The Institutionalization Of Morals And The Rationality Of Morality

During the transition from traditional society to modern society, face to the plight of the loss of morals, the institutionalized trends of morals in social life and academic aspects are increasingly obvious. The particularity of morals is it plays a role by the faith in people's hearts, the public consensus, customs and habits and it is also a self-consciously moral demand of main body. Moral education and moral model's strength can contribute to morals' function. However, institutionalized morals means which need to rely on the law's enforcement to make morals effective. Thus, it seems that there is a contradiction between the institutionalization of morals and the morals' rationality. According to the socialization theory, especially the moral socialization, this paper analyses the role of system in moral formation and development. It shows that institutionalization of morals is the essential link to the individual moral formation, which is its rationality and also the theoretical premise to carry on the moral institutionalized construction.The paper constitutes by the introduction and four parts. The introduction briefly shows the topic scope of this paper selected, the theoretical significance of this study in socialist morality construction. It also comments available related literature and points out the problem to be solved.The first part analyses the moral institutionalized tendency. The moral institution has already become the social fact. The transformation from traditional natural economy to modern market economy is the root cause of morals institutionalized. Traditional moral education and social opinion and people's consciousness are unable to effectively regulate the social order which is the immediate cause to appeal to the heteronomy of system. On the base of the analysis of the institutionalization's reason, this part revealed the institutionalization of morals is the effective path to deal with moral loss and moral crisis in this special historical period.The second part suggests the discourse domain of the institutionalization of morals and the questioned on it. Through the distinction between ethics and morality, we acknowledge that ethics is a concrete need to reflect the common social norms recognized by the society while the morals are the recognition and accomplishment to ethics. Therefore, the moral's nature lies in the individual acts of self-discipline. Compared with the political and legal norms, the validity of the moral norms lies in which is non-mandatory standards for people to obey. Thus, it leads people to question the rationality of the institutionalized morals.According to the human socialized theory, the third part of the paper discusses the system's function in the process of moral socialization. The system provides the external environment and the restraint strength for self-discipline and autonomy's formation. Obviously, the institutionalization of morals' function and significance in the process of moral development is its rationality.The fourth part draws the conclusion that the institution morals' value is its a necessary part that the rational morality construction must pass through in current moral reconstruction. But society's morals cannot stop at the system, it must reach on the individuals' consciousness by the system.