guidelines, boarders and staff invoked the code selectively as a resource for explaining why members behaved as they did. Participants did not passively follow rules, but actively used them to make their own behavior, and that of others, intelligible. In line with Wittgenstein (1965), Weider finds that an orientation to rules does not cause behavior. Instead, rules provide members with resources that they can use to fashion moral claims by ascribing motives to themselves and one another, motives that facilitate other actions such as avoiding friendly talk or "doing distance," giving good advice or sanctioning, justifying aberrant behavior, and the like.
Bittner (1967a) shows how police, like the convicts in the preceding example, make flexible use of laws to maintain the peace on skid row. Their orientation is to practical efficacy in the estimation of peers and community members, rather than strict enforcement of legal statutes per se. In fact, rigid application of legal statutes is considered poor craftsmanship, as it suggests that policemen lack the ability to size up a situation and handle it in a way that maintains social order. For example, in dealing with emergencies concerning mentally ill persons, police refuse to make ad hoc diagnoses of targets, preferring to orient to the situation as officers whose primary job is to ensure that persons do not pose a threat to themselves or others (Bittner 1967b). Bringing people to the hospital is a last resort that police go with when they have no other recourse, such as accompanying the individual to a safe place with persons who can watch over them. The extent of a person's illness, then, is not the primary basis for how they are dealt with as a practical matter. The law is used flexibly, and a strict interpretation of its letter is subordinate to practical tasks like keeping the peace.
The Natural Attitude and Mundane Reason
We have distinguished between the deep morality of everyday life and surface morality concerned with its normative features. What a woman is entitled to do is a surface matter, while the claim of femaleness or womanhood is a deep assertion about one's self. How members use a code – whether in a halfway house, on the streets, or elsewhere – is a surface matter that enables sense-making and normative conduct, while the sense of the code's obdurate reality operates at a deeper level. The natural attitude presumes, at the deeper level, the existence of an objective world that exists apart from subjective perceptions of it. In his analysis of the mundane reasoning practices through which this shared sense of a real world known in common is enacted and sustained, Pollner (1987) delineates a set of "idealizations" to which actors continuously adhere. These include (a) object determinacy, which assumes that the parts and aspects of a given scene are partial elements of a larger totality, (b) object coherency, or the assumption that these pieces will come together in an intelligible whole that respects the constraint of (c) non-contradictoriness, such that the pieces are congruent with one another and the overall whole of which they are parts (Pollner 1987:Chapter 2). As constitutive preconditions for the existence of an objective world, these idealizations are perpetually hidden from the actors who employ them. Idealizations only become perceptible to actors when they are made problematic by a "crisis" of mundane reason, which occurs when contradictory accounts of a real-world event emerge. When this happens, mundane reason provides a solution, such as finding fault with the objectivity or perception of one or more participants in the crisis, so that the sense of an external and objectively knowable world is preserved (cf. Maynard and Clayman 1991).
Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis derives from various sources, of which ethnomethodology is a prominent one. CA shares EM's commitment to distilling the practices through which the features of everyday and institutional life are achieved. In addition, however, conversation analysts look for robust, systematic patterns in data that can be generalized across local contexts (Maynard and Clayman 2003). In coupling careful examination of individual cases with cross-case comparisons of given phenomena, such as greetings or requests, conversation analysts ground generalizations about local phenomena in extensive collections of empirical records of interactional data. The devices used to produce these phenomena are at one and the same time context-independent, in that they transcend the exigencies of local interaction, and context-sensitive, such that they are adapted to the peculiarities of situated engagements (Sacks et al. 1974).
CA's naturalistic observational method provides for detailed examination of the orderly, collaborative actions through which social phenomena are realized. As a largely unmotivated, bottom-up mode of inquiry, conversation analysis makes no a priori assumptions about which phenomena are worth studying, or what embodied details of talk-in-interaction contribute to their production (Sacks 1972). However, CA also embraces what Clayman and Gill (2004) refer to as "beginning with a vernacular action," such as making a request or doing an interview. In either case, analysts meticulously sort through raw and transcribed data with a view to specifying the patterned, sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, and the various social actions these sequences routinely accomplish.
