Professor Steve Hitlin recently published Moral Selves, Evil Selves: The Social Psychology of Conscience. The book provides a social psychological framework for thinking about an often-overlooked aspect of sociological work; we are moral beings. People have strong moral beliefs about right and wrong, yet commonly act contrary to those beliefs. Most of us, at some time or another, have crossed a moral line, and yet still view ourselves as moral and have a clean conscience. The overwhelming majority of people—even those convicted of crimes—consider themselves as at least minimally moral.

“Conscience” involves that part of the self that judges the moral worth of actions, intentions, thoughts, and desires. We judge ourselves and we judge others. We evaluate the morality of groups we belong to and of groups we attempt to stay away from. We draw boundaries as social actors, and these boundaries carry with them a moral dimension. Conscience is anchored in social identities and cultural understandings of the person. We have a strong motivation to see ourselves and our groups as morally decent. We are perhaps not the most moral creatures on the planet, but we consider ourselves “good enough” morally so as to feel we are acceptable members of our important groups.

From intimate relationships to national politics, we define ourselves in large part by how we – and our friends, family, and members of our social groups – draw moral lines around our actions, thoughts, and intentions. While philosophers have weighed in on these issues for thousands of years, social scientists often underplay social life’s moral dimension. Moral Selves, Evil Selves highlights our individual sense of moral coherence and develops a theory of the development and maintenance of this sense in an ambiguous and complicated social world. By conceptualizing a social psychology of conscience, this book explains how we can properly include individual and societal notions of morality into understanding the self across time and situation.

As Christian Smith, author of Moral, Believing Animals, put it: “We very much need a smart Sociology of Morality, but amazingly it does not exist. Steven Hitlin is one of the most promising young scholars in the discipline who is seeking to correct that problem. Moral Selves, Evil Selves is a crucial contribution to the development of this obviously needed field.”