Charitable Giving and Lay Morality: Understanding Sympathy, Moral Evaluations and Social Positions

Abstract

This paper examines how charitable giving offers an example of lay morality, reflecting people's capacity for fellow-feeling, moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. Lay morality refers to how people should treat others and be treated by them, matters that are important for their subjective and objective well-being. It is a first person evaluative relation to the world (about things that matter to people). While the paper is sympathetic to the ‘moral boundaries' approach, which seeks to address the neglect of moral evaluations in sociology, it reveals this approach to have some shortcomings. The paper argues that although morality is always mediated by cultural discourses and shaped by structural factors, it also has a universalizing character because people have fellow-feelings, shared human conditions, and have reason to value.