The Normative Structure of Conversation
The very machinery through which conversational interaction occurs has normative features and implications (Heritage 1984a). Co-present conversationalists perform linguistic and paralinguistic actions by means of a turn-taking system (Sacks et al. 1974). This turn taking system, which orders and organizes both general and more restricted forms of speech exchange, has a number of properties to which participants consistently orient: one person speaks at a time, inter-turn gaps and interruptions are kept to a minimum, and parties are expected to display an appreciation and understanding of immediately prior utterances by attending to the actions they perform.
A pervasive way of structuring utterances, which project a limited range of conditionally relevant next actions, is through adjacency pairs. An adjacency pair is a sequence of two adjacent utterances, ordered into first and second pair parts, where the first is designed to elicit a particular type of response from the second (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Common examples of adjacency pairs include question-answer, greeting-reciprocal, and invitation-acceptance/declination. Production of a first pair part carries with it the expectation that an appropriate second is forthcoming. As such, both speakers and recipients treat situations in which a projected response is absent, or observably insufficient, as specifically accountable. Inadequate or absent accounts can be taken to constitute normative breaches and, in this way, become the basis for morally implicative, indeed often negative, attributions. Thus, an unreturned greeting may be interpreted as a snub, an unanswered question as being evasive. By the same token, in cases where recipients provide acceptable reasons for their behavior, accounts may furnish grounds for exculpation, forgiveness, and so forth.
Close examination of adjacency pair sequences has shown that first part utterances tend to systematically "prefer" some second parts to others. For example, an invitation prefers an acceptance as its second part and disprefers a rejection (Atkinson and Drew 1979) and an assessment prefers agreement over disagreement (Pomerantz 1984). Preferencing also affects first pair parts or initiating actions. For example, offers are preferred over requests, such that speakers often approach a requesting action in ways that elicit an offer, and only make an explicit request when such is not provided. It should be emphasized that preference does not refer to a cognitive state in the minds of actors. A preferred second pair part is one that is offered with minimal delay and few turn components. A preferred answer to the invitation, "would you like to get a drink?" is often a simple and immediate "yes," or an acceptance token coupled with a minimal turn constructional unit, like "yeah + sure." In contrast, dispreferred second pair parts display markers including delays, prefaces, deferral of the response over multiple turns, and accounts or explanations.
As constitutive elements of everyday interaction, turn taking, adjacency pairs, and preference structures shape, and are reflexively shaped by, numerous morally relevant activities.
Moral Phenomena in Everyday Life
We turn now to a consideration of three types of morally inflected action which pervade ordinary social conduct.
Agreeing and Disagreeing as Moral Phenomena
A particularly fecund, and consequential, site for the examination of morality in discourse is that of making and handling assessments. Assessments are delicate objects in that they provisionally commit the assessor to a particular stance on objects, persons, or events in the social world, and place the recipient in the position of aligning with, disaffiliating from, or bypassing the evaluative utterance. Further, assessment sequences involve epistemic displays whereby participants claim their rights to make these assessments (Heritage 2002, Heritage and Raymond 2005).
In a now classic investigation, Pomerantz (1984) shows how recipients of assessments produce second-position responses. Disagreements in second position are typically of the form "Agree + Disagree," such that recipients voice weak, or qualified, agreement tokens before explicitly disagreeing with an initial assessment. One common way of prefacing disagreement is with contrastive conjunctions like, "that's true, but..." where the "but" clause does the work of parsing the turn into separate components. As Lerner (1996) notes, this parsing allows for projection of disagreement, so that the first speaker can intervene with a preemptive completion that provides for agreement after all.
In addition to methods for converting incipient disagreement into agreement, speakers can gauge the likelihood of recipient disagreement before offering an assessment. One pervasive device for doing this is a perspective display sequence, which involves eliciting the position of a relevant other on some referent before venturing one's own (Maynard 1989). In its most basic form, the sequence has three components: opinion-query [first speaker], response-perspective display [second speaker], and assessment-report [first speaker, third position].
