Reconstruction Of Social Morality Under The Vision Of Social Transformation

The great development of industrialization had brought not only prosperity, but also exposed the crisis which was hidden in the social life. The old rules had collapsed, and the new ones had not been established. Therefore, the moral vacuum arose in spiritual world. Emile Durkheim, who was experiencing the transition period between Pre-modern Society and Modern Society in France, as an expert in ethics with great reputation, took the responsibility to rebuild social morality during the social transformation period. The thesis focus on analyzing Durkheim’s theory of social morality, thus tries to find out a way to reconstruct the social morality in the period of social transformation.The present thesis contains three chapters. The first of which, by introducing the social environment of Durkheim’s time and analyzing the extreme form of anomie: the rise of suicide rate, reveals that the incomplete development of social division of labor is the leading cause of the highlighted situation of raised anomie issues. In other words, anomie is just a side effect and inevitable consequence of the development of social division of labor.The second chapter presents that the social division of labor has positive effects on enforcing the changes of social solidarity. From the perspective of society, the division in society plays the main role of integrating people in different occupations, and it also has a strong power to maintain the link. Durkheim called this strengthen bond ’moral’. And the integration which is performed by moral is called’social solidarity’. As a general moral phenomenon,’social solidarity’ cannot be observed directly. We have to use the model of legal as an external symbol to research the change of social solidarity.At the beginning of the third chapter, the author points out that Durkheim tried to establish a secular individual morality which were explicated with three elements, thus are discipline, sacrifice, and self-governing. Durkheim tried to find a rational substitute of religion at the meso level. Based on the need of communication between people in different professions, he proposed to revive the professional ethics by rebuilding the’corporation’,so that the society integration can be improved. But there are many problems that need to be solved in his professional ethics theory.