Good moral panics? Normative ambivalence, social reaction, and coexisting responsibilities in everyday life

Abstract

This article breaks the silence on the politically progressive characteristics of a moral panic. In contrast to the tacit scholarly consensus that moral panics entail regressively conservative social reactions to putative harms, moral panics are alternatively conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power. The article builds on continuing efforts to conceptualize moral panic as a form of moral regulation by explaining how moral panics are capable of perpetuating as well as disrupting and potentially even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.

Measles, Moral Regulation and the Social Construction of Risk: Media Narratives of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the 2015 Disneyland Outbreak

“…In these situations some groups will be held up "as a threat to societal values and interests" (Cohen, 2002: 1) and in so doing become a target of hostility from political elites and the general population. Conventional studies in moral panic, therefore, focus on how authorities construct claims about these groups that amplify their putative threat, prompting social, political or other types of reactions directed against groups that are disproportionate to their actual level of risk (Hier, 2016b). These groups come to be clearly identified and perceived as 'folk devils' (Goode and Ben Yehuda, 1994), marginalized groups that embody the social anxieties of the dominant group (de Young, 2011).…”

“…In recent years, the scope of moral panic studies has broadened as scholars have re-imagined these cases not as moments of societal overreaction, but rather as rational responses to changing sociopolitical contexts (for example Hier 2011a, 2016b, Rohloff and Wright 2010, and Critcher 2009. This rethinking about what Hier described as the 'limits of moral panic' seeks to develop more robust analytical tools for understanding the interconnectedness between politics, culture and the forms of explicit and indirect social control that administer everyday life (Hier, 2011a(Hier, , 2016b.…”

“…The social aspect of moral regulation projects are the "practices whereby some social agents problematize some aspect of the conduct, values or culture of others on moral grounds and seek to impose moral regulations on them" (Hunt, 1999: ix). In that sense, moral regulation discourses -articulated by authorities through messages of harm, risk, and personal responsibility -problematize the behaviour of others, while reaffirming one's own conduct and virtuousness (Hier, 2016b;Connel and Hunt, 2010).…”

“…Governmentality represents not a break from state power, but an extension of its work over individuals 'at a distance' (Rose and Miller, 2010), through interactions among state and extra-state agents, such as experts, journalists, and social movements, which play a crucial role in the volatility of moral politics (Hunt, 1999). Hier (2016bHier ( , 2008 conceptualizes moral panics as rational claimsmaking processes in the context of neoliberal responsibilization, i.e., volatile manifestations of ongoing projects of moral regulation, where the 'moral' is constituted and naturalized by evoking practices of selfcare. In this sense, moral panic is understood as, "a short-term expression of routine moral regulation processes in everyday life -especially but not exclusively regulatory discourses that are transmitted through claims about risk, harm and personal responsibility" (2016b: 3).…”

“…Parents described as "anti-vaxxers" were depicted as a threat to the social and moral order, as deviants whose behaviour demanded public acts of disapproval (demonization, vilification, mockery) combined with calls for state regulation. These depictions did not sufficiently capture the complicated relationship between coexisting forms of responsibility (Hier, 2016b), namely the duty of authorities to maintain community health and the duty of parents to act in their children's best interest. The coverage thus featured the discussion of myriad solutions to the "anti-vaxxer problem": federal and provincial vaccine registries, mandatory vaccination policies, improvements to the national vaccine schedule, banning the commercialization of homeopathic remedies purporting to be "natural vaccines", and making vaccination exemptions harder to get where vaccines are mandatory for schoolchildren.…”