Ethos, Eidos, Habitus: A Social Theoretical Contribution to Morality and Ethics

This essay sets out a practice theory perspective on morality and ethics within a Bourdieuan frame. The terms ethos and eidos are developed as field level accounts of morality the normative character or structure of a society of culture and ethics or, rather, the collective socio-logic of ethical thinking. I then discuss the idea that, consistent with Bourdieus social theory, social structures such as ethos and eidos are ontologically complicit with the systems of dispositions constitutive of habitus. Following my discussion of this idea that the structures of habitus (systems of dispositions) stand in a homologous relationship with the structures of the social fields within which they were developed I turn to some recent research in moral psychology. I attempt to show that the view I have outlined can assist us in understanding the picture of morality and ethics emerging from this scholarship