As we noted earlier, alongside the matter of agreement per se, there are also the terms on which it occurs, and what these imply about the relationship between conversants. Assessments in first position imply that the first speaker has evaluative priority by dint of her proposing the initial assessment. However, second speakers can assert epistemic independence, which implies that their knowledge of the referent and, by extension, their assessment, is independent of the first speaker's. Heritage (1984b, 2002) has shown that an "oh"-preface is a systematic way for speakers to signal independent access to an object. Tag-questions and oh-prefacing both represent procedures speakers use to negotiate epistemic rights to assess in interaction (Heritage 2002, Heritage and Raymond 2005).
Blame Negotiation
Insofar as agreeing and disagreeing with assessments involve preference structures, devices for reconciling potential perspectival discrepancies and methods for asserting epistemic access and rights, assessment sequences are replete with moral overtones and implications. A more intuitively palpable feature of everyday moral conduct is blame negotiation. As with agreement and disagreement, conversation analysts have used a combination of naturalistic observation and detailed analysis of talk-in-interaction to discern a set of systematic, robust patterns in this domain of social conduct.
The allocation of blame is a thoroughly collaborative achievement. It involves ascribing responsibility for an event, or series of events, to a particular person or group. The work of ascription is tightly interwoven with that of description, for the materials used to formulate an account of blameworthy behavior, along with the motives, intentions, and markers of deliberateness that are enlisted to explain it, are forged in the reports people offer about the incident(s) under scrutiny. It follows that if we are to understand how blame negotiation occurs in real time, we need to examine the practices through which reports and descriptions are woven into morally consequential stories.
The basic sequence in which blame ascription develops has two parts (Pomerantz 1978). In the first, someone announces an "unhappy incident." The announcement routinely assumes the form of a stark, unelaborated "object-action" story fragment, such as "the car is broken." Noteworthy about this utterance, aside from its sparseness, is its lack of an actor-agent putatively involved in the event. This announcement occasions the second part of the sequence, in which a recipient may transform the lexical content of the statement from "object-action" to "subject–action–object," thereby attributing blame to an actor (Pomerantz 1978:119).
As these cases suggest, morality, in the form of issues surrounding responsibility, comes to the fore in discourse when bad news, rejection of invitations, and other everyday actions are underway. The pragmatic features of moral reasoning, then, are deeply woven into the fabric of ordinary activities, rather than being independent or outside of them.
Making and Managing Complaints
A third domain of ordinary moral conduct to which conversation analysts have turned their attention is making and managing complaints. Complaints are dispreferred relative to apologies or other actions that preempt an actual complaint. Complaining is a particularly delicate practice because every complaint can itself be complained about – that is, because every complaint is accountable, the complainant runs the risk of being discredited and perceived as a "complainer" should she be unable to provide sound reasons for her grievance (Sacks 1992:634–638). For this reason, complainants work to furnish, in the articulation of their reports, persuasive grounds in support of their claims. As with blaming, these reports are not neutral, but selectively keyed to particular dimensions of the situations they elaborate. Put succinctly, "Complaints are constitutive features of the troubles they report" (Drew and Holt 1988:399).
As an accountable reporting of others' conduct, a complaint does implicit and explicit moral work. The implicit work suffuses one's own actions as innocent in relation to the situation at issue, as complainants routinely make efforts to portray themselves as unfortunate victims. The explicit moral work entails finding fault with others by formulating a normative standard that they have transgressed. Reports of these transgressions regularly contain expressions of moral indignation, which constitute bids for sympathetic affiliation from the complaint's recipient. Expressing indignation, often by means of reports about how the violation in question made one feel, is especially salient in cases where a sympathetic hearer cannot be taken for granted. Drew (1998) identifies a set of procedures by which complainants convey indignation through reconstructed versions of target events. First, speakers describe the background circumstances that led to the impropriety. Second, in so doing, they emphasize the deliberateness of the other's conduct. Third, complainants strengthen their claims by reporting what the other said, which has the effect of animating the offender's behavior in suggestive ways.
Complainants tend to make use of "extreme case formulations" (Pomerantz 1986). These are maximal descriptors such as, "completely innocent," "out all day," and "it always/never happens" that strongly propose some moral violation in the face of potentially non-sympathetic recipients. And, when listeners do not offer expressions of sympathy at junctures where they have been made relevant, complainants recurrently use idioms that succeed generating displays of alignment and affiliation from co-participants. These displays, in turn, can close the topic on a note of mutuality and facilitate transition to a new one (Drew and Holt 1988:411, Sacks 1992).
