Grounding Oughtness: Morality of Coordination, Immorality of Disruption

Abstract

We outline a theory of morality grounded in implicit coordination, in contrast to morality as explicit cooperation. As coordinated practice in time and space is dynamic and ever-changing, memorizing explicit rules and following them may not only be unnecessary but also insufficient to guarantee "moral" behavior. An unskilled novice who knows and follows explicit rules may nonetheless disrupt other practitioners for lack of skill. Instead, a moral person is someone who responds "appropriately" to the continuously evolving situational dynamics. This grounds the sense of oughtness in the smoothness of dynamic, situated practices and thus is the result of skill development and use. The morality of mundane and taken-for-granted acts of ongoing coordination is typically revealed when practices are disrupted. We describe two generic kinds of disruption, (1) procedural and ( 2) conceptual. The first entails an undesirable interference with or coercion of procedural ability. The second entails witnessing an action that violates one's conceptual understanding of how the practice "ought to be." As a result of the constant ebb and flow of people with varying degrees of enskilment and with varying experiences in slightly different local ecologies, disruptions are bound to occur. People may attempt to cope with disruptions by making personal changes, but these efforts are constrained by the irreversible investment of time involved in enskilment.