In these poignant words Hannah Arendt had articulated the question

of moral responsibility for resisting socialization. The mix)t issue of the

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social foundations of morality had been cast aside; whatever the solution offered to that issue, the authority and binding force of the distinction between good and evil cannot be legitimized by reference to social powers which sanction and enforce it. Even if condemned by the group by all groups, as a matter of fact - individual conduct may still be moral; an action recommended by society - even by the whole of the society in unison - may still be immoral. Resistance to behavioural rules promoted by a given society neither should, nor can, claim its authority from an alternative normative injunction of another society; for instance, from the moral lore of a past now denigrated and rejected by the new social order. The question of the societal grounds of moral authority is, in other words, morally irrelevant.

The socially enforced moral systems are communally based and promoted - and hence in a pluralist, heterogeneous world, irreparably relative. This relativism, however, does not apply to human 'ability to tell right from wrong'. Such an ability must be grounded in something other than the conscience collective of society. Every given society faces such an ability ready formed, much as it faces human biological constitution, physiological needs or psychological drives. And it does with such ability what it admits of doing with those other stubborn realities: it tries to suppress it, or harness it to its own ends, or channel it in a direction it considers useful or harmless. The process of socialization consists in the manipulation of moral capacity - not in its production. And the moral capacity that is manipulated entails not only certain principles which later become a passive object of social processing; it includes as well the ability to resist, escape and survive the processing, so that at the end of the day the authority and the responsibility for moral choices rests where they resided at the start: with the human person.

If this view of moral capacity is accepted, the apparently resolved and closed problems of the sociology of morality are thrown wide open again. The issue of morality must be relocated; from the problematics of socialization, education or civilization - in other words, from the realm of socially administered 'humanizing processes' - it ought to be shifted to the area of repressive, pattern-maintaining and tension-managing processes and institutions, as one of the 'problems' they are designed to handle and accommodate or transform. The moral capacity - the object, but not the product of such processes and institutions - would then have to disclose its alternative origin. Once the explanation of moral tendency as a conscious or unconscious drive towards the solution of the Hobbesian problem' is rejected, the factors responsible for the presence

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of moral capacity must be sought in the social, but not societal sphere. Moral behaviour is conceivable only in the context of coexistence, of being with others', that is, a social context; but it does not owe its appearance to the presence of supra-individual agencies of training and enforcement, that is, of a societal context.

Pre-societal sources of morality

The existential modality of the social (unlike the structure of the societal) has been seldom held at the focus of sociological attention. It was gladly conceded to the field of philosophical anthropology and seen as constituting, at best, the distant outer frontier of the area of sociology proper. There is no sociological consensus, therefore, as to the meaning, experiential content and behavioural consequences of the primary condition of being with others'. The ways in which that condition can be made sociologically relevant are yet to be fully explored in sociological practice.

The most common sociological practice does not seem to endow being with others' (i.e. being with other humans) with a special status or significance. The others are dissolved in the much more inclusive concepts of the context of action, the actor's situation, or, generally, the 'environment' - those vast territories where the forces which prompt the actor's choices in a particular direction, or limit the actor's freedom of choice, are located, and which contain such objectives as attract the actor's purposeful activity and hence supply motives for the action. The others are not credited with subjectivity that could set them apart from other constituents of the action context'. Or, rather, their unique status as human beings is acknowledged, yet hardly ever seen in practice as a circumstance which confronts the actor with a qualitatively distinct task. For all practical intents and purposes, the 'subjectivity' of the other boils down to a decreased predictability of his responses, and hence to a constraint it casts on the actor's search of complete control over the situation and efficient performance of the set task. The erratic conduct of the human other, as distinct from inanimate elements of the field of action, is a nuisance; and, for all we know, a temporary one. The actor's control over the situation aims at such manipulation of the context of the other's action as would enhance the probability of a specific course of conduct, and hence further reduce the position of the other within the actor's horizon to one virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the

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objects relevant to the success of the action. The presence of the human other in the field of action constitutes a technological challenge; reaching mastery over the other, reducing the other to the status of a calculable and manipulable factor of purposeful activity, is admittedly difficult. It may even tall for special skills on the part of the actor (such as understanding, rhetoric or knowledge of psychology) which are dispensable or useless in relations with other objects in the field of action.

