Trust in the Moral Space

Abstract

Philosophy and social theory have drawn many portraits of a human being: homo politicus, homo economicus, homo faber, homo ludens. Sociology has its own image: homo sociologicus (Ralf Dahrendorf 1968) based on four assumptions: relational existence, ascription of meaning, existential uncertainty, and normative regulation. The fundamental truth about the people is that they always live in some relations to other people: with others, next to others, for others – but never alone. From birth to death we live in the inter-human space, surrounded by more or less “significant others” (George H. Mead 1964). The composition of our interhuman space changes, it is like a “social convoy” (Ray Pahl 2000) where with time some people drop out, some people appear and even after our death we are still for a moment accompanied by a funeral conduct of relatives, friends and acquaintances. For me this is the crucial trait of society. Society is not a holistic, supra-human entity, some presumed social organism or social system with sui generis properties and regularities. But it is neither a chaotic mass of separate, autonomous individuals living their life on their own. Society for me is a network of relations among the people; what happens between and among individuals in the inter-human space. Human life is precarious, we are fragile animals, exposed to innumerable threats and finally destined to die. Large part of such precariousness is due to our social, relational existence, to the unavoidable and indispensable company of other people. We need others for a number of reasons. Without an intimate relation between our parents we would not have been born, and without maternal and parental care in our childhood we would not have survived. We need others as suppliers of goods and services that we cannot provide for ourselves. We need others as listeners and interlocutors in this most typical human action, talking. We need other as partners in cooperation, in order to reach goals which can be obtained only collectively, with our share directly dependent on the efforts of others. Finally, we need others as a social mirror (Charles H. Cooley 1983) in which we can estimate our worth and develop our self-concept. We can never be entirely sure how others will behave toward ourselves, how they will respond to our actions. We encounter perennial uncertainty, relatively