Moral dialogues are one mechanism of cultural change, allowing communities to resolve conflicts and revise the fundamental norms and values governing their members’ relationships. This essay illustrates the moral dialogue process with the debates over sexual harassment in the Trump era. Victimized women launched a transnational “megalogue” that pervaded politics, business, entertainment, academia, and other spheres. It transformed norms, institutions, and enforcement of acceptable behavior in employment and in public, resulting in a new shared moral understanding. However, the fact that the President is not punished for immorality demonstrates that normative change ultimately requires the rule of law.

Amitai Etzioni’s essay on “Moral Dialogues” – the social processes through which people form new shared moral understandings – emphasizes the necessary norms and values that underlie social interaction and community cohesion. Social relationships are the purview of the discipline of sociology, especially its Durkheimian tradition. The cultural andmoralmotivations for engagement with others contrast with the self-interest foregrounded in economics and with the coerced conformity stressed in political science and the law. Sociologists maintain that people comply voluntarily and even at their own expense if they believe that norms are legitimate and just. While justifications of behaviour may be both practical and moral, they also have emotional valence. Much psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience report that social emotions like compassion, gratitude, and pride are more powerful motives than material rewards. We help others because it feels “right,” not because we expect reciprocity. And we often regulate our behaviour more in response to informal social sanctions such as ostracism, shaming, and ridicule than to legal or economic penalties for noncompliance. Yet socialization into a culture and internalization of shared values are never complete. Values may be rejected, and rules challenged. Diverse subcultures and behavioural patterns persist. Conflicts erupt, disturbing consensus. Cultures are neither monolithic nor static. Assuming they are so has led many a communitarian into trouble. Etzioni’s essay does seem to assert that societies rest upon an identifiable if unnamed set of core moral values, while admitting a modicum of pluralism or multiculturalism. Even if such core values could indeed be enumerated, they are not forever fixed. Etzioni points to one reason why: culture changes through a process that he calls “moral dialogue.”