Within this common perspective, the significance of the other is fully exhausted by his impact on the actor's chance of reaching his purpose. The other matters in as far (and only in as far) as his fickleness and inconstancy detracts from the probability that the pursuit of the given end will be efficiently completed. The task of the actor is to secure a situation in which the other will cease to matter and may be left out of account. The task and its performance are hence subject to a technical, not a moral, evaluation. The options open to the actor in his relation to the other split into effective and ineffective, efficient and inefficient -indeed, rational and irrational - but not right and wrong, good and evil. The elementary situation of being with others does not generate by itself (that is, unless forced by extrinsic pressures) any moral problematics. Whatever moral considerations may interfere with it must surely come from outside. Whatever constraints they are likely to impose upon the actor's choice would not stem from the intrinsic logic of means-ends calculation. Analytically speaking, they need to be cast squarely on the side of irrational factors. In the being with others' situation fully organized by the actor's objectives, morality is a foreign intrusion.

An alternative conception of the origins of morality may be sought in Sartre's famous portrayal of the ego-alter relationship as the essential and universal existental mode. It is far from certain, however, that it may be also found there. If a conception of morality does emerge from Sartre's analysis, it is a negative one: morality as a limit rather than a duty, a constraint rather than a stimulus. In this respect (though in this respect only) Sartrean implications for the assessment of the status of morality do not depart significantly from the previously surveyed standard sociological interpretation of the role of morality in the context of elementary action.

'The radical novelty consists, of course, in singling out the human others from the rest of the actors horizon, as units endowed with qualitatively distinct status and capacity. In Sartre, the other turns into

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alter ego, a fellow-man, a subject like myself, endowed with a subjectivity

1 can think ot solely as a replica of the one 1 know from my inner experience. An abyss separates alter ego from all other, true or imaginable, objects of the world. Alter ego does what 1 do; he thinks, he evaluates; he makes projects, and while doing all these he looks at me as I look at him. By merely looking at me, the other becomes the limit ot my freedom. He now usurps the right to define me and my ends, thereby sapping my separateness and autonomy, compromising my identity and my being-at-home in the world. The very presence of alter ego in this world puts me to shame and remains a constant cause of my anguish. I can­not be all I want to be. 1 cannot do all 1 want to do. My freedom fizzles out. In the presence of alter ego - that is, in the world - my being for myself is also, ineradicably, being for the other. When acting, I cannot but take into account that presence, and hence also those definitions, points of view, perspectives that it entails.

One is tempted to say that the inevitability of moral considerations is inherent in the Sartrean description of ego-alter togetherness. And yet it is far from dear what moral obligations, if any. may be determined by the togetherness so described. Alfred Schutz was fully within his rights when he interpreted the outcome of the ego-alter encounter, as rendered by Sartre, in the following way:

My own possibilities are turned into probabilities beyond my control. 1 am no longer the master of the situation - or at least the situation has gained a dimension which escapes me. 1 have become a utensil with which and upon which the Other may act. I realize this experience not by way of cognition, but by a sentiment of uneasiness or discomfort, which, according to Sartre, is one of the oustanding features of the human condition.'¹

Sartrean uneasiness and discomfort bear an unmistakable family resemblance to that stultifying external constraint which common sociological perspective imputes to the presence of others. More precisely, they represent a subjective reflection of the predicament which sociology attempts to capture in that presence's impersonal, objective structure; or, better still, they stand for an emotional, pre-cognitive appurtenance of the logical-rational stance. The two renderings of existential condition are united by the resentment they imply In both, the other is an annoyance and a burden; a challenge, at best. In one case, his presence calls for no moral norms indeed, no other norms bin the rules of rational behaviour. In another, it moulds the morality it begets