Moral Phenomena in Institutional Settings
In the interest of brevity, we focus on two areas in which a great deal of conversation analytic work has been conducted. Law and medicine are, in many ways, prototypical of the professions, and have long been topics of sociological interest. Conversation analysis begins from the ground up by looking at how members' practices systematically constitute and reproduce institutional contexts. Further, because they use findings from ordinary conversations as a baseline for comparison, they are able to see how generic devices for producing social actions are modified in organizational environments and adapted to the attainment of institutional aims.
Medicine
In this section, we examine three thematic facets of doctor-patient interaction: the doing and management of patient requests, formulating diagnoses, and clinically assessing patient competence in the form of cognitive testing. As our review will show, each of these phenomena is an interactional achievement produced through the concerted actions of doctor and patient.
Patient Requests
Making requests of doctors can be a morally delicate proposition for patients. This is especially so where the request concerns procedures, objects, and assessments over which the doctor has authority and discretion. Because contemporary medicine rests on an asymmetric relationship between doctor and patient (Parsons 1951) in which the former has primary access to a specialized body of knowledge and techniques, a patient's request can seem presumptuous or inapposite, intruding on and challenging the physician's medical expertise (Heath 1992, Stivers 2002a, Gill 1998). The problems of epistemic entitlement pervading ordinary conversation are thus magnified in the medical environment, where rights to know and evaluate are institutionalized in distinct roles. In this context, requests are not just requests. Instead, they can be taken to indirectly propose something about the doctor-patient relationship that may contribute to or threaten its integrity. For this reason, patients work to formulate and perform requests in more or less subtle and tacit ways. Physicians display sensitivity to these practices in how they attend or disattend to projected requests.
It might be said that the asymmetry in doctor–patient interaction is tinged with morality at every juncture. Laypersons (patients) are extremely cautious in demanding anything of the expert or professional (doctor), who must artfully grant or deny underground requests through practices that preserve the integrity of their institutionally based authority.
Diagnosis and Accountability
Patients ordinarily do not participate in the diagnostic process. Physicians appear to encourage this disposition by volunteering only scant information about the particulars of the diagnosis. What little information they do provide is by way of explaining the prescription being handed out (Byrne and Long 1976). The passive attitude and demeanor patients typically display when receiving a diagnosis has been interpreted as reflecting the asymmetric structure of the doctor-patient relationship.
In his conversation analytic examination of the diagnostic phase of the medical interview, Heath (1992) delineates the practices that actively reproduce an interactional asymmetry between doctor and patient. Specifically, patients often handle the delivery of a diagnosis with silence or a downward-intoned token like "er" or "yeh," which has the effect of encouraging a transition to the next (treatment) phase of the consultation.
Examining the diagnostic process in light of the medical consultation as a whole, Perakyla (2006) expands on Heath's findings, suggesting that the design of a diagnostic statement is highly sensitive to the sequential environment of its production. When doctors plainly assert a diagnosis without articulating its grounds, they do so in a context where these grounds are concretely present for, and transparent to, the patient. In situations where examination and diagnosis are temporally separated from one another, or when the diagnostic formulation is marked by uncertainty or otherwise opaque to the patient, doctors make an effort to justify their claims.
In an investigation that returns to the deep issues regarding the morality of discourse, Maynard (2004) elaborates on Perakyla's inquiry by showing how surface practices for delivering diagnosis also grow out of considerations rooted in the interaction order upon which the institutional context of the medical encounter is built. By regularly citing the evidence for a diagnosis prior to the delicate act of predicating it as an attribute of the person, doctors display an orientation to achieving intersubjective agreement, which is a problem for participants in any setting, institutional or otherwise (Maynard 2004:70–71). From this standpoint, medical authority can be seen to derive from the interactional structures of everyday life and the moral dimensions they embody (Maynard 1991).
Evaluating Competence
So far, we have considered competence as something that patients, in presenting symptoms, and doctors, in evaluating them, actively display for one another. Much of time, the competence of both parties is taken for granted. Doctors operate on the pretext that patients are knowledgeable monitors of their health, and only question this presumption when some aspect of the interaction becomes problematic. In other words, the presumption of competence is only overtly broached under exceptional circumstances. We turn now to a situation – cognitive testing – where the entire interaction between practitioner and patient is structured around the assessment of competence.
Conversation analysts explore the interactional processes through which tests are used to translate local, situated performances into objective, reportable measures of ability. In so doing, they have opened the black box (Latour 1987) where raw data are sorted and converted into standardized indices. By investigating clinical judgment in situ and "on the ground," so to speak, CA exposes the reasoning practices involved in doing assessments that can have profound social, educational, and occupational consequences for the examinee.
Law
In legal proceedings, the disposition of a case depends on the relative weight of the evidence that disputants provide. If parties are credible, their deposition or courtroom testimony is more likely to be believed, and positively weighted, than if not. Questions of credibility are especially prominent in Anglo-American trial courts, where most of the evidence fact-finders receive is through witness testimony. The matter of credibility is tightly interwoven with a party's character, and the moral implications that can be drawn from it.
Plea Bargaining
In the American judicial system, approximately ninety percent of criminal cases are resolved before they go to trial. As the primary vehicle for affecting these resolutions, plea bargaining forms the backbone of the criminal justice system. The interactional practices used to negotiate case dispositions thus provide a perspicuous object of investigation. Maynard (1984) examines how district attorneys (DA) and public defenders (PD) formulate morally implicative characterizations of defendants during plea-bargaining to achieve local goals. The meaning of a defendant attribute like age, sex, or race has no intrinsic moral significance. Instead, its moral sense is determined by the way it is fitted to descriptions used to justify, excuse, rationalize, impeach, or otherwise construe and constitute conduct.
Criminal Trials
Anglo-American judicial systems are built on an adversarial logic, which holds that the most equitable and accurate way to arrive at the true facts of a case is to have rival parties contest one another's version of events. The majority of evidence is presented through direct witness testimony, with cross-examination affording each party a chance to confront and challenge the other's claims. Being conscious of attempts to discredit them, witnesses design their testimony in ways that preempt challenges or mitigate and neutralize them once they are made.
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we brought together some instances (but by no means all) of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research related to moral phenomena in everyday and institutional settings. This literature, as well as cognate bodies of scholarship in the areas of discursive psychology and linguistic anthropology, locates morality in the observable, reportable conduct of social actors. We distinguished the deep morality of everyday life, or what Bergmann (1998) calls protomorality, from the surface morality of rules, norms, rights, and obligations that protomorality undergirds. In all, moral reasoning is something we actively and accountably display for one another in our interactional engagements. The ontological status of morality as a specifically social phenomenon is coextensive with its collaborative realizations, exhibited in discourse both in ordinary conduct and the institutions that draw upon it.
Although their respective domains of inquiry differ, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have the potential to engage in a fruitful dialogue with empirical social psychology, in both its sociological and psychological varieties and including the wide area known as social cognition. Because ethnomethodology and conversation analysis re-specify cognitive concepts in terms of recurrent social actions, they provide for a disciplined, naturalistic examination of "cognition in the wild" (Livingston 2008, Sacks 1992). A naturalistic approach to social-psychological phenomena can thus challenge, modify, and ultimately complement findings and generalizations based on survey research and experimentation.
Re-specifying psychological concepts in an interactional idiom also holds the potential for more fine-grained, detailed coding schemes that can be used in large-N quantitative studies. It will also aid in experimental design, allowing researchers to explore how interactional phenomena are modified under a range of controlled conditions.
Finally, we suggest that the programs of neurobiological and social-interactional research can proceed in parallel with one another. In re-specifying cognition and its moral components in discursive and interactional terms, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can engage in a productive dialogue with both social psychology and the natural sciences in ways that address how different processes that distinct domains of study address are ordered intrinsically, organized through everyday practices, and, possibly, interrelated.
References
[Complete reference list omitted for brevity but available in original publication]
This chapter originally appeared in S. Hitlin and S. Vaisey (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_27, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.
Republished here with permission from Jason J. Turowetz, Douglas W. Maynard, and Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
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